mongo
mongo was named after our nickname for the local Mongolian BBQ
restaurant, and because it is a big fast machine. Power Computing (R.I.P.)
makes, er, made the PowerCenterPro. Mine is a 240MHz machine with 64MB ram,
about 9GB of HD, running a 2.2.8 kernel (with a few local patches for sound
and a cheap LinkSys ethernet card that confuses the stock tulip.c driver).
Everything seems to work great. I moved the main disk over to the aic7xxx bus,
which makes it rather fast. mongo now lives in the closet acting as my net gateway, so I don't use X very much, but the other drivers work fine.
I switched that box over to Debian
GNU/Linux when it was the only ppc linux distribution using glibc2. I'm
glad I did: I've seen the Debian light, drunk the koolaid, been touched by the
Muse. Whatever. It's a good distribution, the people behind it have no
marketing agenda, quality and coolness are *everything*. They don't sell their
own CDs (CheapBytes has them for..n
well.. cheap. $8 for the full set, $2 for just the core binaries). The
packages are easier to build once you get the hang of the tools (and the build
process is easier to debug). And the upgrade program (dselect) makes it easy
for an update-freak like me to make sure that there is no program more than a
week out of date on the computer.
older notes
The graphics card (the 2MB ATI card) works fine, I generally run in a 1152x870
(8bpp) mode. With the latest 2.1.128 kernel, I can run 16bpp at this
resolution, and the new XF86 beta from Geert has acceleration included.. very
fast. But I can't figure out how to get a video mode that runs at 85Hz like
the MacOS side will do, which I'd like to figure out because it might help
with a monitor problem I'm having: on and off, the image jiggles or wobbles. I
turned off all the fluorescent lights I could find, and I put an isobar surge
supressor on the monitor (which indicates a ground fault [unconnected ground]..
could that be a problem?), made sure the video cable was run away from the
power cables, but it still wobbles. Maybe there are some strange EM fields
floating around this corner of the room. Anyway the higher refresh rates seem
to help.
This machine is fast! It runs faster than the UltraSparc I have at work
(although that poor machine is burdened with Solaris, which can slow down
any processor). A kernel compile takes about 7-9 minutes. Perl compiles in
4m36.
Brian Warner <warner@lothar.com>
Last modified: Tue Jul 27 23:07:21 PDT 1999