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Adventures in Computing - Or, How Not to Impress The Wife My notes on the computing challenges of the weekend, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the just plain stupid.

I mentioned last week that I intended to make some heavy-duty changes to the home network this weekend; new components for one computer, changes for another, and a quick rebuild for a third. For those without a program, the three computers involved were a workstation, a server, and a laptop; one running SuSE Linux 7.1, one running Windows 2000, and one running Linux Mandrake 7.2.

The score at the end of the weekend is heavily in favor of the computers in points, but I did (finally) win the game. The players now are two workstations and a laptop, two running Linux Mandrake 8.0 and one running Windows. But I bet you can't guess who's running what...

The story begins on Saturday with an excellent shopping trip. Northrup Way, just south of the 520 on the border between Redmond and Bellevue has over a dozen computer stores in just three blocks (west of 156th, for those interested), and Keri's uncle Jon and I visited just about all of them in search of bargains. Guess what? I found them...

The original plan for BRIGID's upgrade was an ASUS A7PRO motherboard, a Duron 850MHz processor, and 128 MB of RAM. Instead, I got an 800 MHz Thunderbird bundled with an MSI MS-6340M motherboard - for less than the price of the A7PRO and Duron combination. I've been a little wary of MSI boards, but this one has had nothing but good reviews. To top it all off, the board has an integrated S3 Savage video chipset (or a licensed version made by VIA, but who's counting?) and integrated Creative sound chipset. Granted, they aren't the highest-quality chipsets ever made - but what do you want for $160? They're good enough for anything I do. The only thing that stayed as planned was the RAM - I did get 128 MB.

We took the parts - plus a cheap case (since I planned to throw it away in a few weeks or months when it was mounted in Bertha) back to Sue & Jon's place. Keri and Sue had gone off to an art gallery, so Jon and I spent the afternoon assembling BRIGID's replacement.

The assembly went smoothly, aside from the fact that the case I picked doesn't have a removable motherboard tray; I mounted everything to the motherboard first, then installed it in the case. The motherboard is solidly made and well laid-out; we didn't have any problems with it at all. Even the cooling fan was installed with only a minimum of swearing. The case is also fairly well made; rolled corners, and even the power supply is quiet and (so far <G>) reliable. I'll probably replace the power supply later (it's only a 250W) but I'm actually happy with the case; if it had a removable motherboard tray, I'd recommend it for use. Of course, I'd also have to be able to find a manufacturer's name on the box...

BRIGID's replacement is named MINERVA. That's the name I usually give my main workstation, and after playing with this machine for a couple of days, I've decided that's what it is. It's much faster than my laptop - or my workstations at work, for that matter - quiet, and with that Thunderbird processor instead of a Duron, I'm happy with its performance. I've not done more than a few timed compiles (and I haven't done the old standby of a timed kernel compilation) but it did those extremely quickly, and I haven't had a single error yet. The video quality is excellent (although I desparately need a new monitor; the one I'm using right now is only capable of 800 x 600 - and even then, it has a nasty shimmer to it. I'll hopefully fix that today.

So that part of it went fairly well. When I got home... that's when the fun started.

The first step was that Keri decided she wanted to move ANYA to Linux - she'd played with MINERVA a bit, decided she liked it, and also decided that Microsoft's latest licensing games were enough of a reason to make the switch.

I didn't mind that, of course, but I did take some time to think. I wasn't worried about the hardware in ANYA; it should all be Linux compatable. The camera, though, and the scanner are not. (Well, the scanner definitely isn't. The camera is a "if you jump through the right hoops, face Mecca, and pray, it may work". Not worth the effort in the long run, most likely.) So, we needed to have a Windows machine of some sort available. My first thought was actually VMWare; but there's no way we'll be able to get decent performance out of it on ANYA. I might try it on MINERVA, but I want to get MINERVA stable and configured the way I want it first, then start experimenting and playing with other things. So, instead I decided to wipe Linux off of THOTH (the laptop) and install Windows 98. Why 98? Well, we're mainly going to use the laptop for the camera/scanner, and also to use in the living room for either of us to surf the 'Net, check email, that sort of thing. The camera software only works under 98; the 2000 version only includes the actual drivers to allow TWAIN32 compliant software to access images. So for now, 98 is our best option.

I'd forgotten how hard it is to install Windows on that laptop... with Linux, just use a PCMCIA boot disk and go. With Windows... load some version of DOS from diskette. Create a FAT partition large enough to hold the Windows CAB files and the final Windows installation (Partition Magic makes this easier, but still...). Spelunk the IBM web side and find the DOS drivers for the PCMCIA external drive bay. Wrack brain trying to remember the config.sys line. (For the record; DEVICE=A:\PCCARD\DEVBAYCD.EXE /p:360 /d:IBMCD001) and the autoexec.bat line (mscdex.exe /d:IBMCD001) Discover that I never did rewrite the MBR, so LILO keeps trying to load when you boot from the hard drive. Fix that... now load the CD drivers... now copy the CAB files across from the CD... finally run setup. Bleh. It took HOURS, thanks in part to the general crappiness of IBM's site in finding the right drivers, a couple of false starts, and other problems. Feh.

Finally convinced that we would be able to use the camera and scanner, I headed over to Keri's machine. Before installing Linux, I wanted to make a couple of changes - swap the hard drives around so the larger was actually the primary, replace the old (and failing) DVD-ROM drive with a CD-ROM drive, and put in a PCI sound card to replace the embedded sound card. Finally, I sat Keri down with the Mandrake CDs.

And they wouldn't boot.

We'd get the nice splash screen, the kernel would start to load... and then we'd get the "cannot load root device on 8:05" error. Lovely. What could be the problem here? This was at 6:30 PM. Well, I figured that it had to be RAM. Nothing gets written to the drives until after they're partitioned, well into the setup process, right? So I swapped RAM. No good.

OK, well, maybe I'm mistaken on the drive thing. Pull out Partition Magic... WTF? How do you get two primary partitions and an extended on one drive, and have them all in use on Windows? Evidently it's possible. The second drive had some "dynamic volume" on it... no version of FDISK would touch it. OK, maybe the dynamic volume or the two primary partitions are affecting it. Clear the partitions from the one drive... can't kill the dynamic volume. OK, hunt around for the Maxtor utility disk... no such thing as a low-level format anymore, but I *can* force it to delete the partition table and replace it with a 2 GB FAT primary, which I could delete from Partition Magic. Drives completely empty, I tried again.

"Cannot load root device on 8:05"

Heck. Spit. Dirty socks. OK. Not the drives... sent off an email to a couple of people, searched online... everything related to either NFS or SCSI systems, neither of which applied here.

Finally, I rebooted the system one last time and noticed something... the RAM test never completed. With the system set to "silent boot", it doesn't really test, but I'd turned that off while I'd thought it was a RAM problem. The "real" RAM tests just kept going, stuck in an endless loop. All right, maybe it really was bad RAM. Swap it with the RAM from MINERVA... nope. MINERVA counts it correctly and boots fine, while the stick that was in MINERVA results in an endless loop on ANYA. Hmmm... out of the corner of my eye, I saw the BIOS data on ANYA. Copyright 1998... and this is an old Gateway system from about then... have I ever updated the system BIOS? Well, yes, but it was a long time ago...

Go to Gateway's site. I owe IBM an apology... what a mess. Eventually, I found the BIOS update page, and discover that I have to know the first 8 digits of the current BIOS revision in order to determine which update I need. This does not inspire confidence. But, yes, here's one that matches... and yes, it's the only one that matches... and a link from there leads to a picture of the motherboard (and a model number) that both match the board in ANYA. OK, it's worth a shot now. Download the update... expand the image to a floppy, and reboot ANYA. The image update takes a LONG time, nearly five minutes. I've no idea why it took so long, but they were pretty nerve-wracking minutes. Finally, the system reports a successful update. OK. Reboot again, with the Mandrake disk in the cupholder... SUCCESS! After all that, it came down to the BIOS. It seems (and digging through my old papers on ANYA, I've confirmed) that this model was never supposed to have more than 64MB SDRAM installed. Since I was using a single 128MB stick, the system BIOS was getting confused... it could handle the total amount of RAM, but it didn't expect it all in one stick. With the update, though, that problem was fixed - and the installation process was able to address it properly.

So. Now KEri is using Linux. When I left this morning, she had Evolution and KMail running (so far I think she liked the potential of Evolution but was using Kmail) and had installed Everybuddy for IMing. I'm expecting a lot of questions... but so far, there's an application for everything she's asked about. We'll see how this works...