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Last week I bought a Gigabyte GV-N62128DE, the Nvidia Geforce 6200 video card, with 128MB of RAM. Even though I know better, usually, to avoid buying a card with 64bit memory, and would have ordinarily bought the one with 128bit memory, this time it was a matter of power consumption.

All of the Geforce 6200 cards that I could find that used 128bit memory required a power supply connector. While that in itself isn’t a big deal, the fact that my HP 873n has a mere 200 Watt power supply gave me great concern. Most cards also indicate a minimum PSU rating… all above the 200 watts mine can provide.

Then there’s also the whole overkill aspect. I’m not a gamer, in the same way that I’m not an audiophile, or videophile. I don’t see the point in spending excessive amounts of money in order to eek out just a tiny bit more performance. There is a certain factor with “good enough” that works for me.

I paid roughly $60 for this card, the 128bit memory versions cost twice that. I’d also feel compelled to upgrade the PSU… making the upgrade cost considerably more at roughly $160. I figured that if this card did not perform to my expectations/requirements I’d return it and then get something with more oomph.

Keep in mind, of course, that I was previously running a Geforce 4 MX-420, one of the biggest hunks of graphics shit Nvidia ever produced. Playing Doom3, even on the lowest settings, was a slideshow.

While not a benchmark, my glxgears frames per second doubled with the swap in of this new video card. I loaded up URU: Ages Beyond Myst and WOW, I was able to play at full native resolution (1280×1024) and have the graphics at their highest settings… while I don’t know what the FPS actually was, I know that the game experience was definitely more than just playable.

I then downloaded the demo of Half Life 2, the game automatically set the graphics to ‘High’ and I loaded it up. Full native resolution, again, highest settings, and the game was perfectly playable and my goodness, the first time I could actually use the phrase “life-like” when it comes to any game.

I decided, based on the demo, to go ahead and spend the $30 to buy the game… and consequently spent most of yesterday playing it. If I turn on anti-aliasing on the card I get a slideshow, but otherwise it’s perfect. I have trilinear filtering turned on, the default based on graphics performance as detected by the game, though I have to admit I don’t know really what that does.

I don’t mind the lack of anti-aliasing, as I’ve never been able to use it anyway… for the first time though, I can almost see why so-called gamers have the zeal they do for getting the latest and greatest hardware. If I was so impressed with HL2 using this ‘crippled’ Geforce 6200, if I had enough oomph on my graphics card to do the anti-aliasing, it’d be considerably more of a wow factor.

Now that I’ve taken a little moment to actually look up what anisotropic filtering is, I can see the benefit again of having more oomph; but, again one gets to the point of… good enough for $$ or extra good for $$$ or $$$$. I could never imagine spending the kind of money that some do, but then, I suppose that’s because I have so many interests, with playing the occasional computer game a pretty low priority compared to so many other things.

All in all, I think I made a great choice with this particular card… it fits my needs. I can play the games I want to play in full native resolution and at their highest quality settings. I’m not going into overkill, thus now ‘wasting’ money for something that doesn’t really get used much. The 2D aspect of video cards is pretty much a standstill of technology, you’re paying for the 3D rendering. Linux and Windows (With possible exception of Windows Vista, still in development, but the jury is still out on if that is ‘fake’ or real) do not use 3D rendering for anything on the desktop. The xcompmgr app I was playing with the other day enables the use of the 3D hardware to draw the desktop, which also allows for all sorts of cool transparency and shadowing, but it’s horribly buggy. Mac OSX, on the other hand does use 3D rendering to create all the eyecandy, which is why those of us, such as me with my pre-G4 iBook, get a bit screwed in the eyecandy area.. our onboard graphics cards were not included in the list of cards, thus doesn’t support the hardware rendering.

With all that said, I still find myself wanting a dual core 64bit AMD CPU, my P4 is still fast, but… it’s now at the lower end of fast, and while Windows apps don’t really yet take advantage of all that extra processing oomph thanks to the 64bit processing or dual cores, at least with Linux I can recompile the apps myself. Sadly, I’d probably find myself actually shelling out for a license of the 64bit Windows XP… it’s kind of sickening to even consider such a thing. I’m going to put all of that onto my ‘maybe late next year’ list… a new iBook, or Powerbook has to come first, it’s really starting to drag at a measly 600Ghz, G3 at that. Historically I’ve taken to only buying a new CPU when I could double the processing speed. I started out with a 200Mhz Pentium, then moved to a 400Mhz Pentium II. I then bought an 800Mhz AMD Duron, but when that motherboard failed prompting a new computer immediately (I later bought a new board and reused the CPU) I skipped over that doubling of speed philosophy by getting a P4 2.53Ghz. Honestly, it really wasn’t that specatular of a difference for everyday computer usage, going from .8Ghz to 2.53Ghz. This time around, I’d probably have to go for slightly less than double, to avoid spending mega-bucks. That’s assuming AMD has 5000+ processors at the time of upgrade, of course. They do have a 4800+ 64 X2 right now, so it’s a safe assumption… I guess it isn’t bad if you’re willing to pay $900 for just the CPU, heh… I’m not.

Oh, and it sort of bugged me at first that I ‘had’ to buy HL2. Now, this isn’t one of those pro-piracy rants or anything like. I simply believe in household sharing when it comes to media. Would you buy a DVD that you could only play on a single TV? That once you’ve played it, you’ve locked it in, and you couldn’t then take it to another room and watch it? That’s basically what Valve and their Steam engine does. You’re not so much purchasing the game, but licensing it for use by one person. When you install the game, you need to register with Steam, your CD key then decrypts the game after their server has authenticated your key. I suppose that you could play the game anywhere that has a legal/valid install, simply by using your own Steam login that has a legal/valid key associated with it. I just don’t know, because I have no reason or way to try.

You see, my brother David had bought HL2 last year when it first came out. I wanted to play it, only to discover that I couldn’t install it on my computer because he’d installed it already. I’d need another CD key, for use with my own account. This may not be entirely accurate as to how the system works, but regardless, I’d basically need to login as him if it’d even let me use it.

While I may be pretty open about downloading music, I actually tend toward legal use of my OS and Games. The games thing is questionable I guess, because I see absolutely nothing wrong with you or your brother buying it, and then both of you being able to play it on separate computers. That’s just like the little DVD metaphor, or like a CD… we’d not tolerate a music CD being locked to play on only one device and not being able to take it with us or loan it to a friend.

I bought the Sims, shared it with my brother, we both bought expansion packs and shared them between us, then when Sims2 came out, he bought that and shared it with me. With HL2 this intra-family sharing was impossible. One might argue that this is a totally different thing, but to me it isn’t. There is a legal copy of the software, we ought to be able to share it between us. Just like, again, why would a family purchase 2 copies of the same audio CD? They could just share it, right?

Perhaps they need to setup something like Apple does, with having a ‘family license’ for the OS. Of course, since the OS runs only on Apple hardware (not counting the latest Intel builds that people are pirating), and Apple is a hardware company, the OS isn’t as important as a revenue stream.

These annoyances are just what we have to live with, so that companies can continue to create new software, I can live with it, I just don’t have to like it. The same thing that is stopping me from borrowing HL2 from my brother is the same thing that stops thousands of unlicensed copies from being played out there too.

The thing though, that I actually have come to like about the whole Valve/Steam HL2 insanity, is that one is no longer required to have the CD or DVD in the drive. One can safely put away their CDs and not have to worry about them becoming scratched or otherwise damaged. I know when I buy an audio CD (and, I actually do, from time to time) the first step is to rip to MP3, I never touch the CD from then on out. Previously to play a game without the CD there’d have to be a no-cd crack and you’d need to keep the disc image on your hard drive all the time… which is exactly the same thing you have to do when you’re pirating the game, ironically.

There’s also this little thing about pricing. It’s amazing what chopping $20 off a software title will do. The price of HL2 was originally $50. I just couldn’t justify spending that much for a game. Yesterday when I went to buy it, or at least to look and think about buying it, I was pleasantly surprised to see it now cost $30 (at Walmart anyway). I have no problems at all buying a game for $30. So, this is a little note to game software publishing companies… cut the price, you’ll make it up in volume. You’ll have fewer people pirating the software because it’s easier to just drop the $30 and get it all legal and nice, everyone benefits. As it stands, I’ll just wait until the game is ‘old’ and thus no longer demands that price premium. Doom3 is going for a mere $20 at Walmart now, I almost picked that up too; even though I’d played it already.

When I bought my Palm Tungsten T a couple of years ago it was pretty much useless to even attempt to get it working in Linux. I was previously able to use my Palm Vx, which connected through a serial cabled dock, but I didn’t even bother trying with the USB of the Tungsten.

Since I’ve been making everything else work, I sort of created the little project titled above, the Tungsten was part of that. Well, it is working, mostly. There needs to be some more voodoo that I’m just not capable of, because while after a reboot I can sync it with Evolution just fine, a few times in a row… later on I can’t sync at all. Something is getting gummed up, either modules, or hotplug, or the sync daemon itself. I have udev creating the appropriate devices, but like I said, it only works one time, then won’t again until I reboot. I can’t really say it is working because I rarely actually reboot. This is the major problem with my pda, I never use it, because I never sync it. It syncs just fine with my iBook, even through bluetooth, but I rarely use the iBook to create appointments, contacts, etc; the sort of stuff I do in Evolution under Linux.

I’ll probably keep hacking at it, might get it, but then… who knows. I don’t know how syncing to Linux will effect syncing to the iBook, for all I know I just destroyed that, heh.

I also decided to give xcompmgr a try, it’s this little ‘thing’ that allows for true transparency and compositing in Xorg, the window server. It’s really quite nice, lots of little drop shadows and fading in and out. I don’t think I’ll actually use it on a regular basis because of three horrible and glaring problems:

1. You can’t log out of GNOME, it just hangs.
2. XOSD, used by Lineakd to make multimedia keys on the keyboard work, is garbled because the composite doesn’t update.
3. It seemed to break my focusing, wherein I couldn’t actually create a new folder on the desktop because the focus was glued to the currently open window of whatever was running instead.

Otherwise, I’d use it… but those are blocker-level problems for me. Another problem, while ugly, and related to the XOSD, was Mplayer… it uses non-square windows, thus the drop shadow is horrible, like a giant black square around all the curvy parts, yuck.

Going upon the success of cloning my workstation’s drive, I set out to clone my server’s drive last night. I was doing a bit of a multiple swap, basically. I took a storage drive out of the file server, it having now been made unnecessary due to the new array, I then cloned using ‘dd’ my workstation’s drive onto it. The next step was to reuse the workstation’s old drive as the OS drive of the file server, taking its 17.2GB drive out.

Unfortunately it isn’t quite so simple as cloning when it comes to that upgrade procedure, because the drives aren’t the same size, geometry, etc. While there is a method of using ‘dd’ to clone then resize, I figured with ext3 filesystems, it’d be better to use the cpio copying method. This took a while, but not nearly as long as the previous clone… it was just much more manual; I had to create all the partitions and format the filesystems before I’d start the copy.

I then made a blunder… though, thankfully not too terrible. Bad things can happen when you type the wrong device in a command… especially when that command creates the new filesystem. Instead of formatting the boot partition on the new drive, I mistakenly formatted the old drive, therefore wiping out any way to actually boot the file server.

Thankfully that happened with the boot partition though, instead of the root or home partitions. I was able to copy a kernel back over, reboot and reconnect the workstation drive, copy the bootloader stuff over, shutdown, reconnect the drive into the server, started it… then “Error 15″ and it wouldn’t boot.

Now, what the hell, right? I remembered to ‘dd’ the MBR, the grub.conf and all the files were there… I just couldn’t understand why it wasn’t booting. So… swap around the monitor again, downloaded a gentoo cd, burned that… fiddled and fiddled some more, again without success. I finally remembered how to chroot into the existing install and re-ran the grub installer, bingo… I don’t know why it wasn’t working, but that solved the problem, so YAY!

All that drive moving insanity is now complete!

Finally! The clone of my drive has finished successfully! Only took 10.735 hours too, haha.

120060444672 bytes transferred in 38646.884611 seconds (3106601 bytes/sec)

Now… I just need to reconnect the drives and see if it will actually boot and run properly.

…And it boots! Wow, I have a new found love of my LCD when in native resolution; after a day of looking at the fuzzy interpolated 800×600 of the Knoppix LiveDVD… crisp 1280×1024, oh so lovely; everything looks so tiny now! ;)

It figures that as soon as I’d boot updatedb would start running, running the drive at full bore, lol. It’s kind of difficult to get a feel for the new speed when it’s being driven so hard by a cronjob. I didn’t take any timing measurements for various things, but it certainly feels like GNOME started up a lot faster than it ever has. Actually, the whole desktop environment feels considerably more snappy, but again that could also be just the relief of not having the DVD spin up anytime I wanted to do something, heh.

I’m writing this from Konqueror while booted from the Knoppix DVD. I’ve been giving a go at the whole drive cloning thing using dd. I’m not sure it’s actually working, I think it is, but it has been running for an insanely long period of time, something like around 13 hours. I realize that 120GB is a lot to clone, but I had no idea it would actually take that long. Which brings me to wondering if it is actually working… do all the writers of how to documents mean DAYS when they say a long time? …I assumed they meant a couple of hours, so imagine my surprise to discover it was still running after coming back up here from sleeping…

Update. I aborted the clone, it was simply taking longer than I believed that it should be taking. I did some more reading and determined that because I did not specify a block size it used the default, which is terribly low and consequently would have taken forever … as I was noticing.

I switched to a more reasonable block size, 1024K, and speed doubled… still painfully slow by the standard of what the drives are, in theory, capable of. I then decided to try the drive in my new firewire/usb2 drive enclosure. This gave me another boost in speed, now I’m up to 3MB/s from roughly 2.5MB/s when directly connected to the IDE bus. The 120GB clone will take between eleven and twelve hours at that particular rate; still horrible, but better than the 33 hours of the original command.

This seems somewhat in line with estimations I’d seen elsewhere, but I’d also seen one that indicated 40GB should be done in one hour, which is insane compared to my low speeds. I’m beginning to wonder if that guy was just going on theoretical speeds versus real-life speeds… which are, of course, always much lower.

I’m just going with the idea the original drive is just horribly slow… even though I read a review indicating it should be more than capable of the speed I’m seeing. The drive activity light on the computer is solid, whereas the activity lamp on the portable drive enclosure is blinking… rapidly, but clearly blinking. This little bit of information would tend to indicate the ‘receiving’ drive is capable of taking in data much, much more quickly… I’d sure hope so!

I just hope all of this is worth it… I’m not expanding the storage space of the drive itself, both are identical in that respect; two different 120GB models, both Samsung. One of them is 5400 RPM with 2MB of cache, while the newer is 7200 RPM with 8MB of cache. The main thing I want to cure by this little (hah) endeavor is to get rid of the horrible lag whenever I access the GNOME menu while the drive reads whatever is in it. I don’t understand why that stuff isn’t cached in memory somewhere, it should be instant; it seems that launching Firefox is faster than seeing what I have in the menu.. .heh.