I bought a new motherboard, the Intel D945GCLF2 board. It has the dual-core Atom 330 processor and Gigabit Ethernet but is still as cheap as original Little Falls Atom board. I got it installed in the case and it booted. The Realtek RTL8111/8168B Ethernet chip wouldn’t work with Linux. I had to get the new r8168 driver. It is still flaky and will only do 100Mb/s.

When I put in the SATA card, it wouldn’t start. Then I noticed that the PCI card was backwards. The card was keyed for both 5V and 3.3V slots and would fit backwards in the 5V slot. Which is easy to do when the bracket is removed from the card. I am pretty sure that this destroyed the old motherboard and probably the card since it did not work when put in the right way. I am going to have to get a new SATA card.

1. Partition the new drive

   fdisk /dev/sdb

2. Create the RAID 1 volume

   mdadm –create /dev/md0 –level=1 –raid-devices=2 missing /dev/sdb1

3. Create the Physical Volume

   pvcreate /dev/md0

4. Add PV to Volume Group

   vgextend vg0 /dev/md0

5. Move all the extents to new volume (takes a long time)

   pvmove /dev/sda1 /dev/md0

6. Remove old disk from volume group

   vgreduce vg0 /dev/sda1

7. Add the old disk to RAID volume (takes a long time)

   mdadm /dev/md0 –add /dev/sda1

The only case mini-ITX case with space for four hard drives I found was the Chenbro ES34069. It was a little expensive but turned out to be nicely designed and well made. The hard drives go in caddies which plug into a SATA backplane. It also has space for a 2.5″ hard drive, thin CD drive, and memory card reader. I decided to get a CompactFlash card in an IDE adapter for the system drive. I skipped the CD drive and reader.

For the motherboard, I wanted to balance having 4 SATA ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and fanless processor. The VIA EPIA SN10000EG would have worked well with 4 SATA ports and fanless processor but was too expensive. I chose to get the Jetway J7F4K1G2E which has a fanless VIA C7 processor, Gigabit Ethernet, and only 2 SATA ports. When I made the decision, the Intel Atom motherboard, the D945GCLF, had just been released. Unfortunately, it did not have Gigabit and the chipset uses more power than the processor. There are now more Atom motherboards with Gigabit and even 4 SATA ports that would work better.

The first problem with the install was forgetting the adapter cable from 40-pin IDE on motherboard to 44-pin notebook IDE connector on the drive. The second problem was the lack of mounting holes in the right place for the non-standard position of the 2.5″ drive. I was able to wedge it in place. The CompactFlash card was nice because I could put in the memory card reader on my desktop to write the root filesystem. When I do decide to go to 4 drives, I will need get a special riser card to use a PCI SATA adapter. That will be a tight fit in an already tight case. The case has a place for everything put it requires putting together in the correct order to get it all to fit.

First, Scratchbox needs the compat VDSO mode enabled. This is done by echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/vdso_enabled. Also, Qemu requires mmap_min_addr set to 4096. These can be set permanently by adding the following lines to /etc/sysctl.conf.

# scratchbox support
vm.vdso_enabled = 0
vm.mmap_min_addr = 4096

On my desktop, which is x86_64, compat VDSO can only be set with the vdso32=0 kernel command-line option. Also, the scratchbox installer script checks for i386 architecture. It needs to faked out like this: setarch i386 ./maemo-scratchbox-install_4.1.sh.

First, the automatically load the padlock module, add the /etc/sysconfig/modules/via-padlock.modules file.

#!/bin/sh
for i in padlock; do
    modprobe $i >/dev/null 2>&1
done

Second, to use it for internal kernel encryption, add to /etc/modprobe.conf.

alias aes padlock

Third, OpenSSL can be configured to use padlock. To see if your OpenSSL was compiled with padlock support, do openssl engine padlock. You can see the speed difference by comparing openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc to openssl speed -evp aes-128-cbc -engine padlock. To use padlock engine by default, add the following lines to the top of `/etc/pki/tls/openssl.cnf.

#enable padlock engine by default:
openssl_conf = openssl_def

[openssl_def]
engines = openssl_engines

[openssl_engines]
padlock = padlock_engine

[padlock_engine]
default_algorithms = ALL

Unfortunately, the version of openssh in Centos 5 does not use the padlock engine. Engine support was added to openssh in 4.9p1 (bug 1437). It looks like there is a bug with engine support which is fixed in OpenSSL 0.9.7h. It looks like Ubuntu Hardy has patched its packages.

Next, install the rng-utils package with the rngd daemon. It reads entropy from the hardware RNG, /dev/hwrng, and feeds it to the kernel entropy pool for /dev/random.

Unfortunately, the package is missing an init.d script to start the service (see redhat bug 215371. The /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit actually has a commented-out line to start rngd. Download the script from the bug and put it in /etc/init.d/rngd. Add the service, chkconfig --add rngd, and start it, service rngd start.

Starcraft under Wine on Linux works pretty well. There are some issues with the display changing resolution that makes it hard to switch back to the desktop and resizes programs. There is a problem with some of the menus not clearing the screen which results in a jumble of text.

Starcraft under CrossOver Mac on the Mac works but not well. The CrossOver installer is nice; it makes managing installs easy. But Starcraft runs slowly. The mouse is jerky and unresponsive.

Starcraft under VMware Fusion running Windows 2000 on the Mac works pretty well. I used the free VMware Converter to turn the Windows 2000 partition on my old desktop into a VMware virtual machine. One of the nice things about VMware Fusion is that I can run the same virtual machine on Linux and Mac.

Another option for running it on Mac is to use the Mac version of Starcraft. The Mac version was originally made of Mac OS 9 and is PPC. Blizzard has a Mac OS X installer that allows it to run on Mac OS X. Supposedly, Rosetta is fast enough with running the PPC binary under Intel. Unfortunately, I have the Windows CD of Starcraft. It is possible one of my coworkers has the Mac version and I can use my CD key with that.

To clients, it looks like a copy of the archive. If a file does not exist, or is too old, it is fetched from the master servers and saved to disk. The files can be populated from CDs or mirrored through rsync to get complete copies. Ideally, it would load balance from multiple mirror servers.

It is possible to set something up with Apache2, modproxy, and moddisk_cache but that does not allow load balancing between servers and stores files in an opaque cache.

Would Perlbal be usable for this? Could it be extended? I am leaning toward writing a mod_perl module.

The Mac is very good at handling multiple displays. It detected the monitor when it was plugged in. It didn’t get the resolution correct but that was easy to change. The menu bar handling is annoying; one display is the primary one with the menu bar and dock. The other can just have windows where it is hard to use the menu. Also, some programs get confused about the resizing; it would be nice if windows recgonized that they were touching a side and stayed that way. If the menu bar was moved to the monitor, then the computer would stay active with the lid closed.

Somebody pointed me toward Synergy which allows sharing keyboard and mouse over the network. The machine that has the keyboard and mouse (in this case my work desktop) runs the server. Other machines run the client and connect to the server. Each machine has to have a text configuration file. Once it is working, it is smooth to move the mouse off the side of the screen and onto the other screen. The keyboard follows the mouse. Also, it connects the clipboards. It isn’t possible to drag windows between screens.

The only problem is that the key bindings are different between Mac and Linux. The Mac uses the Option key (mapped to Alt) where Linux uses Ctrl. The clipboard commands are especially confusing since Gnome Terminal is also different. I have gotten used to the different key bindings when switching between the laptop and desktop but it helps that the laptop keyboard is different.

The biggest problem is that suspend and hibernate don’t work. Suspend seems to work but does not restore. Hibernate suceeds with the most recent kernel but that kernel does not boot reliably.

I hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t running at the ideal resolution, 1280×900. 1080×768 looked a little squished. I had to switch to the ‘intel’ driver for Xorg for the graphics to work at the ideal resolution.

I just installed the compiz compositing window manager. The flipping effect when changing desktops is a nice touch even though it is a little blurry and jumpy.I understand what people were talking about with the wobbly window effect.

The Mighty Mouse is not detected automatically by the Bluetooth system. I have to run ‘hidd –search’ and occasionally restart the hidd daemon. The scroll ball only works in one direction. Unfortunately, moving the scroll ball horizontally scrolls vertically.