Nick Joins the Dual Core Crowd

Received my Opteron 165 and Scythe Ninja heatsink last night. It didn’t take long before my system was torn apart and the new parts were installed. Installation was straigtforward, but damn, that heatsink should not be advertising that it has easy to use clips.

So is there an improvement moving from a single-core 2.0 GHz chip to a dual core 1.8? I definitely saw it. The entire system feels smoother, and I can continue to use my system while performing heavy tasks. I’m sure I’d see even more improvements if I were compiling stuff in Gentoo, but for now, the ability to continue working as normal while playing with 4 GB ISO images, running Qemu, and burning stuff, makes it a great upgrade.

Next up in the performance upgrade pipeline is some DDR500 memory. With some simple overclocking this CPU can run like an FX60!

CD Printing in Ubuntu

I just discovered Ubuntu Dapper has CD printing support built-in for my printers! This makes me happy, as I’m no longer stuck with the amazingly crappy CD printing software which came with my printers (WTF is there no UNDO option), and I can use some great apps like Inkscape and GIMP. This also means my small business will be running on 100% open source software. My Mac Mini will probably move to the living room, and be one sweet Video/Audio/Picture machine.

Email Move Complete

I finally finished moving my email server from a self hosted setup to Gmail for Domains. There were three main parts of the move: configuring inbound email to end up on the Gmail servers, copying all my current email to Gmail, and then setting up local mail to be sent using Google’s SMTP server. The most time consuming part of the move was copying all my current mail over using a nice utility someone had written. Configing the DNS services and watching the changes propigate was the most interesting part of the move.

Postfix has been replaced with ssmtp on my server, and I now have a few extra CPU cycles and MB’s of memory to dedicate to Apache, Lighty, and MySQL.