the corner office

The new machine, which shall be known as 'mirkwood' (since the old 200MMX mirkwood is an ex-PC), is an AMD 64 3200+. I got m'self an MSI nForce4 motherboard, which with new 939 pin design, PCIE and SLI support will hopefully be upgrade-friendly down the line... especially if, when this Honours degree is over, I regain a semblance of a normal life and dip my toes into the gaming world again. I got a gig of memory which isn't much by today's standards, but the proof will be in the swap file, so to speak, and can be upgraded later. I guess the main thing one gets from a new machine like this is unspeakably insane memory and IO throughput, compared to the machines from a few years ago.

Things have certainly changed since my last foray into hardware. Old ATA is out the window, in with SATA. AGP is on the way out, in with PCI Express. Gigabit on-board LAN, by default. On-board sound cards with more output ports than I know what to do with. The machine itself wasn't a problem to put together - which has improved my mood immensely. First of all, I really don't enjoy hardware. Fiddling with jumpers and getting tangled up in cables just isn't my scene. On top of that, I usually just accept that whenever I buy electronic stuff, there'll be at least one component that's a dud. Kind of like people who don't like horses always getting to ride the psychotic devil-horse. So anyway, having everything pop into place, and the machine just boot up without a whimper, was probably a first for me.

On the software side, things are also a bit different. This AMD64 thing is a little daunting. I've made the machine a dual-boot, and installed XP up-front, since common wisdom, which I'm fully prepared to listen to, is that letting the Windows XP installer loose on a hard drive with other operating systems is just asking for trouble. I also know there's an XP 64 bit edition, but my copy(s) of XP are 32-bit, and since I hardly ever use Windows right now, it'll do.

A quick run-through with the various driver disks gave me a pristine, juiced up XP installation waiting to be ignored for a few months. On to Linux...

Gentoo seems to have been a pioneer on the AMD 64 bit front, which I think just means they got to discover and document the problems sooner than most distributions. I could have gone with a safe 32 bit install, but where would the fun be in that? So armed with heaps of documentation, and the as-usual decent install guides, I got started last night.

The main change is that the old Stage 1 and Stage 2 installation methods have been deprecated. These two install methods basically involved compiling the whole damned system from scratch. There wasn't much point in doing it really, but it was an ubergeek thing to do, so that if you were ever chatting to other geeks you could casually toss in a 'oh yes, I've done a Stage 1 Gentoo install', and they'd phear you. I've done a few Stage 1 installs on home machines, so I have my cred and can happily move on. By the looks of things, this old way of installing has now been marginalised and is called a 'jackass' install, which says it all, I guess. About 15 minutes of research had me sold on going with the (recommended) Stage 3, which involves downloading a tar file of all the system tools, pre-compiled and packaged, and basically plopping a near-complete directory structure, and set of system utilities, compilers and libraries onto your hard drive with a single tar -xvf.

With that done, it was a quick job of going through the kernel configuration and compilation, getting the system set-up and installing a few system tools, and then getting GRUB going. Then it was time to reboot, and... I got a kernel panic. A quick Google later, and I realised that I'd forgotten to compile the nVidia SATA drivers into my kernel. So I recompiled, and retried, and ... pff, the same thing. A bit more digging around and I realised that when I copied across the recompiled kernel to the boot partition, I'd gotten the boot image's name wrong, so GRUB kept rebooting with the first, driver-less kernel. Got that fixed, and I booted up OK.

All in all, rather painless (apart from my own stupidity). I've got the machine doing a quick emerge world to get everything updated in preparation for the next step, which will be installing X, Gnome and all the other goodies I need. That'll probably be tomorrow's job. That's where things will get tricky, and the 64-bit issues start cropping up, so the install isn't over yet.

I have to say though, looking at the machine compiling its way through the various updates to system packages, this machine is suhmoking. I am thus far a very happy camper.