“New” Computer

I finally got around to setting up the AMD Athlon 64 3200+ system I acquired about a month ago. I was going to install 64-bit Debian sid on the system but just wasn't finding the time to do it. Today, I changed my mind and just moved the hard drives and graphics card from my current desktop system into the new box. I actually prefer not to move drives in Linux systems any more because I found it can cause some minor annoyances.

I should have swapped the NIC too which would have avoided one inconvenience, but I knew what to expect when I used the K8T's on board NIC instead. The problem arises because the new NIC becomes eth1 but the network configuration is for eth0, so you have no network access. This is easily fixed, however, by editing the udev rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and changing the eth1 to eth0.

Actually, physically installing the hard drives in the new case wasted more time than anything else. The system came in one of those funky transparent Plexiglas cases, which I had to take in order to get the system. These cases may look interesting but this one is not well designed. For example the Plexiglas hard drive mounts are too far apart so the drive does not fit snugly. In fact the gap is so big, you can only put screws on one side of the drive because the provided screws won't reach on the other side. I already decided the case has got to go.

Transferring the graphics card saved a lot of effort. The AMD system had a Nvidia card which would have required the proprietary drivers to get accelerated video. Not something I want to tackle right now. I'm very happy with my older ATI 9250 card which uses free drivers for accelerated graphics. The only other problem was getting sound to work again, since both systems had on board audio so moving the card was not an option. As usual, it was the microphone input which which took the longest to figure out. Nothing serious but annoying none the less.

The MSI K8T motherboard is about 4 years old now. The previous Intel system was about 8 years old. The only reason for this “upgrade” was for 720p video which the new system plays without any effort at all. Frankly, I see no need for anything faster at this time. I haven't bought a complete computer system since 1998, and with all these retired older systems up for grabs, there's a good chance I may never buy another system again.