Category: Computing

I’ve previously mentioned that I’ve toyed with Chrome a bit, both on Windows and I’ve tried out the various ways to make it run under Linux.  The Windows experience isn’t bad, but the Linux story was pretty unusable/uninteresting.

A slashdot post went by that mentioned the new 2.0 version of Chrome and indicated that a Linux build was available, but also mentioned how usable it was.  I had to try it out.  If you’re interested here is what you need to do.

Start at the PPA (personal package archive) for Ubuntu Chromium.  It will instruct you to add a line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file.  Since I’m running Intrepid Ibex I added the following:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Then you need to add the key if you want to avoid the warnings about an untrusted source.  Execute this command line:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5

Then update your apt-cache:

sudo apt-get update

Followed by installing chromium itself:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Its still very early. Tabs don’t currently work, https seems broken in some way, no flash support, crashes, etc. On the bright side – it is native Linux and now that you’ve hooked yourself up to the PPA you should get regular refreshes as part of the system update process.  There is lots that is working – Google Reader for example, and my favorite Chrome feature the omnibar seems to be working well too.

Oh yeah, Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

The server that hosts lowtek.ca sits in a dusty corner of my furnace room.  There are lots of good reasons to not host your own web presence, but if you are stubborn like I am you might find this interesting.

The current hardware is an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ that I bought back in 2001 – I remember it cost me a bit more than $1700 at the time. This used to be my desktop until I upgraded to a much quieter (and slightly faster) refurbished machine a couple of years ago.  For the most part I’ve been avoiding buying new hardware to avoid the steep price depreciation.

Last week the server machine shut itself off, two days in a row.  There wasn’t much data in the logs, but poking around I’m fairly convinced that the CPU was overheating.  The sensor data claims a 23C swing in reported temperatures (55C-78C).  Either way, the machine is now unreliable in my mind and I need the server to be reliable.

While I was tempted to go the refurbished route, as I can pick up a reasonably capable system for about $100 – I really wanted to avoid getting in the same mess in a few years.  So after some amount of searching, I settled on the following components:

• Intel BOXD945GCLF2 (Atom 330) Mainboard/CPU Combo
• SeaSonic 350W-ES ATX2.2 80Plus Power Supply
• OCZ Value 1GB PC2-6400 DDR2 Memory

Total works out to under $200.  I can reuse a case (or steal one from a friend) and the drives I have already.  I do plan to measure the power consumption of my new system vs. the existing one, I’m hopeful I will get results similar to this claim of 41watts.

My thinking here is that by buying new, I’m going to have a more reliable system for longer.  The energy savings are a sensible investment over a few years, thus both the Atom CPU and 80Plus power supply make sense.  Less heat (again the Atom) should mean easier cooling, and again hopefully longer life.