To make along story short, the desktop PC won’t boot.

After some digging around, something must have happened to the BIOS? because all the reference points in the grub menu (/boot/grub/menu.lst) were pointing to (hd0,4).
But it turns out that (hd0,4) is not a partition all of a sudden, and it should be (hd0,3). I’m referring to /dev/sda4 partition.
Anyway, to install the grub menu in the mbr, try this in the grub menu console:
grub> root (hd0,3) #this I think tells grub which partition is root
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1 #this I think tells grub where to get the stage1 data.
grub> setup (hd0) #this I think tells grub where to install itself

Have been thinking about this some more.
The reason I have the X2 4000+ as the desktop is because I sometimes do want to run some CPU intensive apps.

But what if I can run most CPU intensive tasks remotely on a more powerful machine?
NoMachine seems to deliver EXCELLENT remote performance, so running apps remotely may be a viable option.
CPU intensive apps are:
– Catia
– Some video editing/processing
–

It all started about a week ago when I installed the BioShock demo on the HTPC (Athlon2400+, 6800LE video card), to try it out on our projector. It ran, but just barely. Lots of pauses during the game (for things to load I presume?), so I thought, why don’t I just hook up my desktop (which just happens to be right besides the HTPC) which is a Athlon64 x2 4000+ with a 7600GS video card. This machine would run the game much better!
And this got me thinking… Continue reading →

Well the joy of the success in splitting the stereo audio pair in 2 separate cards was short lived…
SoftSqueeze, since it runs in Java can’t access alsa virtual devices. Only sound cards.
Same goes for squeezeslave. It can only access the OSS device /dev/dsp
I’ve tries all I can think of to fake things to fool these applications, but I just don’t know enough about the linux sound system to pull it off (if there even is a way to do it)

So I just ordered 2 small USB sound cards for $4 plus $7 in S/H (what a rip off). Each can do 1 stereo pair.
Hopefully with these, I can run 3 zones (even though stereo is overkill) and I can set up this laptop to serve audio, and put this whole thing to rest.

After deciding to go with a laptop I already owned as a audio server, I pulled out the old PII 266Mhz Dell Latitide CPi.  Spent a few nights installing Puppy linux and trying to get audio working… then the Xircom PCMCIA network card started being flaky…
Continue reading →

Since I’ve changed my strategy slightly on how to distribute audio to the house, I’ve needed to do some research on alsa.
Link
After coming across an article about house audio, someone mentioned the effects of pumping stereo audio to each zone…
Sound can get muddy if zones are playing the same music, lack of separation…
So the idea is to just put out mono audio to each zone. Make is easy since amplification and source becomes easier to manage.
A 5.1 surround sound card will give me 6 zones! I’m a little excited about this.

Continue reading →

Further to the last post, I decided to try putting Vmware server on the server machine to run some vm machines.
All got installed ok, and VMware server seems to run, but I can only conect to it locally. There is no network support. Continue reading →

After reading some posts on the slimdevices forums regarding virtualization, I’m intrigued.
Idea is to install a VERY minimal linux OS, which is only a kernel, an ssh server and VMWare. And run all the distinct servers as VMs.
Continue reading →