Hardware failure. Two words that can strike fear into any geek. Karnak,
my main desktop PC started acting really flaky back in October. It
first appeared when I'd try and run any program that used 3D (opengl) programs.
The machine would hard-lock and I couldn't do anything except reset it.
I couldn't even ssh in.
Well, that didn't last long until the thing wouldn't boot. I would get a wailing-siren of a bios error, and that's as far as it would go. To make a long story
short I thought I sorted it out, until the siren scream came back with a
vengeance. I was more methodical about testing the hardware the second time,
and I pretty much narrowed it down to the motherboard.
After deep meditation (not really), I decided to buy new hardware
as an upgrade. So I new-egged it. Got a new M.B., video card (PCIe),
memory (Dual Channel DDR2), and a Dual Core Athlon 64. Friday night,
I had everything assembled and started to get my Gentoo install into
working condition.
Things went surprisingly smooth, I needed to build a new kernel to
match the new hardware, so I used an Gentoo LiveCD to mount and chroot
into my old / and /usr partitions. I compiled an SMP version of the
kernel I was using with the previous hardware with the new sound, network,
etc. drivers built in. And what do you know, it booted up fine.
There were a few minor issues, this board only has one IDE channel, which
I used for my CD drives. I needed to use my IDE HD, so I bought a IDE-to-SATA
adaptor for around $10. It worked well, but the device names changed
(hda to sda) so I had to coax my RAID array into using a different device
node for the mirror. I also needed to change a udev rule so that the
built-in ethernet ports would be recognized as eth0 and eth1, as an old udev
rule was reserving eth0 for the old ethernet driver.
I've already been listening to music, tried a few FPS games, watched
TV through the tuner, and everything is running smoothly. And I seriously
mean it, I can already feel how the dual cores let the machine blow through
a compile without so much as making any other processes hiccup. It's great!
