Mostly about my amusement

Day: February 22, 2008 (page 1 of 1)

openSUSE 10.3 server upgrade

I did not really mean to upgrade my home server today, it just worked out that way.

Weeks ago I cleaned up my basement computer room and Alek had dropped off an old PC for my use. It is a dual Pentium III 800 MHz machine with 700 odd megabytes of RAM. It does not work well with my old WinTV PVR-350, Windows Media Center Edition 2005, and can’t play most AVI or MPEG files.

My server is a 3GHz P4 with 1 GB of RAM and a okay Geforce 5600 FX in it. So I figured I’d swap the drives and just use the server as a workstation and vice versa. Just to be on the safe side I moved my blog to the backup server on my VPS.

The server hard disk would not boot on the PIII box. The initrd image did not have the drivers for the ide system in the new box. Getting the initrd updated would have required the openSUSE 10.1 which I could not find.

I did have a recently burned openSUSE 10.3 DVD lying around so after a couple of hours I was able to get my server working by upgrading from 10.1 to 10.3. The updated 10.3 YaST is faster than before and I’m going to start using zypper to keep my system up to date.

Once I get the system to a point where I am comfortable then I’ll move the blog back to my basement.

Vista and 4 GB of RAM

I’m running Vista 64 on my XPS 700 720 and I just upgraded from 2 GB RAM to 4 GB of 800 MHz dual channel DDR2 ram.  My system was running slowly (it’s a Microsoft Operating System).

The RAM even came with heat sinks.   After the upgrade my system does perform nicely and I have much less disk thrashing.  But Vista is a pig.  Even running idle and having only Firefox or Internet Explorer, the system is using more than 1 GB of RAM.  That’s just nuts.

This is one reason why people should stick with XP.  With every iteration of Windows you get an even more hungry monster for very little benefit.  I’m glad I moved to Vista but that’s because I have a character defect.  I like working with broken and difficult systems.

I went with the 64 bit version because I was sure I’d run application that could use the RAM.  With a 32 bit Microsoft OS you get a actual limit of somewhere between 2 and 3 GB’s.  It’s an addressing issue and the fix is to go 64 bit.