Oct 05
23
I built a new computer! However, this computer, “Waldorf“, is not intended to replace either Fozzie or Camilla. Waldorf is built (almost) entirely from parts that have been cycled out of other computers — mostly from Fozzie. One of my big motivations for building Waldorf was simply that I had enough parts lying around to build another computer — so why not?
Of note, Waldorf is Linux-only. I quietly removed Linux recently from Fozzie. Fozzie’s goal is to be a computer that constantly meets my needs and is constantly relatively up-to-date. But, by dual-booting Windows and Linux, it was frequently a chore to pick out compatible hardware, which sometimes kept Fozzie from reaching its full potential. I also had been having problems getting XP and Linux to dual-boot from my new SATA drive. And also, I just simply don’t like dual-booting to begin with. It’s nice having a large pool of applications available, but it’s annoying to have to reboot in order to use something in another operating system (especially if you run servers on your computer, which I do). A better solution is to just run Cygwin under Windows, which gives you a Linux-like environment and pool of applications. So, Fozzie is now Windows-only, and Waldorf is Linux-only. Since Waldorf is largely “aged” hardware, this seems to make sense.
The one new piece of hardware in Waldorf is a Linksys PCI 802.11g wireless card. Since there is no room in my computer room for another computer, and that’s where the router is located, I either had to get wireless for Waldorf or run cabling around the house. Luckily, the Linksys card seems to work with Fedora Core 3, by using the infinitely useful ndiswrapper program.
I had some problems with IRQ conflicts relating to running FC3 on this older hardware, but those problems strangely only occur on reboots, not fresh startups, so the rule is to not reboot Waldorf… just startup and shutdown. Other than that, Waldorf is functioning execellently.