Zit Seng's Superwall » linux

Building My New PC

Zit Seng — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 07:37:32 +0000

It’s been quite a long while since I last built my own PC. My last desktop PC was built some time around 2005. I was reasonably familiar with PC components at that time. Technology has changed so much, and even though I do work in the “IT line”, and I do occasionally spec out server requirements, I’ve for the most part gotten out-of-touch with consumer PC components. Fortunately, there hasn’t been much in the way of technological revolution, so all I needed to do was to update myself with the current state of consumer PC developments.

My research actually started something like half a year ago. The old desktop was already 5 years old, perhaps more. Parts had been failing: disk, fans, power supply. The desktop runs as my Linux server. At the start of this year, I suspected something was amiss when it randomly shutdown. Over the course of the next 3 months, the mysterious shutdowns repeated, maybe, another 3 times. I started making plans. The latest development at that time was Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture. It got me excited.

For the new desktop, I had decided to move from Fedora to Ubuntu. Ubuntu did not have out-of-the-box for Sandy Bridge graphics at that time. I had to wait for the 11.04 release. Then, the infamous Intel Sandy Bridge SATA bug came up. So my upgrade plans were put on the back burner. My old PC might be showing signs of age, but I’ve also gotten lazy, and frankly, assembling PCs and installing Linux wasn’t as exciting as they used to be. I didn’t have a pressing need to upgrade. But to cut a long story short, that old PC announced quite vocally last week that it needed to be put to rest. I quickly gathered up my past research and finalized the parts to build my new PC.

Unlike all other DIY PCs I’ve built previously, this would be the first time that I would not be buying on the basis of “cheapest that meets requirements”. Oh, that needs to be explained. In the past, “requirements” were simply attributes like performance (e.g. SATA2 vs SATA1), quantities (e.g. port counts, PCI slots), or technical capabilities (e.g. IEEE 1394a). This time, I was looking at energy efficiency, serviceability, etc.

The power supply was one item I was going to invest a little. That means, to spend a little more now in order to reap long term savings. In my previous post Observing Earth Hour 2011, I had mentioned about the potential savings from operating expenses in using an 80Plus rated power supply unit. The power supply would cost more up-front, but the savings in electricity bills would pay off very quickly. I was eyeing a CoolerMaster power supply initially, but for various reasons, decided on the Seasonic M12II 520W power supply unit. It is a modular power supply, and rated 80Plus Bronze.

Like the power supply, I decided to invest a little bit more for a quality motherboard. Two motherboards came up for consideration: the Asus P8H67M Evo and the Gigabyte H78MA-UD2H-B3. I didn’t quite consider other brands of motherboard. So far, I’ve always bought either Asus or Gigabyte. This time around, the Asus motherboard won out, because it had one extra SATA2 port, a legacy PCI slot (sacrificing one PCIe x1 slot), and legacy IDE ports.

My casing requirements were a little “complicated”. My first requirement was that I wanted side-loading hard disk slots, preferably tool-free. Secondly, the casing had to look “nice”, which to me meant that the casing has to look presentable in a living room. Many PC users have different ideas of what “nice” means. I discovered a review of the Cooler Master Silencio 550, and I quite liked how it looked and its features. It’s “looks” passed my criteria: mostly feature-less black, no side windows, no side or top meshes, a cool mirror-finish plain front panel. It has 6 3.5″ side-loading HDD slots, with screw-less snap-on rails. What was most outstanding about this casing? It’s “soundproof”. Alright, surely it is not totally soundproof. But there is plenty of soundproof cladding on the casing’s side panels.

When I headed down to Sim Lim Square, I was quite apprehensive about parts being unavailable. Most of the times in the past, I would have prepared a BOM (bill of material… or basically a shopping list with all the prices tabulated), head down to pick up the parts, then find that:

The shop that I want to get the part does not have it, and I end up having to buy from another shop at a higher price; or
No one has that part, so I am forced to find a substitute that is either more costly and/or less desirable.

I was really lucky this time. Everything I wanted was available. In fact, when I started my shopping, 4GB of PC3 10600/1333 RAM had cost $55, but had dropped to $32 by the time I finalized my BOM, and when I actually did a quick survey at Sim Lim Square, I managed to secure that RAM at just $29.

This was really the most pleasant DIY PC shopping experience so far. Sim Lim Square was unusually quiet for a Saturday afternoon. Cybermind had expanded to a new shop, and seemed to be having a “re-opening” celebration. I think because of that I was able to purchase my Asus motherboard and Cooler Master casing at somewhat less that had originally expected.

Here’s the final parts I got:

Asus P8H67-M Evo motherboard with Intel i5-2400 CPU from Cybermind.
Cooler Master Silencio 550 casing from Cybermind.
Seasonic M12II 520M modular 80Plus Bronze power supply from Fuwell.
Kingston PC3 10600/1333 CL9 4GB RAM from Best Bargain.
Hitachi 2TB 64MB 7200 RPM Hard Disk from Best Bargain.

I installed Ubuntu 11.04 on it, booting the installation off a USB thumb drive. I’ll save my Ubuntu 11.04 installation experience for another time.

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Virtual Ubuntu

Zit Seng — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 13:40:47 +0000

Then, after installing Gentoo Linux yesterday, today I had a go at Ubuntu. This time, instead of a spare PC, I installed it in a virtual machine in my MacBook Pro. I know, this is hardly a fair comparison, but let’s just hear me out, because I’m just totally awed by the setup experience. It was just so easy, even considering my increased expectations of how Linux distributions ought to have become.

Some of the credit, however, really goes to VMware for making the installation so straightforward. I was going to install Ubuntu in my VMware virtual machine. So I opened VMware Fusion and started trying to create a new virtual machine. VMware Fusion asked if I had an installation disk. Sure… I pointed it to the Ubuntu ISO I had already downloaded. Then… oh, VMware Fusion figured out it was Ubuntu, and fast-tracked the setup process. No, I’m not talking about just simplifying the virtual machine creation… but it actually asked me what password I wanted on my Ubuntu machine, then proceeded to take over the Ubuntu installation for me.

Quite literally, everything was automated. (Alright, so technically I don’t know how easy Ubuntu would have been to setup, because all the wizardry was done by VMware Fusion.)

Upon the first reboot after installation, while still in the Linux text console mode, VMware Fusion had already inserted some text message to tell me that it was installing vmware tools in the background, and that I could already continue to login and explore through the text-mode CLI, or I could just wait till the GUI was started up.

I chose to wait… since I had other things to do, and well, it’s pretty fast on my SSD anyway. It was done quickly enough, and the GUI was started up nicely, vmware tools already installed and running nicely. So… the first real interaction I had with the Ubuntu installation was the GUI login window, after installation was completely done.

Nice.

The next time I re-setup my home PC… it’s going to be Ubuntu. The last time I had a hard time deciding between Fedora and Ubuntu (and I eventually ended up with Fedora).

ps: I keep referring to VMware Fusion above because that’s what I have. I assume it should be just the same like on VMware Workstation (the Windows desktop equivalent of VMware Fusion, which is for Mac OS X).

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Revisiting Gentoo Linux

Zit Seng — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:57:52 +0000

I spent a part of today installing Gentoo Linux in a spare PC. If you’ve not heard of it, Gentoo is yet another Linux distribution. It stands out from the rest in that practically everything you install is actually compiled from source code locally. It’s not my first experience with Gentoo… I had a go at it when it was newly launched around 2002. It’s a hacker’s distribution. Not very much fun, and if you asked me, I wouldn’t want to use it or recommend it. But I have a project underway now that Gentoo would be useful. So, I’m back again exploring Gentoo.

If you know me… I’ve been playing with Linux since the era of Yggdrasil, the times when the Linux kernel wasn’t even at version 1.0. It’s a long long time ago. Somewhere along the way, I relegated Linux to the role of backend server. I not only want something that “just works” on my own desktop/notebook (i.e. the one that I actually sit in-front of to use), but also something that works “beautifully”. Linux was not the answer. I’m plenty happy to have Linux run my servers though.

The state of Linux has improved by leaps and bounds over the years. Maybe Linux-proponents keep encouraging me to go back to it (i.e. to put Linux on my desktop/notebook). But then again, user expectations have also lept forward in those years. I still don’t think Linux is quite there yet to replace, say, Windows 7 or Mac OS X on the desktop/notebook. However, I will concede that Linux has indeed become a lot easier to manage for a newbie. Pretty GUIs, installer wizards, etc.

So, with that mindset, I set about downloading the Gentoo Linux minimal CD image. (“Minimal” still worked out to be 115MB.) I burned the ISO onto a CD, mucked around the drive boot order, and in no time (aside from a couple of prompts)… Gentoo Linux came up. There was the livecd# prompt and a nice blinking cursor.

Hmm. Cool, nice live CD environment to explore around a CLI. I’m not intimidated by a CLI. I’m quite comfortable with a bash prompt. But… erm, I want to install Gentoo into the PC. So what should I do?

The screen was full of text… the kind that would probably frighten noobs. The kind that some noobs would have just declared “doesn’t work”. However, nothing in that screen told me what I was supposed to do next. I want to install Gentoo, but there was nothing intuitive to take me to the next step.

For a brief moment… I thought maybe I used the wrong CD image. But nope, up there on the screen clearly confirmed this was the Minimal Installation CD. Why is it not helping me install Gentoo?

So I was forced to go back to the Gentoo website and hunt for documentation. It was then that I realized… the Gentoo folks really do want you to read the instructions. It’s the kind of longish complicated installation instructions that would surely frighten away noobs.

Alright, Gentoo is not for noobs. What I experienced was a mismatch of expectations vs reality.

I just thought, perhaps, things should have evolved to become somewhat intuitive. Yup, even for a hacker’s Linux distribution.

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Linux Kernel is Dazed and Confused

Zit Seng — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:28:00 +0000

The Linux kernel admits to being dazed and confused, but tries hard to continue. Unsuccessfully. One of our server died. We looked at the screen, and were amused enough that everyone (who had a decent camera phone) took a picture of the screen. The kernel spat out in its logs: “Dazed and confused, but trying to continue; Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled?” Alright, the server wasn’t really important after all, hence its death was only noticed like over 3 months later.

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Fedora 12 or Ubuntu 9.10

Zit Seng — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:24:35 +0000

So, the inevitable question came when I had to re-install Linux on my PC. The PC isn’t new, but I got a new hard disk, and my old Fedora 7 was too old that the current latest Fedora 12 wouldn’t detect as a installation it would upgrade from. I don’t mind a fresh installation of Linux. It seems like a good idea to start afresh rather than let years of upgrades accumulate cruft. So, what will it be: Fedora or Ubuntu?

I’ve been a long time user of Red Hat, then subsequently Fedora (Core) when Red Hat decided to fork out the distribution. It’s no different at work because I got to choose which Linux distribution. More recently, we started to move to CentOS, which still has Red Hat in its roots (it’s the open source version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux). I’ve had my share of problems with Red Hat/Fedora, and I have my complaints. So, how about something new? That something that came to my mind was Ubuntu. It has received good reviews, and a friend has shared his happy experience with it.

So the big research began. It’s a difficult choice. My short conclusion is that Ubuntu is for average computer users, possibly new to Linux, is easy to setup, easy to use, and fits well for typical end-user needs. Fedora is a venerable long-tested Linux distribution, full of power stuffs, will appeal to power users. Hmm. I want both. Problem.

Ok, so in the end, my not so scientific basis of selection reasoned that:

The Ubuntu 9.10 distribution fits in one CDROM. Fedora 12 requires 3.3GB of a DVD. Surely Fedora must pack a lot more things in the installation media. I don’t want to install a brand new Linux on my system and then find myself having to download the Internet to get all the packages I need/want.
I’m familiar with Fedora. Maybe all the end-user niceties of Ubuntu aren’t terribly important to me after all.

Thus, Fedora won, and I went on to install Fedora 12.

It’s sad, but my Fedora installation still met with various problems. The first-boot failed to boot. The Software Update program crashed while trying to update the system with 520 new packages. I’ve already ranted about it.

A nice little thing that I noticed was that during installation, there was no longer a “time remaining” indicator. I say it’s “nice” because in the past when there was such a timer, it greatly misled everyone about truly how much time was remaining. What happens is that when the install starts, it might say 30 minutes remaining, then as the install progresses, it might change to 50 minutes remaining, then maybe 120 minutes remaining, etc. Hey, it is like a “time elapsed” counter rather than a “time remaining” counter. Sometimes I wonder if the label was a bug.

So if anyone came here wondering, Fedora or Ubuntu… I thought to share my experience, but still I don’t think this post helps a lot anyway.

While researching about Ubuntu, I was a little annoyed at having to choose between Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server. Hey, what if I want features of both? But never mind that, I did learn find something interesting with Ubuntu Server – the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. It’s a cloud computing thing that is “compatible” with Amazon Web Services. Sounds cool. I’m now thinking about trying it out.

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Linux for Newbies

Zit Seng — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:59:07 +0000

I’m sad to say, Linux still isn’t quite ready for newbies. Although I only had a few simple struggles with my latest Fedora 12 installation, I cannot imagine how a computer newbie is going to handle such challenges. Granted, Linux is probably more suited for the “power user”, many people in Linux-land try to evangelize the idea that Linux can be used by just about anybody. To this end, I think Linux might be going in that general direction, but it’s still a long way getting there.

My Fedora 12 installation was generally quite smooth. In fact, I’d say it was pretty quick, much faster than I had been used to. My computer isn’t terribly powerful (about 5 years old it think), but it has a brand new hard disk which I’d like to think is reasonably fast. That’s really nice. When the installation from DVD was done, the system rebooted to continue the post -installation setup. Ah ha. The system rebooted, but it failed to boot up Fedora 12. I can see the Fedora 12 boot up screen, then eventually the screen blanked, and nothing could evoke any response from the system. Not even Ctrl-Alt-Del. Hmm, problem. After some struggling around, I managed to see an error message about the system not finding the root device. Hmm, no good.

Well, let’s just say after some mucking around, I finally got Fedora 12 up and running. But my troubles had not ended. One of the first few things to try was to check for software updates. Guess how many updates were there?

Now, remember Fedora 12 was released only in November 2009, just barely 2 months ago. There are now 520 packages to update, totalling over 600MB in size. Fine, if there are so many updates to catch up on, it could simply mean that Fedora or the software it includes are pretty on-the-ball to keep themselves updated. If my broadband speed is fast, 600MB isn’t really all that long anyway. Sure, let’s update.

Yes, next problem. If only the update would actually work. The Software Update program crashed. A quick Google search found several results on this topic. None of the several solutions I randomly picked worked. Eventually, I sorted that out myself by using the command-line tool that I was already familiar with.

I’ve used Linux for a long time. My first installation was Yggdrasil, which I’m sure most people have not heard of until they do a Google search. I consider myself an experienced Linux user, but sometimes I like to be a simple end-user newbie and want everything to just work. I love how in Mac OS X everything (well, almost) just works. At some point, you want to use your computer to get useful work done, not figure out how to fix broken things so that you can get your work done.

Maybe I should have abandoned Fedora and considered something else for my latest installation. Perhaps my familiarity and preference for Fedora has clouded by view of how great Linux distributions have become.

Well, alright I should admit that I just wanted to rant a little. This is 2010, I am expecting Linux to work more beautifully. When I bought an Acer PC preinstalled with Windows Vista last year, it just worked. That’s how I want my Linux distro to be.

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IT Joke of the Day

Zit Seng — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:31:04 +0000

Obviously this is the kind of joke only for IT people, particularly the Linux people. It’s a case of a post sent to the wrong mailing list which quickly developed into a series of hilarious follow-ups. I myself had a good laugh when I sifted through the email I received from the list this morning. Someone posted to the Fedora mailing list about the worsening mileage he was getting on his Toyota Prius. He realized quite immediately his mistake. But other funny people on the list followed-up with serious-sounding Linux advice.

Upgrade the kernel of the Prius.

Use one of the kernel performance measurement tools.

Upgrade the prius_mileage package (yum update prius_mileage).

Someday, the Toyota Prius might really run Linux. Cars, after all, have got onboard computers at least in the form of Engine Control Units which are getting pretty common these days. Particularly on high-end luxury cars, these onboard computers are also getting rather complex, controlling and monitoring a lot more things than just engine operation.

It wouldn’t be too long before cars start malfunctioning due to buggy software.

Oops. Actually some cars are already malfunctioning due to buggy software.

Not the least of which is, coincidentally on the same day, news of the massive recall of various models of Toyota vehicles in the US, including the Prius. It doesn’t sound like a software bug though, even though software could perhaps fix the problem.

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A Gathering of Linux Fans

Zit Seng — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:57:29 +0000

I recently attended a gathering of people who have some interests in Linux. I was quite surprised by the big turnout. I believe the organizers themselves did not think there would be such a big interest, because they had booked too small a meeting venue. The room was too small, and in my opinion, their efforts to move aside the tables did little to alleviate the congestion. I guess we all underestimated the level of interest in Linux, unless, perhaps people were there just to check out the level of interest in Linux.

Like I was, as were a few other people who were there. Yes, we were just pretty curious about just how many Linux people, whether they are users themselves or just simply interested, there are in NUS. Despite several people (more than you could count on your fingers) not being students, the remaining number of people were still quite sizable.

I was surprised, because of the general decline of tech-savviness of our students. Never mind that our students can’t program, that’s something we already know for about a decade. But increasingly, we see how lost our students are with IT. A simple instruction to download a file and save it to a certain directory, for example, was too complicated for one student to execute. Another did not know how to open the printer door to clear a paper jam, despite graphic instruction being pasted on the printer.

But back on topic. I guess there is still some decent level of IT literacy amongst at least some of our students. Even if they aren’t Linux users, the fact that they knew enough to know there exists some other operating system than Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, that they would be interested enough to come to such a meeting, it’s a good start. Sometimes you’d wonder if people still remember MS-DOS, or its “improvements” like DESQview and OS/2.

The sad thing is that I came to understand that this student group, in fact, comprised of just one student member. Everyone else were alumni (i.e. ex-students). That’s for the people who really make up the group (i.e. what I would consider active participation, as opposed to passive audiences like people who came to this gathering to listen).

So I’m wondering, is there not enough interest or perhaps there is no need for such a user group to exist in NUS?

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Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus Mini-Review

Zit Seng — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:22:54 +0000

I bought the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus from Comex last week. The 1TB model was selling at only $239 (was $309 the week before at Sim Lim Square). I had planned to get an external hard disk for my MacBook to put Time Machine backups on. Time Machine requires a separate disk to run on, and I’ve not had the chance to turn on Time Machine because I didn’t have a spare external hard disk available until now.

This is a typical external 3.5″ hard disk, so it requires its own power supply. This makes it not very portable of course, but that’s okay for me because I really just want to leave it on my desktop. The sides of the casing is a nice brushed metal, and the rest is black plastic. It comes with 1 USB 2.0 port and 2 Firewire 400 ports, all located at the back of the casing. The only button is the “one touch” button on the front, which is lit up by a white LED when the hard disk is powered up and also doubles up to indicate hard disk activity. The LED backlight doesn’t look very nice actually, because it doesn’t actually light up the entire button area.

I planned to use this external hard disk for two purposes. First, for the Time Machine backups of my MacBook. 1TB is far more than enough for that. So the second purpose is to serve as extra storage space for all my data, particularly photos and videos, as well as backups of other stuffs I do on my Linux box. I want to be able to connect the OneTouch to both my MacBook as well as my Linux box.

The OneTouch comes pre-formatted with NTFS. Mac OS X doesn’t write to NTFS, and Time Machine requires HFS+. When I plugged the OneTouch into my MacBook, an installer pops up and immediately offers to reformat the entire drive to HFS+. When formatting is done, it will proceed to install the rest of the Maxtor tools, like the Maxtor Manager program that is used in conjnuction with the OneTouch button to do backups of your hard disk.

I chose not to go the path with Maxtor software. Instead, I fired up Disk Utility and formatted the drive into two partitions: one with HFS+ and the other with MS-DOS (FAT). Time Machine worked with that HFS+ partition. When I plugged in the OneTouch to my Linux box, although the disk itself was recognized, Linux could not find any partitions.

Ok, I did a bit of Google search and found that Mac OS X by defaults creates disks with a GUID partition map. The other option is the Apple Partition Map. To work with Linux (and Windows too), the disk must be formatted with the old Master Boot Record format. In Disk Utility, after selecting the disk, then the Partition tab, setup your volume scheme. The partition to be used by Time Machine must be formatted with HFS+. Partitions to be used by other operating systems should be formatted with MS-DOS (FAT). Before you apply, click the Options button which will bring up a dialog giving you the choice of partition formats. Make sure to choose Master Boot Record. Then apply the changes.

The disk should now be usable by both Mac OS X as well as other operating systems like Linux and Windows. Linux and Windows will, of course, only see and use the MS-DOS (FAT) partition.

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Shopping for a Compact PC

Zit Seng — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:54:51 +0000

Nowadays, it is not enough to just get a “best value” PC. Aesthetics have become an important factor in the overall consideration. Buyers are looking for PCs that look nice, are compact, clean design, blend in with the environment, etc. Now that PCs are so cheap, sometimes the price becomes a lesser important issue.

Here’s the PC I bought last weekend. Two sets of them actually. It was for work related purpose. I didn’t need a fast or powerful PC, I just wanted a compact box that looked nice. It cost just $599 a piece for a lowish Pentium E2160, 1GB of RAM, 160GB SATA disk and a DVD writer, packed into a compact shiny black HEC casing.

The box was fitted with an Asus P5GC-MX/1333 motherboard which uses the Intel ICH7 chipset. The Attansic L2 100Mbps network interface was, however, a little of a problem: there was no support in the standard Linux kernel, the driver source provided by Asus failed to compile cleanly, but fortunately there is a driver project on SourceForge that worked. This is an issue for me because I’m building Linux appliances. I understand this network interface is also the same used on the Asus Eee PC.

There’s not much to be said about these PCs. There’s a soft blue glow under the CDROM bay to show that the box is powered up. The casing is a gloss shiny finish. They look nice, and they work. That’s all I want.

A few thoughts on the shopping:

I did my shopping for the above boxes at Sim Lim Square. Shopping with the weekend crowd was a little frustrating. The shop staff are all so preoccupied with people “just browsing”, that “ready to buy” people like me can’t get their attention. I normally don’t have any complaints about Cybermind, but this time around, I was rather annoyed with “bundle packages” advertised on the flyers they were distributing that weren’t actually available.

I also don’t normally have any complaints about Fuwell, but this time I was served by a really very unhelpful and arrogant staff. Needless to say, even though they had what I wanted, I did not buy from them.

No doubt “customer service” is not something Sim Lim Square shops are well known for. But it will probably do them some good to make sure all their staff have some basic sense of it.

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