Synergy: Now Useful

This synergy, that is. (Thanks to Jeff Verkoeyen for the app tip.) Installation is absolutely painless, especially with the APT repos on Ubuntu; in less than five minutes I was happily swerving my mouse around my newly augmented screen real estate.

Oh, and the installation pics are up. Enjoy!

RAIDers of the Nuked Fridge

After following these directions, my new Ubuntu 8.04 system with 1.5 TB RAID 5 is operational! Bonus: GRUB installed and ran without incident, suggesting that some effort had been put into fixing the mentioned bugs even before the Intrepid release. Moreover, I'm impressed to see that 1680x1050 resolution works out of the box. Ubuntu has come a long way since I started using it. Windows users take note: if you wrote off this increasingly popular distro, you owe it to yourself to give it another shot.

I'll post the partitioning and installation pics to my Computers album after work. Next up: development utilities, minor config tweaks, and a bit of A/V "testing" with some Cowboy Bebop.

Computer Pics

Here they are. (Yes, it's a complete mess of cables. Yes, that's a microATX board in an ATX case. Yes, there's a giant opening in the front - I'm thinking about slapping in a fan above the optical drive. Yes, I put four hard drives in there - I'm going to put them in RAID 5, with a small RAID 1 partition on each to accomodate GRUB.)

Ordinateur!

Just finished building my first computer this morning, and am now using it (off Live CD!) to write this post. If you haven't tried putting together your own box before, I can assure you that it really is as straightforward as your friendly neighbourhood unwashed computer geek insists it is. There are several guides available online, though for most first-time builders the useful advice is easily summarized:

• Decide what the computer is for. Is it a workstation? A gaming rig? A webserver? Or are you just using it to surf and type? This will dictate what parts you need.
  
• Research your parts: get specs, find user reviews, make sure everything is compatible, pick up the necessary tools (read: precision screwdrivers.)
• Static = bad: don't build on carpet, and either ground yourself frequently or pick up an anti-static wrist strap - they're a lot cheaper than your parts (unless you snatched them from a scrap pile somewhere.)
• Cooling = good: not enough and your system dies a very pungent death, too much and...well, there is no such thing. The CPU fan/heatsink is absolutely necessary, and most people recommend having both intake and outtake fans for decent airflow.
  

And that's about it. I'm no designer, so I didn't go the case modding route for this one - but now that I've caught the hardware bug, I might be compelled to give it a shot. I seem to recall having a few plexiglass sheets tucked away somewhere...

I'll post some photographic evidence to my Picasa albums shortly.