dirac

My current computer is a GNU/Linux PC named "dirac" (after the British physicist). Hardwarewise, dirac is an Athlon XP 2000+ with 1024MB of RAM and two 78GB hard drives. dirac is connected to the Internet through Insight Broadband.

I built dirac in Summer 2002. For a number of reasons, I decided to finally do a new install instead of using the six-year-old(!) Redhat 4.1 install that powered maxwell and tarski. So now I am running debian unstable.

Anyway, dirac currently runs:

• Linux kernel 2.6.24.
• X.Org 7.3, using ATI's proprietary fglrx drivers, version 8.45.5.
• sawfish 1.3.3.
• XEmacs 21.4.21 "Educational Television".
• vim 7.1-293.
• gcc 3.4.6, 4.1.2, 4.2.3, and 4.3.1 20080401 prerelease.
• glibc 2.7 with Debian patches.
• Java 5 SDK, Standard Edition, 1.6.0_06.
• Eclipse 3.2.2.
• nethack 3.4.3.
• ZAngband 2.7.3.
• perl 5.8.8.
• exim 4.69.
• Iceweasel 2.0.0.14.
• Audacious 1.5.0.
• Lots of other stuff (email me if you're really interested).

On the hardware side, dirac contains [the following list is out of date]:

• Giga-byte Technology GA-7VAX motherboard (Via KT600: VT8377). The motherboard has 6 PCI slots and 1 AGP slot. No ISA slots. Among other things, it has a built-in Realtek 8139 10/100 ethernet card.
• AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1667 MHz) processor.
• 1024MB of DDR RAM.
• Maxtor 6L080J4, 80054MB hard drive, with 1819kB of cache. At least that's what dmesg says. They called it a 80GB drive, of course.
• Seagate ST380011A, 80026MB hard drive, with 2048kB of cache. Again, they called it an 80GB.
• IBM-DTTA-371440, 13783MB hard drive, with 462kB of cache. Marketed as 14.4GB.
• ATI Radeon 9200 (AGP) with 128MB of RAM.
• 21-inch ViewSonic color SVGA monitor, running at 1920x1440x60Hz, at 24bpp.
• nVidia Vanta (NV6 chipset, PCI) with 16MB of RAM.
• 19-inch Gateway color SVGA monitor, running at 1600x1200x70Hz, at 24bpp.
• Lite-On LTC-48161H combination CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive.
• Generic 1.44MB floppy drive.
• Chieftec Dragon case, coloured "Planet Purple" (kind of a dark puce). Two fans in the back, one on the side, and one in front of two of the hard drives.
• GE Wired Office (WK 0804) keyboard, with two rows of buttons along the top.
• GE optical mouse with lots of buttons: left, middle/scroll, right, thumb, antithumb. The mouse came with the keyboard.
• 3Com 3c905C-TX 10/100Mbps ethernet card.
• Sound Blaster Live! Value (CT4832).
• Labtec 1030 speakers.
• Casing Power 300W power supply.
• Lexmark 4039-10plus laser printer, with 10MB of RAM, Postscript Level 2, and PCL 5. I bought it from someone who reconstructed it from broken printers and some spare parts, and it works just fine. A 7000-page toner cartridge is about $75 refurbished on pricewatch, or $195 new from Lexmark's web site.

You can also take a look at some of my config files if you're into that sort of thing.

Last Modification: 16 July 2008
Previous Modification: 17 September 2006
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