The motherboard in my one and only Windows machine (aka ompy) has threw in the towel after a few months of agony. The Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard has had problems coming online from a cold boot. When I try to turn the machine on, it only stay on for about 5 seconds and then shut off. It will keep doing that , but once in a while it will start. Once the computer boots, everything is dandy, which makes me wonder if theres a flaw in the motherboard itself causing a short early in the boot sequence. Its also possible that the system is drawing too much power too quickly, causing an in-rush current spike, and tripping the built in short circuit protection. I haven’t had the time for do a proper investigation of the problem, but from what I’ve been reading on various forums its a problem with one of the motherboards power regulation transistors.
Since that machine is down and out, I decided to give my main Ubuntud Linux machine (aka gizmonic) a little boost with the EVGA GeForce 7900GT video card that was in my Windows machine. Gizmonic was using a very old PCI video card that was laying around, but after experiencing Beryl with a good video card, I may just have to buy a new card for Linux use only.
Of course the main reasion I was anxious to get a computer up and running was the fact that I just bought Supreme Commander and was really looking forward to playing. Wine was the next best thing, but the install would error after about 95% with the cryptic “Error 25”. I’ve looked around Google, but no one else seems to have tried to get it working under Wine. The only good news is that I sucessfully got Counter Strike Source working.
Since I don’t know when I will have a Windows machine running again, I’m going to take this opportunity and work exclusively with Linux. At the very least, I’m going to turn my main desktop into a dual boot machine so that Linux too can bask in the glory of dual core FX-60 goodness. I plan on putting all my media onto a network storage machine, so that my music, movies, and other fun stuff will be available to both systems, as well as my servers. I want to implement RAID 5 for my network storage, but the good RAID adapters go for $350+. More on my homemade NAS in a later post.