My Switch to Linux Log

C

chuyler1

goes to eleven
:
2013 CX-9
It's been a long time coming. I have always used Linux at work but I never had the time or ambition to switch my home machine over to Linux. Well, after my computer started pausing for upwards of 30 seconds every time I tried to open a new Firefox tab I figured it was time for a change. I ordered some new parts and am now in the process of building my new rig.

Here's the new gear:
$74.99 ABIT IP35P LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard
No frills MB with just enough to keep me happy.

$71.99 Intel Pentium E2180 Allendale 2.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80557E2180
Similar to Core2 Duo except with only 1MB cache instead of 2 and costs $50 less. Can easily be overclocked to 3GHz using stock heatsink.

$84.99 G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1000
I was about to go with only 2GB but decided 4GB would mean I didn't have to think about RAM for a very long time.

$69.99 CORSAIR CMPSU-450VX 450W ATX12V V2.2 Power Supply
This p/s was recommended by www.silentpcreview.com and I can see why, it is virtually silent!

$25.99 MSI NX8400GS-TD256EH GeForce 8400GS 256MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card
I don't play many video games so I just needed something that would work with my older games should I choose to play them and my main requirement was that it couldn't have a fan...since a quiet pc was my ultimate goal.

$32.99 LITE-ON 20X DVDR DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model LH-20A1L-06
I had a CD burner but not a DVD burner. This will allow me to backup my photos and stuff and place them in a safety deposit box for safe keeping. We lost a bunch of photos when my HD crashed a few years back.

$45.99 TOSHIBA HDD2D63 (MK6037GSX) 60GB 5400 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Notebook Hard Drive - OEM
Keeping with the quiet theme I went with a basic laptop drive. I mounted it using some rubber bands to reduce case vibrations and it cannot be heard at all.

The order total came to $472.18 including shipping but excluding some mail-in rebates which will save me some more dough. I ordered on Monday evening and the package arrived Wednesday afternoon. I definitely recommend NewEgg!

I reused my monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, zip drive, floppy drive, IDE RAID controller, and dual 250GB Seagate IDE drives (mirrored). The IDE drives are obviously going to be the loudest thing in this system and if I can't get them to shut-off when not in use I am going to pick up some more laptop drives.

I removed an MSI motherboard, AMD Athlon XP 2000 1.4GHz chip, Thermaltake cpu heatsink, 1GB of ram (which can't be used in current system), a generic 400w p/s, and a few optical drives. Not sure what I'm going to do with all of it. If anyone needs some random computer stuff let me know.
 
DAY 1

1) Vacuumed out all the dust and installed new p/s, mb, ram, cpu, dvd drive, and hard drive. Removed all other gear for simplicity.
2) Installed Ubuntu Linux 8.04
3) Installed Virtual Box opensource virtual-machine software
4) Installed Windows XP SP3 and Office 2000 on a virtual machine. This will be my back-up in case I need Windows for some reason (or my wife decides she hates linux).

During all that I determined that Ubuntu has some issues with power-management. I have to boot the system with acpi=off or it won't load the kernel. This may pose an issue later when I want to power-down my loud IDE drives.

I also had some issues installing Office 2000. Some of the packages are corrupt on my ancient CD and I hat to install things one-at-a-time to work around it.
 
DAY 2

1) Hooked up zip drive and old 8GB drive.

After fiddling with jumpers and s*** I got linux to boot with both connected. Unlike windows it doesn't actually detect them automatically. That's fine because my 8GB drive is actually a TrueCrypt encrypted partition.

2) Installed TrueCrypt for Linux and learned how to mount an encrypted drive.
3) Created new encrypted filesystem on main hard drive and copied everything over.
 
nice nice..

Just a quick question... are you going to try for passive cooling on your processor or active cooling?

I just built a small form factor gaming rig (3rd PC currently in my apartment) and I went w/ a total silent system similar to yours. Although I did the Corsair 520HX pwr supply because it is modular and I only hook up what cables I need.
 
right now it's active, since that is what the processor came with. My case only supports dual 80mm fans in the back instead of a single larger one. I have been trying all my 80mm but all of them are too loud...They have some sort of vibration that resonates throughout the entire case. The only one that doesn't do that is a basic 2-pin fan that runs full tilt all the time. So its wind noise from that one or humm/whine/buzz from the others.

I just hooked up my RAID drives. For some reason, even though the controller has them configured as a RAID, they show up as individual drives in Linux. Looking into that now.
 
DAY 3

I was able to hook up my RAID drives and they are surpisingly quiet. It turns out my RAID controller is not a true-hardware controller...and that is apparently common. I installed dmraid and was able to mimic the setup I had on Windows. I transferred all my data over to the new hard drive, reformatted the RAID, and transferred it back.

I also got my printer working. That was a piece of cake. Plugged it in, installed the driver from the pop-up message, and printed a test page.

I was surprised to see that Picasa is available for Linux. that was a 1 minute download and install. I plugged in my Canon digital camera and was able to quickly download my photos into Picasa. Sweeeet!!!

Now comes the tricky part. I use Quicken for my finances. After some quick searches, it appears that Quicken is the bain of most Linux user's existance. Wine and other emulators fail because Quicken is tied into Internet Explorer. So now I am going to play around with some of the open-source solutions to see if I like any of them. If I don't, I'll just have to run Quicken in my virtual machine.

I also attempted to connect my sister-in-law's hand-me-down iPod. That wasn't so great. It locks up the computer, possibly due to a bad hard drive...or maybe just because its really old (2nd generation I think). I'll have to try my wife's iPod tomorrow and I'll see if I can connect my cell phone too.
 
sweet.

i have ubuntu 7.1 on my toshiba as a dual boot with vista. i use vista because, well it came with the machine, and almost all of my work is design related, and wine doesnt support CS3 "yet".

i havent used linux much lately but at some point in the next few days i'll upgrade it to 8.04

and yes...picasa is amazing. not sure if they did an actual release but look into the newest release since it supports web album uploads.
 
Yeah, I've been using the web album feature on Windows and I think the Linux release has it now too. It makes posting photos so much easier.

DAY 4

I tinkered a little bit today.

My wife's iPod works better than my hand-me-down one but it's still flakey. She has been complaining about songs not playing and stuff so I think it has a bad hard drive, which only complicates things. I can see all the files in gtkpod and RhythmBox but they don't play.

I spent some more time trying to get Office 2000 up and running using the wine emulator. It installs OK but keeps asking me for the resgistration key. It turns out this is a known bug and hopefully someone is working on a fix. Otherwise, I'll have to downgrade wine to an older version. I'm fet up with it now so I'll just move on to something else.

...and the best news of the day. Quicken works! I had to install ies4linux first which allows me to run IE6, and after that I installed Quicken without any problems. Auto update works, it downloads transactions from my credit cards. I'm very pleased because I was worried I would have to learn a new program.
 
chuyler1 said:
right now it's active, since that is what the processor came with. My case only supports dual 80mm fans in the back instead of a single larger one. I have been trying all my 80mm but all of them are too loud...They have some sort of vibration that resonates throughout the entire case. The only one that doesn't do that is a basic 2-pin fan that runs full tilt all the time. So its wind noise from that one or humm/whine/buzz from the others.
Click to expand...


This may sound dumb by try to find a piece of flat rubber and either put a piece on each screw between the fan and the case or make a gasket all around. It will help a lot.

Edit: I also modify cases too... I've modded a few of my own to fit a larger fan than what was supposed to be there originally. I might have a few PC cases laying around the apartment... I'll have to check when I get home.
 
DAY 5-6

I ordered a new ThermalTake case fan, one that has a sensor on a 1' lead so I can put it where ever I want. Combining the variable speed of the fan based on the sensor with the variable speed adjustments I could make from the BIOS I am able to get the fan to run at about 500rpm at idle and it will jump up to about 2-3000 at full tilt. The fan can actually go up to 4,000 rpm but it sounds like a fighter jet at that speed. No worries about overheating at the low idle speed. The case stays at about 31C and the CPU at 35-45C.

At 500 rpm it is barely audible. Note that this is the same exact brand fan that I already owned. I got 6 years of constant use out of the original as a cpu heatsink cooler so I can't complain if it introduced some vibrations into the case. I'm happy with the new purchase.

With the fan noise under control I set out to quiet down my RAID drives. Ubuntu has lots of power-saving options built-in but it only uses them when you install on a Laptop. I found out that the command "hdparm" can be used to set many hard drive power saving features. I added a few lines to /etc/rc.local which set the idle standby time to 5 minutes. Now they spindown and remain in standby mode until I access them. Since the OS is installed on a 60GB laptop drive mounted by rubber bands you can barely hear the computer now! It's odd walking into my office and not hearing the whirr from the computer anymore.

I focused my attention back to the iPod issue. After some research, I found out people have been able to get iTunes to work using the wine emulator. I tried it. It installed. It played songs. However I could not scroll, I had to use alt keys to select the menus, and everything ran painfully slow. I uninstalled and said forget it. Next I'm going to try installing it on my Virtual Machine running XP. It looks like I'll have to re-install the Virtual Machine software since the opensource version I have doesn't include USB support.

Amanda is thrilled about the new machine. She loves how fast it is and it does a much better job communicating with the printer. Which reminds me of another task. I've got to share the printer so we can print from our laptop.
 
I finalized my issues with the iPod.

First, I installed iTunes on the virtual machine and pointed it to our music library. Then I purchased and installed a program called NoteBurner which allows you to burn songs to a virtual CD which in turn outputs MP3s instead. iTunes thinks it is making a CD but in reality you are transcoding the songs to mp3 without any license info. We had only purchased about 100 songs so after I burned them all using this method I replaced the originals in my library. It was worth the $35 price tag.

Next I installed Amarok, an opensource equivalent to iTunes. It works great for creating playlists and searching your music database. It also allows you to connect and upload files to your iPod. So we are now free of iTunes, unless we want to buy more music.
 
I was running XP, and it was intolerably slow, most likely due to garbage in the registry. I have never made it more than a year on XP without having to start from scratch. I'm hoping with linux that this is the last time I install from scratch for a long time.

Plus, the perfomance boost from using Linux is amazing. Web browsing is lightning fast, faster than my work computer which on paper should be faster.
 
Nice. I've been running Linux heavily for the past year or so myself. I'm a Kubuntu guy myself.
 
StealthWyvern said:
cool im currently runign a dual boot with xp home and Ubunutu
Click to expand...

I rocked that for about 6 months, but now I'm full out linux.

I much prefer KDE over Gnome (ie, Kubuntu > Ubuntu)...it just has a nicer interface and better default apps. However, Ubuntu is the "father" of all the *buntu flavors, so of course it's the most popular.
 
Kooldino said:
I rocked that for about 6 months, but now I'm full out linux.

I much prefer KDE over Gnome (ie, Kubuntu > Ubuntu)...it just has a nicer interface and better default apps. However, Ubuntu is the "father" of all the *buntu flavors, so of course it's the most popular.
Click to expand...

I've also tinkered with Knoppix for a little bit. However I still use Windows most of the time simply becuase most of my crap runs on it. IE games
 
Please log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

theblooms
    • Like
Off Topic Built a PC for my son
Replies
0
Views
156
theblooms
theblooms
M
Ideal amount of time to drive my car
2
Replies
22
Views
1K
7eregrine
7eregrine
7eregrine
    • Like
    • Wow
Off Topic My Winter Beater
2
Replies
20
Views
2K
Buzzman12
B

Latest posts

Back