tarski's page

My current computer is a GNU/Linux PC named `tarski' (after the Polish mathematician). Hardwarewise, tarski is a K6-2/350 with 128MB of RAM and a 13.5GB hard drive. Tarski is connected to the Internet through @Home (lxintn1.ky.home.com, to be precise).

tarski is running the same install as maxwell. Enough people have asked about doing that that I decided to share my methods. I did the copy with find / -xdev -print0 | cpio -pa0V /newhd, where /newhd was the mount point of the new hard drive. I did the same for the /boot partition (necessary because the new drive has 1756 sectors in LBA mode, and that version of LILO could only boot a kernel in the first 1024 cylinders). I then put the kernel (not LILO) on a floppy, booted tarski from that, and ran LILO. One thing you have to be careful about when doing this is that Linux gets the geometry for hda from the BIOS, while it gets all other geometries from the drives themselves. Since I was copying maxwell's drive on hda with tarski's drive on hdb, with eventual plans to make tarski's drive hda, I had to specify the geometry for hdb on the command line before I ran fdisk. After than, Linux reads the geometry from the partition table, and you're fine. When I first booted with the new drive in hdb, I said "hdb=1757,255,63" (the drive's LBA geometry) on the kernel command line. Finally, I had to say "linear" in /etc/lilo.conf, otherwise I got LI.

The moral of this story is: if you don't know what you're doing, just reinstall. Or keep guessing like I did.

Anyway, tarski currently runs:

• Linux kernel 2.4.4-pre6.
• XFree86 3.3.6. The 4.0.3 server seems to enjoy crashing whenever the CPU is under load.
• fvwm 2.2.
• XEmacs 21.4.2 "Developer-Friendly Unix APIs".
• GNU emacs 20.3.
• vim 5.3.
• gcc 2.95.2.
• glibc 2.1.3.
• nethack 3.3.0.
• Gnus 5.6.45.
• Emacs-W3 4.0pre.46.
• lynx 2.8.3dev.7.
• perl 5.6.0.
• sendmail.
• Opera 5.0b8. It renders CSS a lot better than Communicator 4.
• Netscape Communicator 4.73.
• sirc 2.21, an IRC client written in Perl. I sometimes use a heavily-modified version of scirc [I had a link, but it seems to be broken now], but it doesn't do DCC and I don't feel like writing DCC for it.
• Lots of other stuff (email me if you're really interested).

On the hardware side, tarski contains:

• Tyan Trinity 100 motherboard (Apollo MVP3: VT82C597, with a VT82C586 ISA bridge/IDE controller). The motherboard has 4 ISA slots, 4 PCI slots (1 shared), and 1 AGP slot.
• AMD K6-2 350MHz processor, running at 333MHz (95MHz x 3.5). When I run the bus at 100MHz, I get problems unless I disable L2. It's probably a CPU or RAM problem, since getting a new motherboard didn't fix it.
• 1024kB of L2 SRAM cache.
• 128MB of PC100 SDRAM.
• IBM-DTTA-371440, 13783MB hard drive, with 462kB of cache. At least that's what dmesg says. They called it a 14.4GB drive, of course. I guess that means it's a 13.5 gibibyte drive.
• Matrox G200 AGP with 8MB of SDRAM.
• 19-inch Mag color SVGA monitor, running at 1600x1200x60Hz non-interlaced, at 16bpp.
• Samsung 40X CD-ROM. At $40, it was the cheapest I could find.
• Teac 1.44MB floppy drive.
• A huge case. It has a "DataStor 486-33" badge, but I suspect the case was made by someone else. It has 4 external 5.25'' drive bays, 2 internal 5.25" drive bays, and 3 internal 3.5" drive bays. The case has a handle on top, great for lugging around the 14kg (without anything inside) case.
• Microsoft Internet Keyboard (114 keys, PS/2, with a 5-pin DIN adapter). The Win95 keys are now, from left to right, Super, Compose, and Hyper keys, thanks to xmodmap. In addition, Caps Lock is now Control, Num Lock is Caps Lock, and the accelerator keys are various things.
• Fellowes Browser^2 mouse. It has a scroll button rather than a wheel, and a thumb button. In this respect, it is very much like a Genius NetMouse Pro (and, in fact, it uses the NetMouse Pro drivers, at least under X11). The thumb button is mapped to button 2 (the "middle button"), scroll up is button 4, and scroll down is button 5.
• Multiwave 56Kbps modem. This is some OEM deal; I don't know who really made the modem. It has jumpers.
• D-Link DFE-530-TX ethernet card. For those of you at home who want to use one of these under Linux, use the VIA Rhine driver---the card isn't the same as the DE-530 mentioned in the Ethernet HOWTO.
• Sound Blaster 16 PnP (really a ViBRA 16X). It's not the best thing in the world, but at least I have 16-bit sound now.
• Labtec 1030 speakers.
• Kingspao 230W 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.
• 3COM HomeConnect cable modem. Not very featureful, but it does make my computer look like a land shawk.

I do not yet have the decorations that maxwell has. That will come later. I do, however, have a penguin sticker on one side of the case, a Copyleft "geek." sticker on the other, and a ThinkGeek "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script." sticker on the monitor.