Yesterday I finally decided to update my computer from Mandriva 2007 Spring (soooo old) to 2008 Spring. I had a feeling it would be a hassle, so I had been putting it off for a long time. But it was feeling really old, so I knew the time had come.

Fortunately, I was smart and backed up everything to my ‘storage’ hard drive. Typically when I upgrade Mandriva, I just wipe out everything but the home partition. I had planned to do the same this time, but I wanted to back everything up anyway.

Now, I don’t blame Mandriva for this, because I have had my main hard drives in a faulty RAID set up for some time. I’ve just ignored it. But it ended up causing some serious problems, so I finally deleted the array and wiped out one of the hard drives to start fresh.

One other thing was annoying. During the installation, Mandriva asked if I wanted to install the propriety nVidia drivers for my video card. I thought, “Sure! Saves me the hassle.” Supposedly it did so, but either it messed up or the driver was dog slow. So I had to remove it and then compile and install the driver directly from nVidia. Works great.

Everything else seems to be working right. I hate some of the defaults in Xfce now, but I’ve fixed them up.

Today I have officially retired my old server. It’s been a long run, but it was time to let it go. It is for the best, after all. We all have to move on eventually. Get on with our lives. Let the past be the past. Greener pastures. Faster processors… (No, it has nothing to do with me botching a kernel update! Why would you even suggest that?)

So, here’s goodbye to the computer that has been my music, web, everything else server for the past however many years.

Here you can see the magnificent insides of this once great beast. (Which must have been well before I got any of these parts.) Notice the precarious positioning of the PSU and the full complement of RAM.

From this view you one can clearly see how snugly the PSU is placed within the case. You can also see that the case fan is not really screwed in at all, but is just hanging there.

And finally, the front shows how proud its makers were of having a Pentium II and how they designed it to work specifically with Windows 95. Of course, I don’t think much in the case was left over from whatever inhabited it previously, probably nothing…and yes, that is one of the hard drives peeking out there. You can also make out the power button, which worked occasionally.

Anyhow, goodbye good buddy. I’ll (sort of) miss you!

A computer I was working on caught on fire today.

I will admit I was scared for the two seconds it took for the component to flame up, smoke, and then go out…