June 2008
Fried Computer, Updates
Posted by HokieTux on June 29, 2008 in General, News
Well, as it turns out, my video card wasn’t only suicidal, but somewhat murderous. It would appear that when it went boom (see my previous post), it took the rest of my machine with it.
I know two other people that have had the same type of video card, and theirs both exploded as well. Given this, I’m going to go ahead and say that you should steer clear of EVGA’s 7600 GT line. They are rather aged now anyways, but if you are building a low system, make sure you avoid this line of products.
Unfortunately, I don’t think I can simply buy a couple of replacement parts for the machine and be done with it… I’m really not sure of which exact components are fried, but my suspicion is that the motherboard is dead. At this point, it would be really difficult to find a replacement motherboard that I could reuse the rest of my components with since they weren’t exactly top-of-the-line when I bought them 2 years ago. This leaves me in the position of being able to re-use my harddrive… and that’s pretty much it. Even my PSU will need to be upgraded to handle a larger load given the power demands of newer components.
Not only did I lose my primary machine, but I’m now cut-off from my primary data drive. My main storage is formatted as XFS, which is accessible easily on Linux systems, and from other machines via a Samba share that I had running on it. However, now that the machine isn’t running anymore, I can’t access it. I’ve desperately hoped for years that Apple would add ZFS/XFS support to OS X… but it hasn’t happened yet.
As far as articles go, I had promised a few people that the next post would be on zsh. However, with my Linux machine out of commission, it will have to wait until I get replacement parts in and have it back up and running.
Well, wish me luck!
Exploding Video Card
Posted by HokieTux on June 18, 2008 in News
Okay, so the whole video card didn’t explode, but four of the capacitors sure did.
I was napping at the time, but I’m sure it must have made a rather loud noise – so either I was *really* passed out, or my cheap case has magical sound proofing. I woke up, discovered that my desktop was no longer sending a signal to my display, and shortly thereafter I discovered the blown capacitors. Here are a couple pictures, linked for size (each picture is just over 3 megs):
here’s another angle:
A Guide to Using Screen
Posted by HokieTux on June 11, 2008 in Guides
Wow, it’s already been over a month since my last post! I apologize for the hiatus in activity… especially to those whom I promised this guide to some time ago. The last month was essentially consumed by end-of-the-semester projects and finals, followed immediately by a trip to Japan, and then a research symposium. Anyways, let’s get onto discussing one of the best programs ever written for command-line junkies.
Introduction
‘screen‘ is one of my favorite terminal applications for the Linux platform, and is honestly essential, if not mandatory, for any hacker / *nix power user. Why should you use screen? Here are a few features / reasons:
- Split a terminal into multiple regions, allowing you to run multiple programs in the same terminal window (similar to the ViM functionality)
- Run multiple programs at once (and no, I’m not talking about backgrounding processes with ‘&’)
- Make virtual consoles suck a little less in terms of usability
- All the 1337 kids are doing it
- Access programs remotely (e.g. ssh into your home box and resume a ViM session you left open, as it was!)
I’m probably missing a few… but I’m only half way through my cup of coffee, and these should be enough to get you interested in screen as-is. So then, onto the technical stuff!
