The second monitor finally got here. Video card had been installed and
working single-head for a week.
The second monitor finally got here. Video card had been installed and
working single-head for a week.
The original video setup. The monitor on the left is actually hooked to
cybil, not to angharad.
There it is...
The easy way to get a heavy monitor out of a box... open the box, roll it
(carefully!) over onto its top, and lift the box off the monitor.
Much easier than trying to lift the monitor out of the box.
Monitor 2 in position.
cybil's monitor, as you can see, is now on the floor beside her, to make
room.
A bit of X tweaking later, we had dual-head. X kept wanting to pop boxes up
in the middle of the "screen", though...
Two separate desktops solves that problem, and works much better with
fvwm2's virtual desktops. Running a single screen across both monitors
prevents you from moving the virtual desktops on the two heads independently
of each other. Running two separate desktops prevents dragging windows
between the two heads, but I'd rather that than lose my virtual
desktops.
The full dual-head setup.
The motherboard upgrade arrived.
Mmmmmm.... packing peanuts. Tasty.
Motherboard, processors and RAM, and heat sinks.
Note the bright orange label letting you know that there are parts inside
the CPU/RAM packet, so you don't, e.g., throw it out and write a nasty
email to the vendor because they didn't send you your processors.
The motherboard... a Tyan Tiger MP S2460. Count the processor sockets. The
64-bit PCI slots are just a bonus...
Those sockets filled with processors... a pair of AMD Athlon XP 1900+s
(that's 2 x 1.6GHz Palominos, if you don't speak marketroidese). Note the
exposed CPU cores. That's because they're easier to cool when they're not
encased in a block of ceramic. Which brings us to...
... the heat sinks. They're Vantec copper heat sinks, with 6800 RPM fans on
them.
angharad's original motherboard, FIC SD-11, with the 650MHz Slot A K7 Classic, pulled
out of the case to make room for the new board.
The new board installed in angharad's case. The RAM - two sticks of 512M
PC2100 Registered ECC DDR - is also installed. Note the lack of a backplate
around the I/O ports... the old FIC SD-11 uses a non-standard backplate
(which was provided with the board), and the standard backplate that came
with the case (Enlight 7237... very nice box) is currently in North Carolina
(along with the drive mounting rails... I'll need to retrieve them before
I upgrade the storage).
Time to put the heat sinks on. First, they need silicone grease to make sure
the CPUs get good thermal conductivity to the heat sink itself. However,
both packets of silicone that came with the heat sinks had ruptured.
Fortunately, there was about ten times as much as needed, anyway, and I was
able to salvage plenty to put on the CPUs.
Then we got the fun part... getting the heat sinks on and clipped down
firmly, making good contact with the CPUs, without cracking one of those
exposed cores and destroying a $250 processor. This task was not made easier
by the board design... notice that on not one but both CPU sockets,
one of the clips that holds the heat sink down is hidden down between the
heat sink and a row of inch-tall capacitors.
I did finally manage to get them on without destroying either chip. Note
that I had to pull the RAM again to get more room to work.
Video card (Matrox Millennium G550 32M DDR AGP dual-head) installed, RAM
back in, network card (not visible) installed, and everything generally
ready to go.
First POST. Both CPUs
detected, though it's identifying them as MPs rather than XPs... apparently
making the assumption that because there are two, they're MPs. XPs, after
all, are not supported in SMP configuration (but they work just fine). It
found the full gig of RAM, too, and the boot halted there because I hadn't
hooked the drives up yet.
Inside the case with the machine running. You can tell it's running because
the CPU fans are blurred. Those puppies are loud. One of them, I
discovered on first power-up, had been smacked around somehow, such that one of
the plastic struts that holds the fan in position had gotten cracked, so
when it was powered up, it spun up to 6800 RPM with the fan blades rubbing
against the body of the fan. Sounded like I had a lawn mower inside the
case. 30 seconds with a screwdriver fixed that problem, though.
I figured what with going dual-monitor and dual-CPU, I could go
dual-keyboard as well. Actually, the left Shift and Ctrl keys on my old cheap
keyboard were starting to go, so I went and picked up a new USB keyboard.
It's not easy to find decent keyboards these days. This one was basically my
only option that had a full-sized Backspace, the '\' in the right place
(between the Enter and the Backspace), didn't have the keys in some weird
"ergonomic" position, didn't have strange beveling on the bottom row of
keys, and wasn't wireless (yes, sniff my keystrokes, please!). Both
keyboards are hooked up and working, though, and if I were to plug
in the Intellimouse, I could, I think, theoretically configure X to run the two
monitor/keyboard/mouse combinations as two completely separate terminals. I may have to try it someday just to prove it
can be done.
USB keyboard up and running, don't need the PS/2 keyboard anymore. That took
a couple reboots, because I'd turned on input core support in the kernel for
USB mice, but had neglected to do so for keyboards. The PS/2 keyboard is
actually still plugged in... I just moved it out of the way.
It's got a two-port USB hub in it. Yay.
Lots of extra keys on the thing. In addition to the standard 101 keys and
the "Windows" keys, there's eight hotkeys above the function keys (six of
which return scancodes greater than 255, and are therefore not useful), a
cluster of seven buttons for controlling multimedia apps (which I've set up
to control XMMS... on cybil... gotta love ssh), and two additional keys by
the arrow-T. Some of the standard keys are in odd places, but all of the
important ones are where they belong.
Storage upgrade is up next. I haven't quite decided on that yet, but I'm thinking 4 x 36.4G Ultra160 SCSI RAID5.