(Self) Bias (Resistor)

Yes, the title is in reference to the Fear Factory song, but has no connection to the rest of the blog. Just felt like adding something else to the title besides the obvious.

So as I've may have said elsewhere, I'm a bit biased with computer parts... After building Ziggy and finding that Ziggy ran at 46C (115F) idle (IDLE for f*k sake!), I decided to never buy Intel again. Okay, the Prescott core P4's had a bad thermal sensor or incorrectly placed or something like that, but I think it just had a bad thermal design seeing that it honestly should have lasted a bit longer. Bah, whatever. The netbook had an Intel Atom processor with Intel integrated graphics. That thing was okay, but it was annoying to use.

If I get a free Intel-based computer, I'm not gonna complain, free is free after all. But I will never build another Intel system.

Sure Intel makes powerful CPU's but I have no use for it's ridiculous power. I do a bit of photo editing from time to time, watch videos, listen to music, and surf the net. I hardly play PC games, so why build something overpowered if I'm hardly going to even use more than 25% (if even that) of the computer's ability?

Not to mention AMD spends less money making CPU dies for each type of processor. As you may know (if you've at least read my post on Mei Ren) AMD stamped out a Phenom II x4 and locked two of it's cores to make it a dual core instead of making a whole new die for it. Why? because it's much cheaper to lock two cores than to make a set of dual-core dies.

AMD is cheaper than Intel anyway, which is good when you are trying to build a good rig for cheap. And for all the Intel vs. AMD crap out there... For f*k sake people shut your hole and stop bickering! A proc's a proc and just stick with what you like best. Bash the other company all you want, but what good is it going to do to flame each other? I post my opinion and experience of why I like AMD and don't really like Intel, but I'm not going to force you to go AMD. Your opinion is yours and yours alone.

Anyway... I do like AMD's Fusion line of CPUs APUs from what I've read, they really blow the Intel Atom line out of the water. Sure Intel may have the cutting edge stuff, but AMD usually has the more refined stuff it seems. Even look at the Bulldozer FX chips that were just released - under liquid helium cooling, the FX proc was able to be OCd to 8.429 GHz (which was done by AMD and a team of expert overclockers). Sure a liquid nitrogen cooled i7 may do 6.x GHz, but is it able to be OCd past that under liquid helium? I sure as heck don't know, and someone's gotta spend that money to find out.

Well, the other reason I don't really like Intel is that I continually see it when I read MaxPC. I do understand why, but I see more Intel mobos than AMD mobos get reviewed, and that's a bit annoying.

Anyway, I think I'm done for this rant. As a last word, if you don't like what someone else says, don't flame them, just stop reading/listening and go your own way.

(2014 update: Ziggy's CPU is not dead, I will never build another Intel system for myself, I also occasionally do CPU-intensive tasks from time to time, and AMD locks unstable/dead cores then sells them accordingly.)

Triela 1

I bought a Habey Wifi+Bluetooth combo card (along with the RAM upgrade) from Newegg and tried it out to see if I was able to get Bluetooth. I couldn't get the Bluetooth to work no matter what I tried. After searching around, I read that the firmware (for the Bluetooth side of the card) is written to announce itself as a USB even though it's a Mini-PCIe, and there wasn't really any way to fix it. It only appears in the hardware list only for Linux kernel 3.0+ and I think someone was able to get it to work (in spite of the firmware) with 3.1.x. I decided then to keep it and wait for something maybe, but I RMA'd it since I found something else. Oh, the card was actually made by AzureWave, and Habey just re-sells it or something like that...

The one I found is an Intel brand. Now there's only two problems I may have with it. I've read that it may not compatible with AMD processors, but I don't think that will really happen anyway (not to mention the on-board audio is listed as an Intel when I'm watching the messages as I'm booting into openSUSE). The other problem I may have is that the Wifi may not work, the only reason I'm partially sceptical of this is because I only found one instance of it in Ubuntu and didn't find any other instances of it (in either Ubuntu or openSUSE).

Of course the only problem is that I had to spend a bit over $9 to RMA the card, and with the refund from it I needed to get the HD 6770 for Mei Ren (I actually lost a few dollars in total, but oh well). So I haven't been able to buy Intel combo card yet. I'm honestly hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

Sim Cards / Google Voice

Oh what a joyous day it has been. At some point when I was working on this blog, my service for my cell phone went out. I rebooted the phone which didn't do anything, then tried it in my old phone, nothing still. So I decided to wait and see what would happen at work (maybe the cell tower is down?).

At work, absolutely nothing changed. So after a kind of long shift, I get home, eat and called up T-Mobile. After getting to technical support from customer support, the guy said that it the SIM card I was using was a legacy card that has a limit on how many times it can register (to a cell tower) and that I would need to stop by a T-Mobile store to get a new one.

So after heading over there (and waiting about 20 minutes), the guy set up the new SIM card and gave it to me. I stuck it in and booted up the phone, and I instantly got service (the tech guy said it would take two hours or I just heard him wrong and he could have said that it could take up to two hours) double checked the connection and everything and went on my merry way home.

So there's got to be some kind of catch right? Yep. Supposedly I have a new voice mail, but I don't have one in my T-Mobile voicemail box, and the one in my Google Voice is an old one (I actually don't use my T-Mobile one since I can't get service in my friend's basement).

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Well, since I'm on the issue. Google Voice is two (maybe actually three) things essentially, which is a "phone" provider and voicemail provider (with the latter being free); I obviously use the voicemail feature.

It has a similar style to Gmail, and it has it's own listing for each voicemail that you get. It also (attempts to) transcribe each voicemail, so you actually don't have to listen to it. But this is based on how clearly the person speaks, and I'm also assuming it can't transcribe non-English languages at the moment.

So why am I using this over my provider's? Because of my service as I previously mentioned. Since I don't get service in his basement, I can't get voicemails or calls. This is where Google voice shines. Since my friend has internet, I can keep a tab open for Google Voice and check it every so often to make sure I don't have a voice mail.

Another great feature I use is that you can have different greetings for each group. So for your work group, you can have an ultra-professional greeting; for family, you can have something something relaxed; for friends, something upbeat; and for anyone not in a group (say unknown numbers), you can have a greeting that in incomprehensible. Of course the catch is that you need to make sure you add new contacts into the corresponding group or they might hear that incomprehensible greeting.

Linux/Unix Distributions

Well, as the "experienced" Linux user knows, most distros have an original base to it. Linux Mint (normal version) is based off of Ubuntu which is based off of Debian (LMDE is also directly based off of Debian).

Anyway we have are major bases: Debian, Slackware, and Red Hat.

Why wasn't SUSE in the list of bases? because as you can see in this graphic, SUSE (and openSUSE) is actually based off Slackware (interesting huh?).

Now according to that graphic, there's plenty of original bases, but besides the three I mentioned above, none of them has as large number of branches. The only one that has the most of the smaller bases is the Enoch base which essentially could be called the Gentoo base.

Anyway, time to get to my point of all this. I've tried at least one or more distributions from these 3 major bases plus the Gentoo base. Oh yeah, there's the Arch Linux base that probably follows after Gentoo... (sorry for my stream of consciousness type of writing).

I could list all the distributions I've tried, but that would take a while and I'd have to fish my spindle of distributionss out, which I really don't want to do. Anyway, onward!

Originally when I was curious about Linux, a friend of mine stared me with Knoppix 4.x (can't remember which version of 4 it was). And it was okay, I got it to run on the Half-top which was a laptop that was missing the main screen (it had a VGA port, so I just hooked it up to the kinda crappy LCD TV I had. It was okay, and I kinda used it to watch some videos on it, but it just didn't fit my bill quite right (after all, Knoppix is live).

I dropped it for a while and then eventually looked for a out-of-the-box distribution, since all my parents had was dial-up and that doesn't go too well with Linux. I found Sabayon 4.x and downloaded it bit by bit from the local library's free internet. At the time I had Lie-chan and Ziggy, and Ziggy was where Linux was going (Lie-chan had XP installed at that time). Sabayon was okay.... Until I couldn't access my DVD drive to watch something. I wasn't happy about that and started looking again (at the library of course). I found Linux Mint 8 and it worked great. I even upgraded to LM9 and then to LMDE. Sometime between Sabayon and LM8 my parents finally got real internet, so I was able to download LM8 at home instead of awkwardly trying to do it at the library....

I forgot to mention that between Knoppix and Sabayon, I borrowed Fedora 8 and Fedora 9 (the big books with the "free" disk) from the library and made a copy of the live CDs and the DL-DVDs. I tried the live CD's on Lie-chan, and installed Fedora 9 on her, but it didn't give me the "out of the box" experience I was looking for, so I set it aside.

LMDE is when I stared to have the Kernel Mode Set problem... Well, sometime during my usage of it, since I was upgrading when I was supposed to... But it was getting very tough to getting it to boot even with the nomodeset option at boot. I'd have to hold the power switch in to shut it off, boot it back up and hope it didn't KMS again (I turned it into a verb back then lol). Oh, Ziggy did have a reset button, but it was such a sliver of a button that it was pretty much worthless to try to use - a paperclip or a fingernail (assuming your fingernail was long enough) would suffice to hit the reset switch - so I decided to remove it instead.

One day, the KMS problem was so bad that I couldn't even boot into LMDE. So I had to find something else that was not of a Debian base, since that's what I assumed was causing the issue. After a tad bit of research, I learned that Fedora was just as bad with the KMS and decided to skip that. That's when I "learned" about openSUSE. Since it was not based off of Debian or Red Hat, it shouldn't give me the KMS problem right?

After installing it, the monitors were in mirrored mode and I couldn't "extend" my desktop like I wanted. After a bit more research, I learned that Xorg's radeon hd driver package were crap and that the radeon driver that was more up to date was in the "bundled" drivers package. I couldn't find exactly how I was supposed to switch to it, so I opened up the package manager and removed the radeon hd driver, rebooted, and held my breath. Hey it worked! I was happy. And with the lizard I stayed for a long, long while.

Okay, so I said I tried a lot of distributions right? And now you're wondering where the rest of them play out.

So when I got the netbook (which I dubbed Triela because I couldn't really think of anything), that's when I really tested the heck out of a lot of these Linux distributions.

Attempting Debian on it left me with no X at all... just a freaking command line...

Vine Linux (can't remember the base, but was from Japan) worked for a bit.... and then for some reason, it broke itself... Yep. Stayed away from that one after that...

Oh, by the way, these are in order of when I remember them.

Momonga was very slow to load initrd, I gave up the three times trying to wait for it... (this was the 32-bit version) I tried it on Lie-chan and got to the installer and quit since I didn't want to install it. Weird... Momonga is based off of Fedora by the way.

Chakra (Arch base?) was still in alpha so there was very little to it.

Salix (I don't remember what base) was okay I think... but I think it also automatically broke itself like Vine.

Swift Linux (based off of Puppy I believe) wasn't all that great.

WattOS didn't play nice (I think I didn't get an X session)

FreeBSD (Unix) had some sort of weird install, so I quit before anything was written... I think I tried it twice...

Blah, I can't really remember right now... My phone can't pick up a signal for some reason... Either I have to do a factory data reset or the cell tower needs to be reset... I don't want to factory data reset my phone... at least not right now when I'm relatively tired.

I also tried some other small distributions on the Half-top: Puppy Linux. CentOS and a few others, but they were pretty much nothing I liked or didn't work or whatever...


So basically what it came down to for my use was:

• openSUSE for standard usage
• Ubuntu for GRUB-2 and testing

It seems it's just easiest to stick with the large distributions just because of the larger support "ring". I tend to easily find the answers I'm looking for for either openSUSE or Ubuntu, and in most cases, I can translate an Ubuntu answer to a openSUSE answer with some fiddling around.

Yep. Blah time. I think I'm done for the night.

Ubuntu 11.04

Okay, so I have 2 instances of 11.04. One of them is on Momiji and I don't have much of a problem with it beside that one of the kernel upgrades actually used more of the processor than the kernel before it so downgrading wasn't really fun because of the weird yaboot boot loader configuration stuff (I'm used to GRUB).

Anyway, to the meat of the matter. The other installation is on Lie-chan. And while it works decently enough, I only installed it for GRUB2 since openSUSE 11.3 (and I think 11.4 as well) only offer GRUB1 as the "stable" version (and I don't want to even attempt LILO). Blah, anyway...

Apparently, the ATI Radeon X1650 Pro is not compatible with the default Unity desktop that 11.04 ships with, so it forces classic instead. While it does work, I've had the panel applets' configuration files "corrupt" and GNOME asking if I want to keep the applet in the panel or delete it. Never had anything like it happen with any other installations anywhere else... At first I kept it, but then it would duplicate my applets upon next boot. After that, I just deleted it and it stays permanently gone. Whatever.

Beside that, it seems for some reason Nautilus (in 11.04 and 10.10) doesn't like FTPs and has a very hard time downloading/staying connected to the FTP (the FTP by the way is Shizuma).

Tthe PPA Launchpad "repository" thing is a little awkward seeing how I'm used to the YaST package/repository manager and zypper now that I know how to use zypper well. It's just weird that the PPA thing is a separate command from the apt-get... With zypper I can easily add a new repository and install programs with one command, but PPA is essentially quicker since there's less to type, but it gets a bit confusing what exactly I need to type for it...

 Don't get me wrong though. I think Ubuntu is a great distribution, but for how I use it, it's a bit too broken for me.

Otherwise, I really don't use Ubuntu much, seeing how I can do everything I want to do in openSUSE 11.3 and some of the tricks I learn with Ubuntu I can apply to openSUSE (with a bit of tweaking).

Mei Ren 1

Oh god... I usually enjoy building computers, but the case just took away so much of my enjoyment to make it feel a little more menial than anything.

The case is a Raidmax Thunder case, which seemed decent on Newegg for $25, but totally was way cheaper than that. Honestly, I think the case is worth $10-15 max. Three fans are included, and that's probably why it's $25.

The metal used is some really crappy sheet metal and it's quite sad when the plastic parts of the case is much sturdier than the metal.

The side panel window is not clear plastic, but a transparent cyan which is pretty WTF worthy.

The whole back panel is misaligned so the PSU doesn't sit flush against the metal like it should and my PCIe Wifi card sits a smidge crooked in the port (luckily it doesn't affect it too much, just sometimes isn't detected, but easily fixed by a simple reboot).

The front panel is held in by six screws. That's right! Six f*ing screws! Most companies just use clips which work quite well and makes it easy to take off. Not this case. I had to remove the front panel twice, once to get the card reader into the 3.5" bay and the second to reorient the front fan (I think I still need to point that fan to blow in, but I REALLY don't feel like doing it because of how annoying it is).

The tool-less holding things for the hard drives and such weren't really satisfactory. It held my card reader just fine (I still replaced it with screws), but it didn't hold the hard drives securely enough. It did keep them from leaving the hard drive bay, but there was plenty of wiggle room, which doesn't matter when the computer is stationary, but I had to build the computer in a different room, and I don't like my hard drives having a slight wiggle, especially when being transported.

Okay, so in all this negativity, there's got to be something positive right? Well, I suppose so. It DOES hold everything decently enough, so I can't really complain there.

Ok, I think that's enough about the case, I'm sick of talking about it. Well, this upcoming tax season or earlier, I'm gonna get a $50 Cooler Master (or Antec, I can't remember) case that is a lot sturdier from other Newegg reviewers.

Anyway, moving on.

I found that the RAM still crashes openSUSE randomly at full DDR2 800 speeds. Luckily these crashes aren't too bad, one time it force closed Firefox, and not too long after that it crashed Xorg (forced a log-out), and the other couple times after that it caused the package manager within openSUSE to hang... I could've sworn there's a time or two where I had to reboot... Bah, whatever.

Luckily, there's a option in my BIOS to force RAM "compatibility". I don't exactly understand how it works, but I know for one thing is that it halves my ram speed (it brings it to DDR2 400 speeds), and I have no issues with the RAM afterwards.

I've ran Memtest86 4.1 a few times (both with the option on and off), but I can't get a solid answer from it. One of the times when the option was off, and I let it run from test 0 to 7, I got a whole lot of errors within 3 of the modules. Turned the option on, and had no problems in test 7. Turned it off, and got no errors in the first pass of 7 and then got one error in the second pass of 7. WTF?

So I'm torn between emailing Corsair and getting new modules or just running it at half speed since it seems to work just as fine. Not to mention the downtime I'll have, which is not really important. But it's a tough decision, especially when I can't pinpoint the module(s) that are unstable.

Moving on...

So the Phenom II x2 555 BE that's in there.... Yeah... Forgot that AMD stamps out quad-cores and locks two of them and brands them as x2. Actually, when I first read about it, it was before the Phenoms, and was the Athlons. I kinda disregarded it a bit after reading it, since I didn't really care too much about it. But when I was reading a review for an XCLIO case, one of the reviewers posted their specs as an unlocked x2 555 BE, and I stopped and re-read that line again. "Unlocked x2 555 BE? WTF?" Searched it up, and there was the answers. Decided to give it a try since the worst thing that could happen is nothing.

Played with the ACC (Active Core Control, if I remember correctly) setting and in seconds, the core % settings for all 4 cores showed up. It was so quick that I was in disbelief and decided to keep moving by saving and rebooting. Got into openSUSE and verified all four cores. Opened up the system monitor and watched the cores while I was doing my thing (whatever I was doing). Core 4 stayed at 0.0% use and I was concerned, but after watching it a little longer, I saw it jump up to 3% and back down to 0. Luckily, core 4 is being a team member now.

The Zalman 9700 I put on top of it works pretty well, I actually haven't ran the processor any higher than 38C yet. It stays a cozy 34 if I keep the 5.25" bay cover off to allow better airflow into the case. These are all idle temps I'm talking about here. Even after playing 1080p video for 20 minutes, it was still around 34-35, and I'm pretty sure I had the cover off as well. The fan for it stays around 2900-3000 RPM (usually around 2960), and it's audible, but not annoying (like the Vantec Tornado series...) enough to use a fan controller to scale it down.

I originally had a EVGA GTS 450, but I couldn't figure out how to get the second monitor to turn on or enabled or whatever, so I RMA'd it for a Radeon HD 6770. I had thought that nVidia GPUs were a little more Linux friendly, but I suppose I was wrong. I wouldn't mind on a single screen setup, but I need the second monitor. The bottom screen I use for the main video, and the top screen for the controller (VLC with the video split from the main window) to quickly control the video without bringing it out of full screen or using the partially obtrusive full screen controls (also which the seek bar is a bit small for my tastes). I wish I didn't make the mistake of trying something new when I should have stayed with the tried and true method. Oh well, I lost about $10 for the RMA.

Well, I think I feel that this is pretty complete... I really can't think of anything else to say... Oh! The reason whey I named her Mei Ren is because of the crap I went through. Her character in Dance in the Vampire Bund (anime) is kind of sad. She's used as an assassin to (try to) kill the main character (later in the series), but she is unloved/unwanted from what it seemed like. That's kinda how I felt with this build. I want to love what I put into it, but it was hard to with what I had to go through with the case.

openSUSE 11.4 Part 1

Well, I originally installed it back in March and had some Xorg permission problems on my AMD Athlon 64 x2 (which has a ATI Radeon X1650 Pro), but I got it to work enough, but decided to not stick with it since I had to login via command line and then startx every time.

Well, after learning a lot more, I reinstalled it on my laptop in the 25GB partition on my hard drive (test-bed space) and proceeded to zypper the FGLRX driver via command line. After several hours later (because of an unreliable internet connection) I finally was successful and got into GNOME without having to do anything special (minus using zypper to install FGLRX, which is pretty minor).

The only problem is that Xorg lagged considerably, but after updating the kernel, it went away by itself.

I still need to update and install everything that I have installed in 11.3 to do some further testing to see if it really is any different and if it's worth upgrading/fresh installing.