The Linux Extremist

My fiancee likes small laptops. One of her first recovery missions for me was to take an old Dell and see if Linux would revive it. Sadly, even Ubuntu can’t make a laptop that has a battery running as hot as short order chef’s griddle run better. She has since moved on, but I remembered that she liked having a tiny laptop, sufficient to fit into her handbag.

Recently, PC World made available a cheap version of the MSI Wind netbook, known as the Advent 4211. It’s based on the excellent Intel Atom processor; however, there are some ways in which it’s deficient: it has only an 80 GB hard drive, and only 1 GB of RAM. Plus, for some strange reason, it comes with Windows XP.

I tested it in Windows mode for a while and was somewhat surprised by what I found: the processor was powerful enough to run Rome: Total War without any hiccups. However, as my lady doesn’t play games, I decided to ditch Windows and give her a smoothly running Linux machine. I bought a 120 GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3 hard drive, and I had an old Dell 1490 broadcom based wireless card to replace the Realtek card that the machine contains. I also bought an additional 1 GB of memory: memory from Crucial only costs £14.

The Advent 4211 doesn’t have a CD ROM drive, but LG GSA-E50N drive is perfectly adequate for the job.

However, it’s important to follow a series of steps to ensure that you’re getting the maximum performance out of the laptop. These steps begin before you replace anything.

First, ensure you’re using the latest firmware. If you’ve purchased the Advent 4211, this can be found by clicking here. If you’re using an MSI Wind, this bios update can be found here.

Once installed, shut down and remove the battery for ten minutes. For whatever reason, missing this step can cause the keyboard to freeze up. Restart and then go into the BIOS; there is an option to optimise the system by pressing F9: do so, and then save and exit.

After rebooting to ensure everything is all right - switch off. Remove the battery. You’re ready for surgery.

Removing the cover is relatively straightforward: there are nine screws which hold the bottom in place. Once these are undone, the back pops off easily. There is a free memory slot which is instantly recognisable: detailed instructions on how to put the additional memory in is available here.

Removing the wireless card turned out to be the most difficult portion of the task. The wireless antenna leads, which are indicated by a small white and a small black cable leading into the card, popped out easily enough - however, the screw which held the card in place gave me no end of trouble. It had been screwed in so tightly, and the screw itself was so soft, that the treads were ruined with only a couple of attempted turns. I had to use a pair of needle nose pliers to get it free; this accidentally loosened the metal portion below the card which the screw turned into. Fortunately, a small dab of superglue at the tip of the metal portion, fixed it back into place.

Beneath the wireless card there is an additional screw which frees the hard drive. The drive after this, pops out relatively easily. The Advent 4211 comes with a Western Digital drive, a brand I detest: I took it out, removed the metal guide and affixed it to the Seagate, which slotted easily back in. I put the drive back, put in the screw and then put in the Dell 1490.

The Dell 1490 wireless card is not an easy fit. The antenna cables are particularly awkward. Furthermore, a thin sticker on the bottom of the card is all that prevents an ill-placed protrusion from touching a portion of the motherboard, which can lead to it shorting out. I screwed it in to the point that it was in place, but did not tighten it to excess.

After putting the back on, and screwing it in place, I put back in the battery, and plugged the CD drive in. My OS in this case is Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.1 - note this is the latest version, as the immediate predecessor did not work.

Installation was straightforward; the only complication lay in a difficulty I had made for myself in using the Broadcom based Dell 1490. I plugged in the wired connection into my router, entered the terminal and typed:

sudo apt-get update

After that, I went into System > Administration > Hardware Drivers and found that the Broadcom wireless card driver was awaiting activation. I activated it, following the steps in the installation process after this selection. Wireless gave no further issues after this.

Apart from this, graphics acceleration, sound, and all other features worked as expected: the MSI Wind / Advent 4211 appears to be a very good fit with Ubuntu Linux. Wireless is quick and punchy, and even the small screen (10″) is something one gets used to after a short while.

In fact, I like it so much, I may get one myself.

My ideas about waste make it nearly impossible for me to throw out an old computer.  I still have an old HP Compaq nx7000 which is still my workhorse - it’s the living room computer, the one I sit down with in the morning and evening to do web surfing, writing emails and word processing.   With its wide screen and reasonable graphics, it’s not bad for the task.

That said, I thought it was really coming to the end of the line.  I had upgraded it from Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron via the usual upgrade procedure while Hardy was in Beta.  I lost the Desktop Effects, and the computer seemed to be getting bogged down: the extensive error messages I got during shut off was particularly painful.

I decided to give it one last go with a clean install; if it didn’t work, then I was going to have to accept that the laptop, after 5 punishing years of service, was coming to its end.

But I’m pleased to say it did work, and in fact, it’s better than ever.

I should point out that this is not a standard HP Compaq nx7000: I replaced its original IDE hard drive with a Seagate 7200 80 GB drive.  I also put in an SMC Networks PCMCIA 802.11g card (this is based on the Atheros chipset).  I also put in 1 GB of RAM several years ago.  These have helped in terms of connectivity and speed; otherwise, it is a standard first generation Centrino laptop.  It has a 64 MB ATI Radeon laptop graphics card, and a lovely 1680 x 1050 widescreen aspect.

I wanted to ensure that the transition was as painless as possible; this meant that I wanted to ensure that I’d copied all my Bookmarks and emails. Fortunately, in Firefox 2, there is a facility under Bookmarks > Organise Bookmarks to export Bookmarks as a single file. Firefox 3 has a facility to import these bookmarks.

Thunderbird was less straightforward. I found an excellent add on called Import Export Tools. It’s available here. I was able to export all the messages, whisk them off with the other files and able to wipe the hard drive with confidence.

Installation was painless.  All of the hardware was detected and there were no problems with the sound, graphics, or networking; I still remain convinced that this laptop was more designed for Linux than for Windows.  Where it gets a bit trickier is trying to “smooth the setup”.

First and foremost, with my setup, I have two competing wireless cards.  As I’m not interested in having an 802.11b connection, I went into Applications > Accessories > Terminal and typed:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Add the following line:

blacklist ipw2100

Save and close.  This will knock out the silly old Intel wireless card upon restart.

I found that the Desktop effects still did not work.  Not to worry though, there is plenty of eye candy to be had at www.gnome-look.org.

In my case, I decided to install the Aurora GTK engine, because I rather liked the Elegant Aurora theme.

The good news is that this old laptop can run it. The bad news is that it does require some further packages in order to make it work.

I first had to go into Terminal again and type:

sudo apt-get install libc6-dev g++ gcc

But this isn’t sufficient, it is looking for specific GTK packages to make it work. One also needs to do this:

sudo aptitude install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev

Then extract the Aurora 1.4 folder from the zipped archive onto the desktop. Go into Terminal again, and navigate to that folder. From this point, the instructions are relatively straightforward. Type:

sudo ./configure –prefix=/usr

Then hit enter. After it goes through the motions, then type:

sudo make install

This will install the Aurora engine. Reboot.

You can then go into System > Preferences > Appearance and install the Elegant Aurora theme. Its curved, elegant appearance, while not as “dynamic” as Desktop Effects, is pleasing to the eye.

However, there are other items I wanted to install. First, fonts. It’s necessary to get the Microsoft core fonts in order to view web pages correctly. I went into System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager and Searched for the following package, “msttcorefonts”. This package contains all the base Microsoft fonts one could require. I also wanted Macintosh fonts, as I rather like Lucida Grande. I found them at “Iceman’s Emulation Page”.

Once downloaded, unzip and put all the .TTF files on the desktop. Go back to terminal and then type:

cd /usr/share/fonts

Then type:

sudo mkdir apple

Navigate back (via “cd”) to the Desktop. Then type:

sudo mv *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/apple

This will move all the fonts to the “apple” folder.

You can then refresh the font cache by typing:

sudo fc-cache -fv

This will clock through your newly installed fonts and make them available for use.

Next, there is the matter of setting up Firefox. Firefox 3 is an improvement on Firefox 2 in terms of speed, though it is still a beta, with the limitations that implies. Some of the tweaks one could do with Firefox 2, still apply to Firefox 3. It’s a question of identifying where changing values is still appropriate.

To start, type “about:config” in the address bar.

You will get a warning; proceed anyway.

The HP Compaq nx7000 now needs to be treated as if it is a slow computer on a fast connection (given the SMC network card). Add / change the following values unless these values have already been changed / exceeded by the Firefox 3 configuration:

user_pref(”network.http.pipelining”, true);
user_pref(”network.http.proxy.pipelining”, true);
user_pref(”network.http.pipelining.maxrequests”, 8);
user_pref(”content.notify.backoffcount”, 5);
user_pref(”plugin.expose_full_path”, true);
user_pref(”ui.submenuDelay”, 0);

And:

user_pref(”content.max.tokenizing.time”, 3000000);
user_pref(”content.notify.interval”, 1000000);
user_pref(”content.notify.ontimer”, true);
user_pref(”content.switch.threshold”, 1000000);
user_pref(”content.maxtextrun”, 4095);
user_pref(”nglayout.initialpaint.delay”, 1000);
user_pref(”network.http.max-connections”, 48);
user_pref(”network.http.max-connections-per-server”, 16);
user_pref(”network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy”, 16);
user_pref(”network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server”, 8);
user_pref(”dom.disable_window_status_change”, true);

This will yield a substantially faster Firefox.

I don’t like the default Firefox theme, so I’ve gotten a hold of Phoenity Modern. I also made sure I hit You Tube to get it to automatically install the Adobe Flash Plugin (I went for the genuine Adobe plugin rather than its open source equivalents).

Next, Opera. Opera 9.27 doesn’t work with Flash on this machine; so it’s time to be daring and go with the beta, known as 9.50b / Kestrel. This can be gotten here. This works with the Flash plugin reasonably well.

Finally, Thunderbird; one does need to install the Import Export Tools again, however, it is relatively easy to import the messages, once you’ve re-set up your accounts. Just ensure you’ve clicked on the right folder - i.e., Inbox, when you’re trying to import Inbox messages.

There were other items to set up: as the FireFTP extension doesn’t work with Firefox 3, I went through setting up gFTP. Pidgin internet messenger setup was simple and painless. As my printer is a Canon, I used the Turboprint drivers, as they seem to lead to less smudging in the output than the standard Ubuntu drivers.

Also, with some wallpaper and icons from Deviant Art, I managed to make the old laptop look like this:

Screenshot One
Screenshot Two

But most of all, it is not left behind by recent developments - with the latest Ubuntu, latest Open Office, latest Firefox and latest Opera - it’s at the forefront of them. Not bad for something which in Windows world, would be pushing up the daisies.

My parents, now retired, like to keep computing simple. To their credit, when faced with a choice between a PC and a Mac, they chose the latter. However, my father tried out the Linux PC I built in 2006, and was highly impressed by its speed. So, for Christmas, I’ve offered to replace their ageing iMac with a homemade 64 bit Ubuntu Linux machine. I’ve yet to hear if they’re going to take me up on the offer.

The build is complicated somewhat by the fact that they’ve moved to America for their retirement, so the usual haunts I’d use for parts don’t apply. No matter, there is www.newegg.com to the rescue. From this, I’ve managed to put together the following list of parts:

I’m starting with a Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775 processor. It’s not the fastes that Intel make, but it is 64 bit and it has a nice balance of cost for performance. It also comes with the necessary cooling equipment.

Sticking with Intel for the moment, I’ve selected their Intel BOXDP965LTCK LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Motherboard. If I need to change the processor to something with more oomph later, the board gives me some room for this.

I’ve proposed getting two sets of Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel memory. The memory comes highly rated, and again, appears to be a nice balance of price and performance.

Linux support for Nvidia is still better than ATI in my view. At the same time, my parents are not likely to be playing graphics intensive games. So for graphics I’ve selected a ASUS EN8400GS/HTP/256M GeForce 8400GS 256MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready card.

The sound on the motherboard doesn’t look particularly convincing. Hence, I’m proposing that I bolster that with a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE SB0570LPVP 5.1 Channels PCI Interface Low-Profile card.

SATA drives offer better performance than their IDE predecessors. I don’t want to skimp here, but at the same time, my parents aren’t going to load loads of music and photos on it. For the hard drive, I’ve picked a Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500AAKS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s drive. For a DVD-R drive, I’ve picked a SAMSUNG 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-S203B.

As for the casing and power, I’ve gone with a GIGABYTE Triton 180 Black 0.7mm SECC Steel ATX Mid Tower and Thermaltake Purepower W0100RU ATX 12V 2.0 500W Power Supply.

With these parts, plus a 22in Samsung monitor, a slimline Kensington USB keyboard, and a Microsoft mouse, the sum total comes to less than $1070. In contrast, to replace their iMac, the entry level model would cost $1199 - this has a smaller screen (20in), much less memory (only 1 GB), and a slower processor (2.0 Ghz). Of course, the Mac does have a lovely casing.

That said, the user experience need not be radically different; The Mac4Lin Project is an example of how the usability of a Mac can be brought to a Linux machine. Furthermore, there are benefits the Ubuntu machine will have: for example, it will be able to run Swiftweasel, and connected to an American cable modem, it should be blazingly fast.

If my parents allow me to execute on this project, I will write an update as to how the project proceeds.

Merry Christmas to all, nonetheless!

This week, my office melted in the withering heat. On that basis, I decided not only to take my newly built custom desktop machine home, but to keep it in an air conditoned room with my other custom built desktop at least for the duration of the summer. Once there, it took about 5 minutes flat for me to be annoyed about not having a Keyboard-Video-Mouse switch to easily swap controls between the two.

My setup is fairly modern - I have a DVI monitor, and there is no way I was going to go back to VGA. My keyboard and mouse are both using USB. I also have a scanner and a webcam that I wanted to use on both machines. The problem is that there isn’t exactly a world of choice in terms of DVI / USB KVM switches.

I first took a look at a Belkin Omniview model, and then backed away when I read reviews like this -

Bad points: Doesn’t work with a lot of mondern USB keyboards Cables don’t work with DVI-D only TFT displays Firmware update program only available for Windows

General comments: Updating the firmware stops the annoying beeping if the KVM switch doesn’t recognize the USB keyboard.

Other comments were in this vein. I also looked at a model from Avocent. But the comments on this were not much more encouraging -

Bad points: Occasionally ‘misses’ a PC on boot-up, leaving the USB keyboard and mouse unresponsive - you have to either restart the unit by removing power and USB host cable, or reset the PC. This happens inexplicably, probably about once a week. All the cables you need are not included, and need to be purchased seperately.

Ouch. The only option in this case was to try and broaden my search outside of the standard stockists like Dabs and Misco. Through a company called KVM Choice, I found a little switch by a manufacturer called Aten, and bought their CS 1762 model. It was difficult to find much in the way of reviews on it, so I was taking a risk. The only thing I could say with certainty was that Aten was the Egyptian god of the sun. Was that a positive omen in summer? Who knew, it was roll the dice time.

The switch itself is nothing much to look at, but KVM switches are generally little grey boxes. I was pleased by the fact that it had all the necessary cables with the unit - something neither Belkin nor Avocent had. It also had a small USB hub in the back of the unit. Plugging in the cables was straightforward, I booted up my first computer and found no problem - there was no loss of resolution on the monitor, no change in sound, no loss of performance on the keyboard, no strange beeping, and no problems detecting all my USB devices.

It was when I booted up the second computer that I discovered a little niggle; if you press lightly on the switch for a moment, only video switches over. In order to switch full control over to the second computer, the button has to be pressed for 2 seconds. This is not a big deal, but still, an issue. Generally speaking if I’m switching it’s not for a quick glance as to what’s going on at the other machine; some people might find that useful, but not I.

Another minor niggle occured when I had the focus of the switch on a computer I was shutting down. When the unit shut down, the screen then “partially” switched back over to the other computer - I got a distorted picture from the first PC, even though I hadn’t switched over.

Another little problem which requires more testing is some level of screen flicker after a few hours of operation.

That said, overall, the Aten does the job. Even with the niggles, it is worthy of recommendation. It’s a little grey box, but a valuable and worthwhile one at that.

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.

I’m originally a Londoner, but I always wanted to move to the countryside, particularly after seeing how the other half live in December 1997. I was visiting a software firm; their offices were located in the middle of Dorset. I had to drive for hours on winding roads to a tiny village located in the middle of a small valley. The offices were above a pub and they had a T1 line. The fellow who ran the company, an ardent Linux advocate, excused himself at the end of the meeting by saying:

“I’m sorry, I have to go and play the piano at the village church for their Christmas play.”

I thought that was so cool.

After the meeting, I went for a walk along a country lane, sucking in the cool, clean air and when I looked up, I saw a strange sight - the most stars I’d seen anywhere outside a planetarium. At that moment, I knew that I had to get out of the city, and eventually I got my wish. Fast forward to 2006, and I’m presently looking for a little corner of West Sussex in which to permanently settle down.

My lovely, intelligent and wise girlfriend brought up a major point as we began our search: “Make sure you check out the internet services that are available.”

She knows me well. I am the type of person who insists on having an 8 MB business broadband line in my private home. She also realised, rightly, that what’s available to people in the countryside is not always as good as what the city slickers in London get. Presumably it’s the compensation for being jostled in the Tube on a daily basis, rising gun crime and property prices that would break the Bank of England - your life may be a load of camel excrement, but, hey, at least you have the latest and greatest broadband.

Fortunately service in the shires has improved; unlike that fellow in 1997, I don’t have to get a dedicated line to achieve a high speed connection. This year, I was able to make the leap from 2 to 8 MB, and believe me, there is a difference, particularly if you download Linux distros constantly like I do. So how does one maintain this high standard of living while looking for a new house? I’ve gathered a few hints.

1. Forget cable. Not that many people, particularly in the countryside, were going to be able to consider it; NTL claims that it’s only second to BT in terms of the size of its network, but what they don’t say is that it’s so far in second it’s not anywhere in sight. Furthermore, I have used their services before and found they were far less flexible than ADSL; equipment such as ADSL routers are far more generic than those one gets with cable broadband.

2. Get the postcode. The postcode of any property you consider is the first key to discovering what services are available.

3. Go to Yell. It’s fairly simple to plug the first part of a postcode of the property you’re considering and find the phone number of a local store, cafe or in some cases, farming equipment supplier. Generally speaking, the business will be on the same exchange as the property. The local exchange determines what broadband services are available.

4. Use the broadband checker on BT Broadband. It doesn’t matter if you want to use BT or not, they will be able to tell you how fast you can go, under most circumstances.

5. After you’ve found your speed, find your service using www.adslguide.org.uk. This is, by far, the best source of consumer advice on which one to pick.

6. If you’re renting, ask the potential service provider if they are part of BT’s programme which allows your services to be moved along with your telephone account. I found out I couldn’t do this with Bulldog the last time I moved and I was disappointed.

7. Try not to chew the carpet while you wait for broadband to be switched on. Bulldog was the worst in so far as that was concerned - I had to wait over a month. BT Business Broadband had me on in less than 5 days.

8. If you have wireless, remember you still need security. Even if your immediate neighbours are a bunch of cows in a pasture (as opposed to ones in semi-detached houses screaming at their 15 kids), switch on some form of filtering; wireless signals travel further than you think, and broadband leeches are always a danger.

Following these hints, I’ve managed to maintain my fast connection to the rest of the world, while staying away from it. As I pick a house which is still further buried in the shires, I am glad that it’s likely that I will be able to continue to do so.

I am a compulsive tinkerer. It’s rare when a boxed system is good enough for me; I am always looking to make changes in my systems in order to optimise performance. Had I lived 50 years ago, I suppose I would have been out in the garage fiddling around with cars, trying to build a hot rod and terrorising the back roads of West Sussex. It’s probably safer for all concerned that I am more interested in building a computer powerful enough to communicate with space aliens.

Linux and tinkering go hand in hand. Linux forces the user to be conscious of what’s in their computer, and enables the user to fine tune it. This is in stark contrast to how Windows promises to take care of everything for you, and then does so badly. Then, they promise if you spend a lot of money on an upgrade, that it will take care of the problems that it had, but then again, it will create more problems in doing so.

To a lesser extent this scenario is also true of Dell. Recent encounters with this manufacturer’s work have made me want to scream “Waste! Waste! Waste!” in the same tone of voice that aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers used when they found fresh humans.

I am presently using a Dell Dimenson XPS T600 running Xubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06. It’s acceptable; with a wireless card and an Nvidia AGPx2 card, it is part of the modern world, if only just. The tinkerer in me wants to get into the guts of the machine, replace the motherboard and processor, so that it can get more mileage on the clock. I want to extend what I have, increase the speed of the machine, and thus make it so that Openoffice isn’t maxxing out the CPU when I fire it up.

I can’t do that, however. Dell’s cases, motherboards and power supplies are proprietary. In order to rebuild this computer, I have to literally start from scratch, with a new case and power supply, in short, I can’t “rebuild it” - I can only scavenge the non-proprietary parts and build a new one. From a waste perspective, this is a disaster - the motherboard, this plastic and metal case can’t be “recycled” except in the most basic, junk crunching sense.

Other Dells have given me similar problems. My girlfriend’s Latitude LS is approximately the same age as this desktop. However, the power supply and battery also appear to be proprietary. In order to fix it up, I have to pay over the odds for a new battery and power supply; it’s expensive to the point where it makes more sense to purchase a brand new laptop.

I’ve gone trawling for other horror stories of this type and there are many; a good example is this one from 2004 -

We were going to transfer an internal DAT tape drive from an older Dell server to a new Dell PowerEdge 2600. While scoping the new hardware for fit/rails/etc., I noticed that there were no power cables available in the 5 1/4″ drive bays. So I called Dell Tech Support and was told that the only way to add additional drives would be to purchase Dell supplied peripherals which would come with an appropriate backplane that would plug into a proprietary connector to provide power and data transfer connections.

So we got the kit from Dell. It contained a standard DAT drive, plus a standard SCSI cable. The gotcha was a semi-standard power cable that plugged into a power port on the systemboard. I probably could have found this power cable by going to a specialty cable shop or a clone computer shop, but my time is worth more than that. What Dell cheaped out on was in not providing the power cable with the server. They also didn’t provide a part number for the power cable, which would have solved my problem. Their tech support was so bad that they caused me to spend $700 that was unnecessary.

To be fair to Dell, this behaviour is not only common, some regard it as a good business practice. I once read an article in the Economist which complained that German manufacturers were building products to last, rather than building in a replacement cycle, so as to encourage more business. To me that’s absolutely crazy. It’s much less wasteful to build things that endure, or at the very least, to be able to upgrade them when requirements become more intense. I have experienced this with my custom made desktop; I purchased it approximately at the same time the Dell Dimenson XPS T600 was still a new model. The only things that are from the first build in it now are the floppy drive and the case. The discarded parts found a use in other machines, including this one (fortunately Dell doesn’t have proprietary PCI and AGP slots). I am conserving what I have, making do and mending, and yet I am not “suffering” for it.

Fortunately, my company has moved on from Dell as a preferred supplier to a non-proprietary solution. When upgrade time comes for Vista (as it inevitably will for many people in my company), the costs will be kept down. That said, people should be conscious of what they’re getting when they buy a Dell. It may seem like they’re getting a good solution at the time; however in the medium to long term, the cheerfulness of some like the Dell Dude aside, they’re getting some Hell.

I’ll be perfectly honest. The PC I presently have at work is driving me mad. It’s not because it’s bad; with Xubuntu it’s running competently. What is making me crazy is the comparison between this machine and what I have at home. With an 8 MB broadband connection, the latest graphics cards and hardware - the difference is noticeable.

My company laptop has somehow disappeared into the netherworld with all the socks that get eaten by dryers. So I’ve had a serious look at how I can turn this old Dell Dimension into something with a bit more oomph.

I have several goals in doing this -

1. To just make it so that I don’t have to hear the damn thing - the hard drive churns, the power supply on this Dell has a low hum which is irritating.

2. To make it faster - at the moment, it’s adequate. But adequate is not “perfect” nor even “good”.

3. To have a long lasting backup - for as and when my laptop does arrive.

4. And also, to do it all cheaply.

Happily the world of 64 bit computing is now cheaper than ever. With parts totaling under £250, it is possible to turn this Dell Dimension XPS T600 into something much more decent.

Let’s review what’s on it at the moment -

1. Pentium III processor - this has to go. One of the blessings of having Xubuntu is that I can use a handy monitor which shows me what resources are being consumed at any given point - CPU, memory or swap - the CPU is the one that regularly maxes out.

2. Nvdia GeForce 4 video card - it’s not bad, but not great. No DVI output if I ever got a decent LCD monitor.

3. 10 GB hard drive. I suspect it’s 4200 RPM. It also sounds like scraping metal. This has to go too.

4. DVD-RW drive. That stays.

5. Soundblaster compatible sound card. Fine.

6. 440 MB of RAM. Adequate - it never maxxed out. However, it won’t be transferrable.

7. Netgear MA311 802.11b PCI wireless network card - the wireless network here is “mixed”, meaning it caters for both 802.11b and 802.11g - for some reason, the 802.11b card works better. It also is automatically detected by Xubuntu. It stays.

So, to get this PC up to speed for under £250, I need the following parts -

1. AMD Sempron 3400+ processor. For an astonishing £64, one gets into the world of 64 bit computing.

2. A Gigabyte GA-K8U motherboard. Gigabyte have been very good about providing motherboards for modern processors that still can use AGP graphics cards, which tend to be bargains. At £32, this is also a cheap motherboard.

3. A 400W power supply - I’m rebuilding a Dell, so there are some gotchas to keep in mind; for one, a Dell PSU won’t work with anything but a Dell motherboard. Furthermore, getting rid of the old PSU at least means I can get one that’s much quieter. A decent one costs around £12.

4. Western Digital Caviar (WD800JB Special Edition) Hard Drive - 80MB, at 7200 RPM, and with an 8MB cache. This should solve the problem of the grinding hard drive. This too is cheap - at £31.

5. Kingston ValueRAM 1GB 184Pin DIMM PC3200 DDR Non-Parity CL3 - the motherboard I’ve selected can take 2 GB at 400Mhz or 4 GB at 333 Mhz. I’m going for 1 GB at the higher rate. This should be more than adequate for Xubuntu and leave room for expansion later.

6. Inno NVIDIA GeForce 6200 256 MB graphics card - after much thought and research, I picked this card. As this is a work PC, I’m not going to be playing Doom all day. However, I want sufficient firepower to look at and edit graphics, and also have a DVI connection to an LCD monitor. I want to avoid ATI, because their Linux drivers are proven to be unreliable. This card seems to provide the right balance of qualities required. It also costs only £30.

Should the company pay for it, the project would cost a grand total of £236.03 with delivery costs and taxes. But at the end, we can see the resulting machine, a 64 bit PC with better than adequate graphics and memory, plus one that won’t drive me crazy listening to it all day. In theory, it should be very fast and agile; if the project is allowed to come into fruition, I will report the results here.

Addendum - looks like the case is going to have to go, as Dell is not a standard ATX size.