Computing

Open Nerd Thread

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I found out that my Logitech F710 gamepad works under Linux with no additional drivers if I leave it in direct input mode. 😀 I tested a couple games with it and it recognizes that a controller is present.

The rest of my evening consisted of customizing KDE to my liking… Yeah I’m a nerd. I have a nice blue setup right now though. Downloaded a ton of schemes, themes and other stuff to make it look cool.

I think I’ll give Windows some love tomorrow though. Been a few days since I’ve been under there. 😛

Back in the saddle again

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The first thing I did when I got home was… use the bathroom. Then I tore into reinstalling Fedora 19. I finished tweaking it to my liking under KDE and xfce which I have decided (a long time ago) are my two fave desktop environments. I even got my wireless controller working under there thanks to some open source drivers via rpm. 😀

Since I haven’t been into Windows for the last few days I figured tonight I would return to it. Played a bit of Portal 2 with a controller and it wasn’t too bad although it felt weird. Mostly had chats going otherwise. Just a bit ago I had a random system reboot and my logs seem to point to my current video drivers. I’m hoping this is a fluke. Luckily the warranty is still good though.

Early Morning Open Thread

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I have everything up and running on Fedora 20 so far. I did run into a kernal panic relating to my video driver though. So if it keeps up I might have to revert back to 19. The only problem I had under that was voice corruption over mumble (and maybe other programs without realizing it) which can be avoided by leaving out some updates, and since the latest kernal update seems to hate me on both versions I might as well roll back. Not now though, I’ll continue to ride this out and see if I can fix anything with it. I have a busy weekend ahead of me.

As usual I have to work memorial day weekend. The tourists are already here and man some of them are crazy. One of them tried to get me to meet up with them at one of the local bars and got upset when I turned them down. I was polite too, they didn’t like the idea that I didn’t date customers (or employees for that matter). I got him on his toes though when I gave a big smile and told him to have a nice day. Turns out that guy was with a couple other dudes, and they were shoplifting… You know, given the choice to either date one of these dudes or be forever alone, the latter somehow seems more peaceful.

It lives!

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Up and running on the new computer. Had some issues after we plugged more hardware in, but after pulling out what turned out to be a faulty media card bay it stopped Michael Baysploding on every reboot/powerup.

I did head over to Linux to get things setup, but to my dismay after running the latest updates mumble took a giant shite. Now whenever I Voice chat it sounds like I’m possessed by Satan’s arse. I might give Fedora 20 a go and see if it’s matured at all.

As for the R9 290 I haven’t had any black screens yet. Hopefully it stays that way.

There is no excuse for any of this crap.

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Well, my video card returned to my doorstep with a bent backplate. It seems MSI’s idea of packaging an item is to just put it in shielded wrapping and pop it in a box to flop around. Even if it does work I’m going to complain to them. There is no excuse to package an item that poorly. It’s like people don’t care anymore.

If that wasn’t bad enough my motherboard arrived. Good news was that they did a great job packaging it, they included everything and I mean EVERYTHING. It all seemed so promising until I found over 11 pins bent in the processor socket. The seller claimed that it had “light socket damage” but mentioned nothing about the socket pins being damaged. I contacted the seller and complained about it. He told me that it was in perfect working condition, so I decided to test it for shits and giggles and sure enough he was right… But only if you used memory in the first triple-channel bank. Once you loaded both triple-channel banks I got 128 errors within the first five minutes of running memtest86.

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Turns out he didn’t fully test each slot to see if it would pass. I’ll be sending the mobo back tomorrow since they don’t have another motherboard I could use. I’ve ordered a replacement from somewhere else. Hopefully I have better luck with this one. It should arrive sometime next week alongside my SSD.

On the brightside my Xeon processor arrived and it’s working with flying colors. Now if everything else could come together…

A backwards upgrade is on the rise.

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Well, I’m finally going to get my hands on an Intel Xeon Processor and an ASRock X58 Extreme. Yes, I’m going backwards a bit to get better performance. It feels a little weird but for the cost it’s well worth the upgrade to six cores. I could have gone with an ASRock Extreme 6 setup with an Ivy Bridge based Xeon, but the cost wouldn’t have been worth it for what… a 10 frame increase in performance? No thanks. For a little under $300 this is an excellent performance upgrade.

So in a few days I should get my new parts, and my R9 290 should be returning from MSI around the same time. Can’t wait to get rid of this unstable mobo and game with a six core Xeon.

My motherboard needs viagra.

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Well, it appears my motherboard is getting more and more sick. Every night when I get home from work and turn the system on I’m finding that I have to restart it multiple times before finally making it into windows. I’m also having to let it idle in safemode for 10 to 15 minutes so it gets warm enough to restart and go in properly (lol I guess the R9 290 was keeping it just warm enough to not crash 😛 ). The amount of restarts seems to increase every time I go to turn it on. If this keeps up I might have to use my laptop for awhile until I can find what I’m looking for. So far x58 with a good Xeon hexacore processor seems to be the best solution for price and performance.

This is still a major piss off since I only got the motherboard off NewEgg last winter. :shakes fist disapprovingly: