Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Computer stuff
26 GFLOPS for less than $1300. Schweet.
Finally got the ATI drivers (went with 8.40.4) to compile and now I’ve got my workstation running with two monitors, although not quite the way I was anticipating.
Instead of the desktop spanning both monitors, I’ve got separate desktops on each monitor. It’s not the usual desktop layers either. More like having two separate simultaneous login sessions going. Not quite what I was expecting.
Going to have to do a little more research on the matter, but at least it’s working (kinda).
A couple of new colour Barco monitors arrived yesterday for one of the diagnostic workstations over in Ultrasound. The monitors shipped with ATI FireGL video cards of an unknown model (read: I didn’t look all that closely at the card before I popped it in), but since the workstation already has video cards in it, the ones that shipped with the monitors were extra. So I decided to grab one to put in my Fedora 7 workstation at work and see if I could get a dual-head setup running with the spiffy new 21″ LCD monitor I scavenged from the above workstation (it was one of the monitors being replaced by the Barcos, really).
Normally this kind of thing should be easy.
Naturally, I know better. For some reason, the drivers I grabbed from the ATI site (8.35.5) for the FireGL cards wouldn’t compile at all, so I have a feeling I might be missing something. One of the first errors that popped up was an attempt to link to libstdc++.so.5. libstdc++ is installed, but I have libstdc++.so.6 in /usr/lib, so I’m guessing I need to find an earlier version of the library or install the libstdc++ compatibility package. I didn’t tinker around with it too much this afternoon, so I’ll have to play around a little more tomorrow.
Boots up ok and shows the boot messages on both screens, which is promising. The driver issues are keeping the X server from starting though.
It’ll be cool once I get this going. 3 megapixels of desktop goodness at my fingertips. Woot!
A fine example of computer geekery.
What do you do with a gazillion CPUs that have been upgraded into obsolescence?
Tile a desk with them
An upgrade to one of the Apache server modules took the webserver down.
It’s all better now.