videocard blues
Soooo, I had a nice idea to put this old ATI Fire GL4 into my workstation. Since I’m not a gamer (and the little gaming I do, I do on my media center, not my workstation) I thought, if I get it to work, it’ll be fine for my needs…
Somehow I couldn’t let this card go for EUR 29,-... (listprice in 2001, somewhere around $2000)
dual DVI, stereo-connector (for shutterglasses)
AGP Pro
Well, it fits nicely (and yes, I need to clean the fans of my CPU-coolers, but that’ll happen this week)
But this is how a great deal of my weekend looked… workstation on console and my iBook up front, searching for ways to get it going…. I wasn’t succesful in that and since I had work coming up on sunday, I needed to come up with something else…
Well, the trouble with my old card had to do with the cooling (a little on that here). I never ever took a serious approach in solving it… somehow now was the time…
I needed to saw a piece of the heatsink which goes on the back. My motherboard has a heatsink on that same place and that was the problem…
...and I polished the sharp edges… I don’t like sharp edges in my workstation! ;-)
And the old card now fits nicely, I do have my desktop back and yes, I still need to clean those fans, but guess what? I got two Nocona’s coming my way… So those heatsinks are up for some cleaning next…
And… what to do with the ATI? Well, it’s not like I couldn’t get it to work, but all the drivers are quite old, and imho I needed to switch back too much to get it going.
I need to switch to XFree instead of Xorg, everything I’ve got for making a kernelmodule is for kernel 2.4 instead of 2.6… So, I decided this will be my weekend-play-around card… Now I need to find an old harddrive where I can put a dedicated (and slightly dated) linux-install on.
And(2)... I decided I’m gonna give Project Looking Glass a go…
Actually, I almost totally forgot about Looking Glass, even though I had been posting about it before.
I stumbled upon this nice howto for Gentoo and somehow, since I spent the weekend already fooling around with X and such… This is next on the list (after I recompiled a kernel for the Nocona’s to come)...
you can find all of my projects overhere
