Portrait of Edd Dumbill, taken by Giles Turnbull

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My new computer

Approximately every four years I replace my desktop computer. I've just undergone the latest switch in this series. Adding itself to my PC computing history of a Pentium 120 and Pentium II 450 is an Athlon XP 3000+ based machine.

I tend to prefer to configure the machine with a relatively high end specification, in order to meet my daily needs for the next four years. If I'm honest the retired P450 would have done for a couple more years were it not for my Debian package maintainance responsibilities, which were starting to call for a faster compile box.

So here's the spec: Athlon 3000+ XP processor (despite the bursting of my PowerPC bubble, I can't bring myself to buy Intel any more if I can help it), Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard (main benefit: SATA disk controllers) and a Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card.

The downside of the up-to-date hardware is that I had to poke around a bit in order to get a decent Linux install. As I had some trouble finding all these bits of information, I thought I'd record them here. There seem to be quite a few people with this combination of hardware and motherboard, so I hope this information might be useful to others.

SATA controller

The SATA controller is an SI3112. To install Debian Linux on a machine with a SATA controller I had to compile a 2.4.22 kernel (2.4.21 will do, but it won't automatically enable DMA on the disks), and replace the boot kernel of the Debian install media with my custom one. Scott Kveton has a handy page on how to do this.

The RAID features of the SI3112 are not currently supported by Linux, although Thomas Horsten has made a driver which supports RAID 0 (striping), it doesn't cover RAID 1 (mirroring). As I understand it, support should be on its way in the official siimage driver before long.

CPU

Apart from selecting the Athlon CPU in the kernel configuration, there's one other tweak required: specifying mem=nopentium as an option to the kernel on boot. This will stop strange interactions that happen with the AMD processor and the AGP graphics bus. Omitting to do this led me to have periodic lockups and odd artifacts with fullscreen 3D. It seems odd to me that the kernel configuration doesn't switch this on automatically for you when it sees you've picked AGP support and an AMD processor.

Motherboard

The Asus A7N8X Deluxe is a nice motherboard, using the nForce 2 chipset. Kernel 2.4.22 has support for the AGP interface. The A7N8X has two onboard ethernet controllers, a 3Com 3C920B and an nVidia ethernet controller. The 3Com interface is supported in the kernel, so I used this one for installing. The nVidia interface is supported by drivers downloadable from nVidia themselves. Audio support can be enabled either using the nvaudio driver from nVidia, or the i810_audio module from the kernel.

Radeon 9600 Pro

To get accelerated support for this card under XFree86, you must use a proprietary driver, downloadable from Schneider Digital. This driver contains a custom kernel module which you must compile and install. There are two keys to success here: firstly, don't try and get smart, use the XFree86 configuration program included with the download. Second, use the 2.4.22 kernel's AGPGART support rather than that built into the driver.

Overall, I'm now happy with my new machine, though I was a bit depressed until I put an end to the spurious lockups. I've already put the compile speed to good use in compiling and uploading Redland to Debian, sponsoring Dave's good work with these packages. (He's getting Redland ready for CPAN, too, happy news for Debian-less Perl mongrels.)

Finally, for UK residents, I will recommend Scan, who put my computer together for me. They showed good attention to detail and shipped some quality extras, including cables of a decent (as opposed to penny-pinchingly-short) length.

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