Brettia

In the interest of not being cursed, I’m blogging about Friday the 13th on Monday the 16th. No, actually I’ve just put off blogging for quite a while now and I’ve finally decided to give it a go again. Sometimes I’m just too lazy, others I’m too busy, etc. Unlike some bloggers that have to blog about every little thing that occurs both in their own lives and in the lives of others (which can make reading weblogs quite redundant), I just blog when I can and only when I really want to. If I have to push myself to do it, I know that I should take a break for a while.

But now I’m back for a bit, and I suppose I should update my huge reader audience of about six people (myself included) with the latest events in my less-than-exciting life. First of all, I stated in earlier entries that I might be going to Europe (for the third time) in March, but it doesn’t appear that that will happen. If I hadn’t been there twice already I would be much more disappointed, but, at the risk of sounding ungrateful, the novelty has worn off a bit. And the financial impact is no longer worth it, especially this time, when my whole family was going to go. Plane tickets alone were going to be $2,500, and the hotel room was at a nice resort that we had a timeshare thing for.
So at least something would have been free. But $2,500 is still a lot of money, too much after getting a new car (Toyota Sequoia), new kitchen appliances, and Christmas, which is always a pain in the wallet. For the same reason, it doesn’t look like I’ll get any sort of parental aid in my little computer venture that I’ve been harping on incessantly since I started blogging way back in July of 2003. Even though the topic has been thoroughly discussed, there are some new developments to record, one of which is that my good friend/teacher Mr. Trapani has found a poor kid whose parents took his PC away. Why is this good for me? Trapani wants to help him build a new one, and it looks like I’ll get to help while perhaps building my own computer at the same time.

This could be good and bad, good because I might be able to loot the district’s parts closet for network cards and such, and bad because I’ve learned recently that now is not the best time to build or buy a PC, mainly because of new technologies becoming available in the near future. First of all, PCI-Express, the replacement for old, slow AGP and PCI expansion card slots which are used by most necessary computer components such as video cards, will come into being sometime this summer. It would be stupid to buy a $300 motherboard with PCI and AGP slots when PCI-Express is due out so soon. Then there’s the BTX form-factor, which is a new initiative spearheaded by Intel to change the configuration of motherboards to be more air-flow friendly and to increase performance. Again, buying a motherboard now would be wasted money. Finally, I’m still a bit worried about building a computer myself because breaking a component or frying a motherboard would be catastrophic. I’ve heard the horror stories, and they’ve made me want to keep my case shut and my hands out of the computer’s innards.

Then again, I was able to successfully pry apart my Pavilion 8660C and install a new video card and fan around Thanksgiving, which was a triumph for me, though perhaps a small task for more experienced computer builders. There’s about an 80% chance that I’ll do everything and have no problems, and the odds become even better if I buy a motherboard combo, meaning a motherboard that already has a processor installed. One of those wrist things that prevents you from shocking the inner parts would keep that possibility at bay, and I would have Mr. Trapani and the other tech department people to help me if I really screwed up, but…I dunno. My self confidence isn’t incredibly high when it comes to handling tools and parts. I’m much better at destroying than I am at creating.

But if I did decide to go ahead and build a computer, either now or later on this year when PCI-Express and BTX have arrived, what parts would I choose? I’m really stuck on that question, because I really don’t want to get the wrong thing and then be stuck with a worthless component. I think the key here will just be planning and research. PC Magazine recently did an article on building computers, and this was their recommendation as well. One guy said he spent two full weeks researching and calling people before he put his together, another said he just went to a computer store, bought all the parts he thought he’d need, and put them together. It took him all of a weekend. I guess some people just get lucky.

But so far, my biggest hardware concern is the processor. For a while, I was interested in the AMD Athlon 64 (or 64 FX) processor, since it is the first Windows-compatible 64-bit processor to be manufactured. And the reviews have been pretty good, at least when using it for 32-bit applications (current apps are 32-bit, future applications and some server programs will be/are 64-bit). But I came upon one review of the Athlon 64’s performance when running a beta version of Windows XP 64-bit Edition, and it was decidedly poor. This was mainly because the operating system used was a beta version, and because 64-bit is so new that most part manufacturers haven’t released 64-bit drivers yet. When they do publish 64-bit versions of their drivers, the Athlon 64 will do much better, hopefully. But I have no idea how far in the future that will be. I might just pick parts that have 64-bit drivers already, but that would severely limit the selection.

The alternative to an Athlon 64 would be Intel’s Prescott-based Pentium 4 3.2E Ghz Processor. The ‘E’ after the 3.2 means that it is based on the Prescott processor architecture, which is much newer than Northwood, the old architecture that standard Pentium 4’s are based upon. The Pentium 4 is a much better choice for compatibility with Windows and other components, but it is 32-bit, so it won’t be compatible with future 64-bit games and applications. I’m still thinking on this one.

The next most important component is memory, but it doesn’t take much to decide how much or what type is needed. Different processors/motherboards need different types and support different speeds of memory, but that won’t be much of an issue. I’m probably going to get 512 MB or 1 GB of whatever type (ECC,DDR SDRAM, etc) I end up needing.

After memory comes the hard drive, which again will be an easy choice. I know I want a 7200 RPM SATA (serial ATA) drive, and about 120-160 GB of space. I’ve seen some great deals recently from Western Digital on 200 GB and 36 GB (10000 RPM) drives, so I might look into getting one of those.

The final major part is the video card, and I’m not sure if I want to use the GeForce FX 256 PCI card I got a few months ago or if I want to buy a new one that is AGP or PCI-Express, which would be much faster. If I do get a new one, I’ll get a GeForce FX 5700/5900 or an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro rather than the top-of-the-line GFFX 5950 or ATIR 9800 XT cards. I can’t imagine paying $500 for a video card; that’s half my total budget!

Now for other cards, I’ll need a gigabit ethernet card (about $30), a FireWire card ($20), a USB port card ($20), a sound card, and perhaps a wireless networking card. Those are all subject to change depending on which parts are already on the motherboard. Onboard FireWire, network, and USB is good, while on-board sound is usually not great, and I’ve yet to see an on-board wireless card, unless Intel’s Centrino processor counts.

After cards comes drives, of which I’d need the following: floppy drive ($10), CD-RW drive ($50), and a DVD-ROM drive ($40). I might be able to find a CD-RW/DVD combo somewhere. Notice that I don’t want a DVD+/-RW drive yet, since they’re still quite expensive and there’s still competition over which standard (+R or -R) should become the norm. I don’t do much video editing, anyway (I can’t on my current machine).

And that’s about it. Of course, there’s always a monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers and such to buy, but that isn’t as high a priority as just getting the box itself put together. I’d like to use the new PC as an addition rather than a replacement for my old one so that I could network them together and install Linux on one and other good fun stuff.

Speaking of Linux, I retried Fedora again over this past week. I liked it, to be truthful, but it just comes down to the fact that Windows is just plain easier to use and customize to my needs. I know that statement would spark vehement opposition in any Linux community, so let me explain: It’s not that Windows is better than Linux, it’s that Linux is much harder to use for a Windows convert than for a Unix junkie. I only got as far as I did this time around because I’ve tried various Linux distributions (some more than once) over the past year or so and I’ve learned a lot from experiences with them. Red Hat-based distros have become my flavor of choice, but I’m burning a Slackware install CD right now to try it out. Last time I did I was turned off by its non-graphical installation system, but I think I’m ready for a second attempt now.

Oh, by the way, the reason I got rid of Fedora after only a week was that I stupidly tried to upgrade it to the newer kernel, version 2.6, which it promptly chewed up and spat out. The fact that my Windows XP installation survived unscathed and uncorrupted is a testament of my Windows/DOS computer skills. I was really afraid for a moment, especially after installing Fedora on Tuesday and getting the simple message “Error loading operating system” when I tried to boot. Then the PartitionMagic rescue disks were nowhere to be found, so I popped in the PM CD in the hope of finding some kind of rescue utility there, and lo! There it was, a beautiful scaled-down version of PM running in an emulated Windows 98 environment, just for me. I set the Windows partition active, and all was saved.
The second mistake (before the almighty KERNEL) came sometime on Wednesday, when I stupidly CHMODded the /etc directory 700. For those who don’t know, CHMOD is a Linux/Unix command that changes permissions on a file or directory, allowing specific users or groups to read it, write to it, or execute it. The /etc directory is where most configuration files are stored, and by CHMODding it 700 I kept other applications from being able to read or write to it, thus crippling my installation. Time to whip out another rescue disk, this time the Fedora install disk, which had a rescue terminal on it. A few commands and I was back up and running fine.

The third mistake wasn’t really a mistake, it was more of a problem that needed fixing. This was a driver problem with my video card. You see, Linux, unlike Windows, doesn’t come with drivers for every known component out of the box. Instead, you get generic drivers that are enough to run the system with so that you can find better ones on the Internet. I was lucky enough to find that NVIDIA does have Linux drivers for their video cards, so I downloaded the package and typed the ’sh insertfilenamehere’ command to install it. But no, it could not be executed while the X server was running. What the hell is an X server? And why is it running?
I quickly found out that the X server, or XFree86, as the package is called, is what runs the base graphics and interface of the Linux operating system. So I tried to figure out how to shut it down, and could not. Then I found from reading some forum posting or another that I had to change the runlevel. Linux has several runlevels for different tasks. Runlevel 5 is probably the most common, which is fully-booted with X server running. Runlevel 6 restarts the computer, and runlevel 3, the one I needed, was a simple command prompt, like booting Windows to the DOS command prompt. The neat thing about Linux, though, is that you can change to a runlevel and back without restarting (except for runlevel 6, of course).

So I type the “init 3″ command to switch the runlevel, finally was able to extract and execute the package, and voila! It seemed my troubles with the video card were over. But it was not to be. To take advantage of the new NVIDIA driver, the XFree86 config file had to be edited. Since I was still in the command line, I used vim, a text editor, to edit the file. Once the changes were made, I had a problem: I didn’t know how to get out of vim! I was about to force a shutdown and lose all my changes when some random command triggered the vim help file, which told me that I had to type ‘:wq’ to write (save) the changes and quit. I did this, switched quickly back to runlevel 5 (it still is so cool the way you can do that), and was done.
The switch to runlevel 5 brough up a new NVIDIA splash screen, which happily told me that I had done everything right by displaying a large, green and black NVIDIA logo on my screen. When the system had finally booted into GNOME, the graphical desktop, I opened up a game called Chromium which had been incredibly sluggish earlier, so sluggish, in fact, that it almost crashed the computer (not easy in Linux).

Chromium was awesome! The graphics were smooth and perfect and fast. Everything was as it should have been. And to make my state of heaven even more complete, I tried BZFlag, a cross-platform tank game I discovered recently, and found that it works even better on Linux than on Windows. Now I was elated.

There was only one problem: there was nothing else to do. After those few days, I had run out of new applications and ideas to try. I couldn’t successfully do any kind of PHP development in Linux, since all the programs I tried just weren’t worth the hassle of trying to configure them to my needs. And that’s what it comes down to with Linux: it just isn’t worth the hassle. I’ll continue to learn it and I’ll continue to try new distros, but I just can’t switch to using it as my primary desktop environment. Windows will always be easier, because it is already configured to my exact specifications and needs. To configure Linux, I’d have to compile several programs and fool around with permissions and change dozens of configuration files while perusing thousands of pages of documentation. I just don’t have the time for that. Maybe this summer, but not yet. Maybe I’m just not ready yet. But I’ll get it eventually, and that will be a good day.

I suppose I should end this long, poorly-typed entry of horror now. I racked up about 15,000 keystrokes while writing it, too, which should make up for an entire week of nothing. (The Linux WhatPulse client isn’t very good.) But before I finish completely, I must state that I have decided that I will get a new computer for my birthday, with my own money. This I solemnly promise, and I will only break this promise if I find that I need to wait longer for some new technology or another to come out.

Wait a sec:
I forgot something. Yesterday (Sunday) I went with my good friend Jim to Estrella Mountain Park to this festival thing called Estrella War. It’s where all these people get together in medieval gear and bash each other to bits with rubber arrows and padded spears and swords. It was really cool, and it sure beat going to church. Thanks, Jim, for taking me.