June 11th, 2024
Upgrades and Another Desk
Worry not, I'm back.
Sick.
Last week, I didn’t add a blog post. Why? I was sick. Worry not, it’s all fine and dandy now. There’s that.
Oversized Tower Upgrade.
Last post, I mentioned upgrading the Oversized Tower. I did upgrade it. The first upgrade to show up was the RAM. I put the 4 4GB sticks totaling 16GB into the Tower. It went in fairly uneventfully, although I did have to put the sticks in in a different order than I did at first as the machine would not boot. It did improve usability, but not all the way. That Nvidia GTX 260 was a real bottleneck for modern usage of modern systems like Kubuntu. So that had to go.
The AMD Radeon RX 570 arrived the next day, and I was sick. That didn’t stop me from installing it. I chose this particular card for no good reason, but I did have a reason for getting a AMD card over Nvidia, and that was Linux compatibility, which is key for someone like me who uses Linux extensively and on just about every device I use daily.
I did have trouble getting it to work. First, the computer would not boot and would turn on with fans at full blast while beeping loudly for help. I ended up fixing that by re-seating the card properly. After that, I booted into Kubuntu and the card worked wonderfully. And, for once, 4k60FPS video playback worked properly. But that was not the end of my troubles. I booted into Windows 7. I installed the driver. Windows 7 would not take it, claiming it was “unsigned”. I was using the official AMD driver and everything. I ended up putting it into “test mode”, enabling it to use unsigned drivers. It still did not work, saying the device was not working properly. I tried everything. Uninstalling the driver, reinstalling the driver, trying to use Snappy Driver Installer to install the driver. Nothing. I finally gave up and tortured myself with installing Windows 11 (patched, of course). Nope. Nothing. A little internet digging revealed I might need to reflash the card’s BIOS. So I did. And, lo and behold, I restarted into Windows 7 and it was running at full 1080p resolution, with Aero effects on. Yay!
The Oversized Tower, as of right now, has a Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard, a Intel Core i7 920 CPU, 16GB of RAM, a AMD Radeon RX 570 GPU, 1TB of SSD storage, and another 500GB of spinny hard disk storage that was already in there.
Nvidia Drivers
Also in my last post, I mentioned the Nvidia 304 driver patch thing. It didn’t work. Here’s why:
1: I was trying on a machine that uses a more ancient driver on Linux.
2: I tried it on a machine that had a 304. I couldn’t get it to compile under Debian. I need to try again sometime.
So there’s that. So much for resurrecting the ancient cards in any of these ancient machines I’ve gotten.
Desk Upgrades
I mess around with these old PCs quite a bit. Enough to the point my current setup became a problem. I had two monitors on my desk. My daily 16:9 widescreen monitor, and the old 5:3 (?) not-widescreen monitor. I also had two keyboards I had to move around to use the other monitor. I also had a bunch of space on the other side of the office occupied by a unused keyboard piano. I ended up moving the keyboard elsewhere, and moved my first desk out of storage into my “office”. It works great for these old computers and looks perfect for the job. This will also allow for easier testing of anything I get that’s not new enough to deal with my 4-port KVM switch and 1080p widescreen display. It also allows me to have easier access to my media setup as a bonus. I do wish my headphones came with a longer cable, since the cable they came with doesn’t quite reach the amp. I end up having to swap the cable for another one if I want it to reach properly.
Do I really use Linux on almost every device I use daily?
I think so. At least, my phone, laptop, desktop, and media setup is all Linux powered. I use Fedora 40 with KDE 6 on my laptop, Kubuntu 24.04 with KDE 5.27 on my desktop, Android 14 (LineageOS 21) on my phone (Google Pixel 4), and Android TV 13 (LineageOS 20) on my media setup. And yes, Android uses the Linux kernel, so I count it as Linux, even though others might not.
Photos.
The Oversized Tower with Upgrades Installed:
Agathae Sitting by My Door
Thank you for reading this blog post.
JM.