The Linux Extremist

I got approval from Group IT for my little project to build my own Linux desktop PC for my office. The parts arrived today. The good news is that I have it up and running after a few hours work; the better news is that a secondary experiment, trying to select components that are instantly detected by Ubuntu succeeded, including the wireless network card.

The parts I chose are as follows -

1 Gigabyte GA-K8NE (rev. 2.0) motherboard (Socket 754)

2. AMD Sempron 3100+ processor

3. Corsair 1 GB 400 Mhz memory module

4. Seagate Barracuda 120 GB hard drive (7200 RPM, 8 MB cache)

5. Creative Soundblaster Audigy Card

6. Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce 6600 PCI-E graphics card with 256 MB RAM.

7. SMC Ez-Connect Turbo Wireless PCI Card (SMCWPCIT-G)

8. NEC DVD-RW Drive

I didn’t bother getting a floppy drive as I haven’t used floppy disks since the Clinton Administration.

I put all the parts together in an X-Power C100 desktop case - it’s plain, it’s ugly, it’s beige. The idea was that a plain, drab exterior was going to hide a powerful PC. This particular case was a mistake, though - the X-Power case is painfully cheap - and I managed to cut myself on one of the sharp edges whilst putting the system together.

Apart from losing some blood, assembly was fairly straightforward - the motherboard is not the nicest fit in this case, but adequate. I did have to have an extra IDE cable on hand to connect both the DVD RW and hard drives.

Once up and running, I went into the BIOS, and modified the configuration to turn the motherboard’s sound off - otherwise this would confuse Ubuntu during setup. I then put in the Desktop CD and found, to my joy, all the hardware worked. Installation was similarly painless. Yes, there were a lot of updates to download, but the combination of the fast wireless, hard drive, processor and memory meant it did not take long.

I used EasyUbuntu to configure most of the multimedia items and the Nvidia driver, with the exception of Flash and Java; these I downloaded and installed myself. In order to set the driver up fully, there is one last step to follow - go into Applications > Accessories > Terminal and then type:

sudo nvidia-xconfig

Reboot, and the system should now use the correct driver. Using the nvidia driver as opposed to nv is very important - I found for some odd reason that the video card ran very hot using nv - it cooled right down using nvidia. Perhaps the nvidia driver makes a much more efficient use of resources; in any case, it is a critical addition to prevent a meltdown.

I also had to fiddle with the sound card settings in order to make it run with Flash and other applications. I opened up a Terminal window and typed -

cat /proc/asound/modules

There I found the name of my sound card.

I then typed -

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Which opened up gedit. At the end, I tacked on the following line for my Audigy card -

options snd-ca0106 index=0

If you’re trying this at home, substitute whatever sound card name you have for the “snd-ca0106″ - change underscores to dashes.

With the correct settings in hand, the PC was fully ready to go. The broadband connection here at the office is not particularly great, but the wireless card (configured on ath0) picked it up automatically and made the best of it - I will run tests with it at home at some point to see how well it performs there. That said, the people at SMC and Ubuntu have done very well - this is by far the most painless wireless card installation I’ve ever had on a Linux distribution.

Overall, the PC runs quietly, efficiently, and very fast. I will add more memory next month as well to see if there are any performance gains; but even without an extra 1 GB of RAM, it’s so fast it could be called Beige Lightning and it’s a perfect counterpoint to my dull, drab Windows PC.

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