Well Fedora 11 was released to the European mirrors yesterday and I had DVD+R in hand ready to upgrade my backup machine.

I had to reinstall soon afterwards as the Nvidia drivers and/or compiz-fusion borked my display, so for now I’m sticking to the slow Nouveau drivers and no desktop effects, although Plymouth works. I might ghost boot the drive and then try the beta Nvidia drivers.

My JFS partitions (drives) had some weird issue after the reinstall, I couldn’t mount them anymore until I ran fsck on them, I guess I had rebooted without unmounting them, or they hadn’t written their journal or something. Mind you, the ext4 boot drive says “Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.” so could be filesystem issues with F11, glad this is only a backup machine at the moment!

Pip has had major hard disk failure issues this week, which has prompted me to bite the bullet regarding larger hard disks and a better fileserver, rather than clinging to old hardware. So I’m going to order:

• 2x 1Tb Samsung Spinpoint F1 SATA hard disks, they’ll be a bit noisey but they’re the fastest and cheaper than Seagate;
• A Pentium Dual Core E5200 2.5GHz CPU, which is essentially the same chip as a Core2Duo E7200 with less cache, for a damn site less cash (see what I did there?) huge improvement over the 2.4GHz single core AthlonXP, apparently they overclock to over 3GHz on the stock cooler too!
• An Intel motherboard, which has an onboard e1000 gigabit NIC not some Realtek rubbish, and 6x SATA2 connectors as well as onboard DVI+VGA graphics so no PCI-E graphics card required. The onboard gigabit and SATA300 should significantly speed things up without the PCI bus limitations and SATA150 controllers of my older hardware;
• 4Gb RAM

I’ll bung the 2x500Gb and a 250Gb boot drive in there too, using the case, DVD burner and 520W PSU from the old fileserver. It’ll probably run Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS Desktop.

I’ve been looking at the hard drives I have spare or in various external enclosures, and the drives I have in my current fileserver and in my old desktop that will become my new fileserver (on top of 1.25Tb in my new desktop). I’ve found:

Old desktop: 3x250gb and a 200gb SATA

Fileserver: 2x500gb and 2x250gb SATA, 80gb IDE

Spare:

• 160Gb 2.5″ SATA (in eSATA enclosure)
• 6Gb 2.5″ IDE
• 20Gb 2.5″ IDE (in USB enclosure)
• 2x 80Gb IDE (one in Firewire enclosure)
• 160Gb SATA (in eSATA enclosure)

I then looked at the number of SATA controllers I have in the old desktop (to be new fileserver):

Its been a while since my last post, so here’s an update.

I got back from my trip to Dover/Ramsgate, I can’t stand the hussle and traffic, the weather is shite too, it was freezing and rainy for three days. The new ferry was nice, but the crossing was slow and the sailing times are useless.

The new iGO 8.3.2 GPS software worked well – I like the way it pronounces the roads now instead of just “turn right”, and also as you’re approaching an exit you need to take it displays the lane signs, highlighting the one you need to be interested in.

It was Mum’s birthday yesterday, Pip & Co and I went over for a little party which was lovely. We got Mum (and Dad) a jacuzzi.

Today I’ve been playing with the new version of iGO 8 on my GPS – 8.3.2, which meant more setting up of maps, speedcam databases and backing up of favourites/POI’s etc. I’ve got it working nicely now, with the March09 software and November08 maps, so can test it out when we go to England – I’m taking a backup SD card with 8.0.0 just in case! 😉