Well I am lucky enough to be a slut for free hardware, and was the happy recipiant of yet another small score of computer bits last night. The biggie was an Alpha, which sits in the corner now, and acts as another seat in the office. The most immediately useful was a nifty little motherboard/cpu combo from Yohimbe which I used to upgrade Naked from a PII-300 to a PIII-500. The board is a L748LMRT with a very different configuration. An AT style keyboard, smaaaaaall profile (it’s absolutely tiny). It has only two slots, one PCI and one ISA, but has both types of CPU slot (slot A and whatever the other one is called). Three DIMM slots, and onboard sound, ir, network and video. Just in case anyone is wondering, the sound module to use is the C-Media (CMI8338/8738) (cmpci) and the onboard ethernet uses the SiS 900/7016 (sis900) module. Works great. Apparently the onboard video gives you about a 10% reduction in performance, but I had no choice as I needed the one PCI slot for my SCSI controller. If I find an old ISA video card I might swap over, but no tribbles about it now.
In a fit of trying to be cool I’m in the process of recompiling all the programs on this system with optimization flags for pentium3 instead of pentium2. I’m sure the 0.00000000001% performance gain will be completely offset by the day or two it takes to finish all the compiling though.
Had a great run this morning. All 45 minutes at 6.7mph, no break, felt great at the end of it, and looking forward to having a productive day here.