Well, I wasn’t planning on upgrading my system quite yet, but I lost all trust in my previous motherboard. It was probably damaged somehow by heat. So above you can see the basic specs that Ubuntu Linux sees. Once I assembled the hardware parts, the system booted up just fine, and apart from a minor tweak (The video card address changed in the move to the new system.) everything started up perfectly without any hassle.
Needless to say, everything is noticeably zippier. Linux loves to eat memory for breakfast, but so far it can’t stomach all of the new memory. Linux (Ubuntu at least) is getting very close to the “stuff just works” phase of an operating system that Mac and Windows have been at for some time. For so many years, I’ve had to struggle to get the simplest things to work – recompiling code, installing thousands of library packages by hand, etc. And to be fair, once things worked, they were reliable. Nowadays, I can install Ubuntu on a new system and everything works – sound, video, network, dvd – without having to do as much “geeking” as before.
Oh, and the new system is crazy quiet. Seriously, it’s borderline absurd. I hear the water pump going, and the radiator fan (the only fan in the whole system) in the back, but the case lid is still open. My other machine was a gas-powered leaf blower by comparison.
There were some issues getting the water-cooling kit setup in the new system, but that was the only tough part. Time to get some rest after a hard-fought battle.