My workstation being a few-year-old Core 2 Duo box that wasn't exactly high-spec when I put it together, I've got an upgrade in progress.
Gutted the old server, freeing up a perfectly good Cooler Master Centurion case... still with the original 380W power supply.
Picked up a Micro Center combo deal on a Core i5 CPU (now that the Nightmare of Sandy Bridge is well past) and a Z68-based motherboard, and a Newegg deal on 8G of DDR3-2133 RAM, plus a 1 TB SATA3 hard drive that didn't have too many bad reviews.
Got it bolted together (I really need to write a review of some of the bits), and repotted the Blurray burner from its external case.
The (badly outdated) Xen/Linux live CD kinda-sorta boots, but the X display doesn't come up right.
Debian-stable (Squeeze) installs and runs fine, but xorg doesn't recognize the Sandy Bridge GPU; it thinks it's got a plain VGA (and runs my 1680x1050 monitor at 1280x1024).
Debian-testing (Wheezy) installs - slowly, 'cause it's netinst and needs to grab all the packages over the intarwebs - and X comes up at 1680x1050, with the Sandy Bridge driver, so all appears well.
Still need to install some CPU- and GPU-demanding software and give the machine a good workout.
Oh, and that vintage 380W power supply? My Kill-A-Watt says the box is drawing something under 75W. I'm guessing it'll increase once I start running, e.g., an FPGA compilation, but probably not beyond the capabilities of the old supply.
It still needs a good modern internal flash-card reader before I button it up... and I need to figure out how to connect the front-panel audio and Firewire.
And then I need to conduct an exercise in virtualization, to get some flavor of Windows running as a guest OS so's I can use sundry mandatory office & CAD software that's specific to that benighted world. Once that's sorted, I can try doing the same trick on a laptop... at some point I'll need to upgrade from my 8-year-old laptop, which is still working fine (except for the battery) but was never meant to do quickie PCB autoroutes and FPGA compilations.
And this might be a good time to replace my 4-way PS/2 and VGA KVM switch with something that does USB and either DVI or HDMI... given that the current workstation is already bypassing the switch to use DVI, because stuffing all those pixels down a VGA cable results in blurriness.
Update: This is weird with a capital WEE. I wanted to check out the 3D capabilities. Best way to do that is to run X-Plane, right? So I try running the X-Plane installer, and get sundry missing libraries, such as libGL.so.1. Eh? That's installed, and, as it turns out, lives under /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ - so how come it's not found?
Stranger still, running ldd on glxgears finds libGL.so.1 where it lives, while ldd on the X-Plane installer (an ELF binary) from the same shell gives "libGL.so.1 => not found".
Also, ldconfig shows /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ and /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ being listed twice, until I comment them out in the one place I find them listed at all. Either way, ldconfig finds libGL and libGLU right where they belong... but they're not there for that darn installer.
Apparently there have been issues with this on Wheezy in the past, possibly in relation to multiarch, but this isn't the same problem.
Wait.
Multiarch.
This is a 64-bit installation. The libGL is under a directory with a 64-bit-ish name. The X-Plane installer is presumably a 32-bit binary.
So, time to figger out how mixed 32- and 64-bit stuff coexists, or start mucking about with Xen, or something. (Come to think of it, the other commercial OpenGL application I'll be wanting to run on this machine, a CAD program, is also 32 bit.)
Update 2: Bingo! Install ia32-libs (and, what the heck, ia32-libs-gtk), and ldd finds all that's needed, and the installer runs. Hooray!
Now to see if X-Plane itself will run, once the installation finishes. And how much scenery I can get away with turning on.
I'm guessing ia32-libs would have been needed for EAGLE, too. That doesn't need 3D acceleration or any such, but I expect the zippy-fast CPU will benefit autorouting. Then there's the Xilinx toolset, which really needs a fast CPU... and can make use of the multiple cores.
Update 3: Looks like the Sandy Bridge graphics is not for gaming. X-Plane gets totally frotzed unless the BIOS setting for graphics memory is cranked way up, and once it is cranked way up, it's horribly sluggish, and kinda flakey (which could be a driver issue, I suppose).
I also note that, now that I've got the thing connected with a DVI cable instead of VGA, the display is sprinkled with swirls of sparkly red fairy dust. I don't know if that's a DVI timing issue brought out by the cable & video switch, or if updating the BIOS to version F8 messed it up, or what (given that I updated the BIOS just after switching locations and cables, and before bringing up a full-res display).
Oh, well - a decent Nvidia-based card with gobs of dedicated video RAM is pretty cheap these days.
Update 4: Picked up a two-steps-up-from-bargain-basement video card with an Nvidia GT 430 chipset and 1 GB of video RAM - and a bigger power supply to go with it (Cooler Master 460W). A few moments of confusion as I thought it wasn't coming up... but it turned out my DVI switch had been helpfully switching over to the current workstation, which was in screensaver mode. Running the X-Plane demo with the Sandy Bridge graphics, not only was the display flakey, but Innsbruck was totally snowed in on what should have been a fine day in late July. With the Nvidia card, it's summer and the landscape has texture and color... though I guess if you want to set the display options to "count the leaves on the trees" and then go zooming around at 100' AGL, you need one of the fancy expensive video cards to avoid the "too many rendering options; invoking fog" message.
Oh, and the red pixie dust (pixel dust?) is gone; that must have been something to do with the motherboard's DVI output.
And with the Nvidia graphics, it's reasonable to run -stable instead of -testing, 'cause I won't be needing the Sandy Bridge graphics support.
Hm. I maybe could have used a cheaper motherboard, had I really done my homework on the GPU's capabilities. Unless it's the driver that's currently deficient, in which case I just needed to wait a few more months. Still, it's a nice motherboard, with lots of I/O and many slots.
Still to be procured: a modern internal flash-card reader (that properly supports SDHC), and an external USB3 hub. And I should figure out the pinout of the front-panel Firewire connector in the case, and ensure that it matches the motherboard's header before hooking it up.
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