A new machine.

Fedora 7 came and went. It passed me by, partly out of laziness and partly out of choice. That's not going to happen with Fedora 8. I have downloaded and installed it on a brand spanking new machine. This machine is going to be my media and telephony server. It's going to host MythTv and asterisk so it's quite bulky. Here is what the configuration looks like:

CPU : Pentium Dual Core 2.0 GHz (E2180)

Mother Board : Ausus P5B SE

Memory : 2 GB Kingston 667Mhz

Hard Drives : 3 of Hitachi 250Gb SATA 3

Graphics : Nvidia GeForce 7300 GS

TV Capture : Asus My Cinema P7131

DVD Writer : Asus

Casing : Asus

A good friend of mine got me a good discount on Asus stuff so most things carry that brand. That doesn't mean I am a huge fan of Asus (or the local agents for that matter). Asus stuff is pretty good but even then, I had a mother board die on me a few years ago. Since then I have tried lots of different broads ranging from a low end Asrock, through Gigabyte to a high end Intel Board. The Asrock is still going strong on my desktop, the other boards all died.

You will probably ask me why I chose an Nvidia instead of an ATI. There is a shortage of ATI stuff on the Sri Lankan market (or rather there was a shortage) when I bought the stuff last week. Hope that has changed, if so I will give up on the graphics card.

The P5B SE was chosen because it doesn't have VGA out. The plan was to put in a card with a decent amount of memory and has TV, VGA and DVI out. The Nvidia card has all of that but TV out does not work!! According to what's on the nvidia forums, It works fine with NTSC but doesn't work too well with PAL. I am appalled that they ship this stuff. I knew the card works with X11 and honestly that's all that I checked when I bought the card.

The E2180 probably isn't the best processor to buy at this time, but it's a stop gap measure. Something to see me through until Quad Core processors because cheaper. It's silly to spend a lot of money on a high end Core 2 Duo right now when it will be obsolete in a few months time.

There is one complaint about the mother board as well. It's advertised as having SATA RAID 0 and 1. It does have it if you plug in an external hard drive. RAID is not available if you use only internal drives. In the end I ended up using software raid (mdadm).

The TV capture card also gave a spot of bother but more on that later.