Stuart Herbert

You go down the supermarket to get some toilet cleaner, and come back with the latest album by one of your favourite artists. Mmm … today is a good day! And it’ll make Kristi’s day tomorrow when she gets back from working away for the week to find the CD waiting for her as a present

Now, I wonder how I could convince Naomi to go and record a second album? I have two good reasons to be very biased on the matter, but the album she made during her year in Denmark is one of the few on my iPod where every song is rated the full 5 stars.

The VIA board I’m using in my new fileserver has an onboard Unichrome-II graphics chip. I didn’t have any luck getting X up and running using the stable X11 6.8.2 packages, but the via driver in the X11 6.8.99 packages works.

I don’t know how the X.Org via driver compares to the Unichrome project’s driver. I couldn’t find an ebuild for this driver in the main Portage tree. If it turns out that the X.Org via driver doesn’t support all the hardware acceleration of the Unichrome-II, I’ll make the time to take a good look at the Unichrome project’s driver.

Speaking of hardware acceleration … next step is to get mplayer built Oh, and some themes for Gnome that aren’t as butt-ugly as the default ones!

The good news is that HighPoint’s driver for the 1820A card now loads. I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but building the kernel module whilst booted from the Gentoo 2005.1 livecd meant that the module ended up with the wrong version string, which wasn’t compatible either with the livecd kernel nor the kernel I installed for the box. Booting the box into its own kernel, and then rebuilding the module, fixed that.

I don’t yet know which driver is the better choice - the Marvell driver, or Highpoint’s own. Benchmarking performance is one thing, but what I really need is some sort of stress test to help determine just how stable and reliable each driver is.

All the remaining parts for my 1.5 TB fileserver arrived last week, and I’m slowly getting Gentoo onto the machine, and getting the machine up and running.

The EPIA SP 13000 board I’m using for the box certainly feels much nippier than any of the VIA boards I used last year to build cheap firewalls from. That said, it’s still quite painful to compile on

I was surprised and disappointed to find that the connector on the end of the firewire cable on my CoolerMaster Stacker isn’t compatible with the header on the motherboard. I’m not sure who is “at fault” over that. Still, it doesn’t prevent the onboard firewire port from working for now.

Been having some “fun” trying to get a driver for the HighPoint RocketRaid 1820A card working. There isn’t a driver included in the kernel source tree. HighPoint’s own driver is open source (brownie points for them), but hasn’t been updated since July, and doesn’t compile out of the box with later 2.6 kernels. There’s a problem with loading the module too, which I haven’t had time to get to the bottom of yet.

This particular SATA card uses the Marvell MV88SX5081 chipset. A quick search on Google turns up quite a few references to a Marvell GPL driver - but no obvious link to the driver itself on the Marvell website. The closest I’ve come is this page, which has details of how someone @ Edoceo managed to get a Marvell driver working on Gentoo. This driver at least loads under a 2.6.13 kernel

Whether it actually works or not will have to wait until tomorrow.

With being away from home this week, I really wanted to travel light. That meant no laptop (wasn’t likely to have wi-fi access anyway), no laptop charger / accessories, and nothing else that I could leave behind.

My old iPod only manages about five hours battery life, and hapilly runs down even when it’s switched off, so I thought “Sod it,” and picked up a 4GB iPod Nano before leaving town. It was still going strong when I returned from my trip. That’s one less charger I need to pack next time

I’ve been trying to decide what motherboard / CPU combination to use in the file server since getting back from holiday. Ideally I’m after something that’s cheap, low-power, and has on-board SATA and PATA.

I’m a big fan of the Pentium-M, but there just doesn’t seem to be any ATX boards out there for this chip; not from my preferred suppliers at any rate. I could get an Asus socket 478 motherboard, and use their Pentium-M adapter, but I can’t find any evidence on their website that they’ve certified modern boards with the adapter I’m hoping to build a few more of these servers in the future for friends and family, and I’d rather not base them on something that I’m not confident will still be around when the time comes.

It’s possible to get a mini-ITX board for the Pentium-M, but I’d be looking at a cost of around £325 for a motherboard plus CPU - and that seems expensive compared to the VIA mini-ITX boards that are available.

Clock for clock, I find VIA chips very slow compared to any other x86 chip that I’ve used. I have two of these already in Linux-based firewalls that I’ve built in the past. Still - it’s a file server. The largest thing I’ll be building on there will be PHP 5 for the web-based admin software.

I ordered an EPIA SP 13000 from Mini-ITX.com on Thursday, with a stick of RAM. Never had a bad experience with these guys yet, and true to form my parcel was waiting for me next door when I got home from work tonight. I’ll pop down City Road after class tomorrow and pick up a couple of hard drives and a power supply, and hopefully I’ll have the machine booting tomorrow.

Kristi and I are back after spending a wonderful September on the Isle of Arran, off the west coast of Scotland. If you like the outdoors, and/or your mouldy old stones, then I can heartily recommend Arran to you.

I’ve started uploading photos from the holiday to my gallery. So far, I’ve put up some shots of Castlerigg in the Lake District, which we visited on the journey up to Arran.

More photos soon!