Melty 1

I was doing a deep clean earlier today, and I booted her up afterwards, opened the hardware monitoring program from CPUID, noticed the GPU temperature rising from about 49-50C; I looked at the fan, thinking I accidentally unplugged it when cleaning, and it wasn't spinning, but after taking the card out, the fan was plugged in. I then tried to spin the fan by hand, but it was much harder to do so than it should have been.

I played with the fan a bit to try to get it to spin better, but wasn't horribly successful. I got it to the point where it should spin okay. Tried it again, and it kinda worked, but the temps weren't really stable, so I took the card out again.

I decided to take the plastic heat-sink shell off and use the Vantec Spectrum Fan Card from Ziggy to put underneath the graphics card. I was worried that it wouldn't hold well, seeing as the fan card was made to be inserted into a PCI slot and not a PCIe x16, but after testing it out, the PCIe slot seemed to stabilize the card enough.

When I turned Melty on, and opened up the hardware monitor, I saw the GPU temperature at 32C! I was so surprised, but then again, it made sense, since the fans are cooling majority of the heat-sink. I haven't seen the temps go higher than 50C, but I'll let time run the course and see what happens.

I was wanting to email HIS and request a replacement fan, but on the site they posted that they will not send out a replacement cooler/fan because the user can damage the graphics card if done by themselves (obviously voiding the warranty). The fan mounts to the plastic shell - the fan being easily removable without removing the shell - and the fan's power cable is pretty free, so to be honest, I think it's a bit much to say they won't send out a replacement fan (I can understand the concern with the heat-sink though). Needless to say, I'm not going to bother and I'm going to stick with Sapphire's video cards like I have been. (By the way, the shell is screwed into the heat-sink, so removal of the shell requires removal of the heat-sink, of which I did without any problems.)

After letting the fan sit face-up for a while, the fan seemed easier to spin, but also still didn't spin right, leaving me to think it's a problem with the bearing. I think the bearing uses oil instead of grease and the oil flowed out of the bearing area and caused it to lock up. Only reason I can think as to why oil was used instead of grease is the cost (I'm assuming oil's cheaper than grease). Even though I'm sure that's the problem, there's not exactly a way for me to fix it, as I'm not sure how to separate the PCB of the fan from the mounting bracket (where the axle access probably is).

When I'm able to, I think I'm going to upgrade Melty to a 7770, since I won't have to upgrade the PSU to compensate. We'll see though.

openSUSE 13.1 Part 1

Well, nothing I noticed different from RC2, but that's probably a given, though I did notice that the network configuration changed a lot since 12.3, allowing you to configure IP/DNS/etc. separately (the old version required you to input a DNS if you were configuring the IP manually.

I've done 5 installs so far... Three on Triela and two on Mei-chan. First install on Triela was on the test partition to make sure VLC could be installed; the second was an install with BTRFS, which I found out halfway through the installation (after the reboot, before touching the manual configuration) that ext4 performs better than BTRFS; so the third installation was, obviously, with ext4. The first install on Mei-chan failed because a couple packages were broken (I was going to install XFCE and KDE along with GNOME), and so I tried again (without the XFCE and KDE) and it worked just fine.

I used the live disk to test VLC installation and 1080p playback on Mei-Ren (at the same time when I was testing on Triela), and didn't have any hiccups. And as usual, the hot keys don't work on the video window. Oh well.

I think I forgot to mention that after logging out of root after editing fstab, fstab's reloaded on login instead of boot.

I also found a separate program for additional trackpad options that aren't in the settings.

Fstab is also a lot cleaner, as it only contains physical partitions/drives (the proc and stuff like that aren't there any more).

I think that's all that I can really think of... Besides Rhythmbox being a bit weird on Triela and crashing when trying to play certain songs. I may write more, but I can't be certain, as I'm pretty tired, physically.

Lie-chan was easy and mostly uneventful (only problem I had was a slight glitch with the fonts after logging back in after changing the theme, which worked itself out); Melty on the other hand.... While trying to boot into GNOME live, something happened and it stalled or got stuck in some sort of loop, so I was forced to do a blind install on Melty. Luckily, nothing happened.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that the menu for certain programs (Rhythmbox, as that's the only one I've really seen so far) is interesting. Each "section" of the menu has its own arrow, which releases the sub-menu once clicked upon.


Well, I think that's it. I won't update for the next 3 years or until the next good LTS is released. I'll still continue to test the later releases as they come out.

(edit)

Seems that it's Rhythmbox itself that crashes when trying to play certain songs, but it changes what songs it crashes on per computer. When I open Rhythmbox via terminal and play a known song to make it crash, it gives me an undecipherable error maybe having something to do with cairo? If I was able to install the older version of Rhythmbox, I would, but since 13.1 ships with 3.0.1, there's not a whole lot I can do. Banshee works very similarly to Rhythmbox, but is very slow (probably because I have a lot of songs in my music library. It's slow enough, where I really can't use it.

Amarok works decently, but doesn't have a separate "now playing" list like Rhythmbox or Banshee. While it keeps the song it was playing, the next random song is random. Luckily, there's an option to shift the randomization, which I set to "Not Recently Played" to avoid hearing a song that I heard not too long ago (iTunes is horrible for it). Amarok does have a queue, but it's very lacking, only allowing you to move songs up and down and to delete the song from the queue or clear the queue. If they program it further to have it become the "now playing" section, I'd probably migrate to Amarok without a second thought. I'll use Amarok for the time being and keep an eye on Rhythmbox.

While this is annoying, it's no real reason to go back to 12.3. Not to mention, I really prefer 13.1, considering all the features I was looking forward to. It's just kinda sad I can't really do much but wait and play things by ear.