steve_v

The issue with the X5460s is the (supermicro) board layout, Socket 771 puts the CPUS too close together for fans >70mm. So of course the stock coolers feature ~7000RPM fans. It's really an "everything" server: Web, mail, SSH, MPD, files & VM images etc. on ZFS/Samba, so some more cores is nice. - - - Updated - - - The (secondhand) board was also dirt cheap, and has some nice server features besides ECC & SMP, like BIOS serial console, hardware alarms, and onboard 8-port RAID controller... making a total of 22 SATA ports, with my PCIE card.

On ye old "quest for the perfect mouse" of earlier posts: In the end I bought a couple of NOS intellimice (mouses?) on fleabay. Better the devil you know and all that, some nutter was shipping free at $30ea. - - - Updated - - - Amen.

I have the base version (P9X79), excellent board. The plentiful pcie/memory bandwidth on that chipset is a nice bonus too.

And to think I upgraded my Q9400 to a mere 2x X5460s. But hey, it's only a fileserver, I wanted the 24GB of ECC RAM more, and it's 8 cores real cheap. Making a quiet CPU cooler for it was a bit of a bear though. Length of copper bussbar & drillpress FTW.

You lucky sod

But mine weighs 2.3kg. Bigger must be better, right? Seriously though, I still use that beast from time to time. Digital meters are convenient and all, but they'll catch you out from time to time - mainly because the input impedance is high and the measuring currents are low, leading to stray / induced voltages interfering with readings. A well maintained AVO model 8 was the official benchmark for calibration of (mostly digital) meters when I was an apprentice. It was also the only meter sensitive enough to be useful for demonstrating winding polarity in AC motors. When working on analogue stuff (I like loud noises, e.g. amplifiers), an analogue meter is ideal. For everything else a digital meter can be had very cheaply these days. On the topic of shorting things out: A co-worker once dropped the end of a serial cable onto some 3-phase/400v contactors... It blew a hole in the (laptop) motherboard beside the serial port - very dramatic, smoke, ozone, loud noises etc. Surprisingly enough the machine still ran, sans RS232 UART

But it's only 12v, what could possibly go wrong Shorting stuff out is bad, m'kay. But you're fairly safe just putting power on a fan. Obviously one shouldn't connect random wires to expensive parts unless you know what you're doing. - Although my GPU does have solder pads for VRM hacking . Best case it's the fan: Replace it or butcher something else to fit. Case fans and cable ties work surprisingly well. Worst case it's the fan controller and you can't RMA the card: You could always buy (or build ) a PWM regulator and control the fan with a potentiometer mounted in slot cover, or a thermistor wedged in the GPU heatsink. - - - Updated - - - On the topic of meters, I have one of these, but it needs a clean. Rescued from a trash can years ago, and still working perfectly.

Really? I've had one since I was ~12 Handy tool it is, beats guesswork or randomly replacing parts. Particularly useful as my PC case tends to contain large quantities of strip connector, and sometimes hand-etched boards (fan controller). Electricity is far more interesting when you can see what's going on , but I digress...You don't really need a meter to test a fan: Jam some thin wires into the fans power connector, other ends into appropriate (either 5v or 12v, usually printed on fan) pins of spare molex plug, or other random power supply of correct voltage. Be sure to observe correct polarity, though decent brushless fans are RP protected. Apply power, trying not to short out the PSU. Good ones will survive this, cheap junk (and maybe your underwear ) not so much. Observe rotation (or not). One can discuss what it might be all day long, but to actually diagnose the fault means testing the thing. Incidentally, old PC power supplies make very handy bench/lab supplies, some even expose the AVC/voltage regulation functions of the SMPS controller somewhere on the board... For (limited) variable voltage output .

If you have a multimeter, test for power at the fan header. If you don't, test the fans for life the old fashioned way - Do the fans spin when powered externally? - if they do then it's the TC/PWM circuit on the GPU board. Also, computer power supplies are switch-mode these days - 'different wirings of the same transformer' doesn't really apply since you won't find a big 'ol transformer in anything made post 1985 . It's (split rails etc.) a similar concept though. The best indicator of a PSUs quality is it's weight, or finding a teardown on the 'net. (well, better to look inside yourself but you can't do that before you buy ). Cheap chinese units tend to skimp on heatsinks, use cheap caps, and generally undersize everything... then rate the thing based on 'peak' load rather than continuous. Case in point: bought a "480w with LED fan! best power supply!" a while back to replace a 300W OEM unit... the magic smoke came out at ~320W real load. Opened the sucker up to discover parts spec'd for a 250W! PSU inside. A real PSU should be able to pull 100% rated load, 100% of the time. If it can't then some tom foolery is going on with the ratings, and the quality of the whole unit is suspect. I tend to 'burn test' a new PSU, most good units will actually do somewhat more than the box rating... until thermal shutdown (a feature clearly omitted from the unit above). That said, I doubt it's the PSU. Far more likely the fans or PWM controller.

Moving the end of C: should be fine, I refer to the 'system reserved' partition.

I usually use Gparted Live or PartedMagic. Both run from USB or CD and support NTFS. Don't touch the system/UEFI partitions.

Like I said, the process is different. Starting with stay away from the manufacturers website. Add 'contrib non-free' to a config file and run 'apt-get update; apt-get install nvidia-driver' isn't really "an obscene amount of text" either, IMO. 'Download sgfxi and run the script' is even easier. Having the option of other GUIs, or no GUI at all is an excellent reason to do core system management tasks from the CLI - because it's always available. But whatever, suit yourself.

Sort of, it's not deprecated as such, just unnecessary for most drivers. If you have more than one driver installed for the same card (and your package manager doesn't automagically set it up), or need SLI/custom modes/overclocking/your monitor lies about its caps etc. it still goes in there.- - - Updated - - - FWIW, there is also SMXI/SGFXI, useful if you want the upstream or beta drivers (my nvidia drivers were installed thus), but you have to remember to re-run it after kernel updates. Oh, and, disclaimer: If anyone ever tells you to run a command, you should probably check the manual for said command (in this case 'man nvidia-xconfig') to see what it actually does.

You should be able to safely delete xorg.conf and run 'nvidia-xconfig' to generate a new, sane, default one that explicitly loads the proprietary driver. Does mint not do the easy metapackage "nvidia-driver" that pulls in the latest binary? -> 'apt-get install nvidia-driver', reboot - - - Updated - - - So you're just CLI-phobic then? No OS has full OpenGL acceleration on modern cards without installing drivers. You installed drivers on Windows, did you not? How many FPS do you get without them? The process is just different, that's all - try to do it the Windows way and you will fail. Linux is: Kernel + GNU toolchain + Xorg + Deshtop environment + apps. You don't rely solely on the desktop because that bit un-bolts. Loosing the GUI or graphics drivers is not "the world ending" at all, the rest of the system is probably just fine. Some Linux boxes have no GUI at all installed you know.

This is either something that is now fixed in the dev build, or it's yet another rare variant. So precise reproduction steps are needed, the more detail the better, but keep it simple. It's been said before (and that gif is awesome) but this thread moves fast. If you want to help fix it, see the github issue. Is this the same bug? Are you running a dev build with commit _bd6d274? Since I can't reproduce this bug anymore (post fix, above) who else is still seeing it?

Remember Murphy's Constant: Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value. Put all your cash in one mission and it will probably explode

Sounds like it flies as a shuttle should... fast and brick-like.

Dude, seriously? many of my designs have no airbrakes, spoilers or flaps. The are capable of flight well below 200mph and, unsurprisingly, quite land-able. "scrubs too slowly" by whose standards? you got numbers to back that up? I only put flaps and spoilers on large aircraft or those designed primarily for supersonic performance. No problem at all with small subsonic planes. As you say, small craft shouldn't need airbrakes to slow down... and they don't, if you take a sensible approach. Are you moaning about drag because you want the old (pre 1.0) soup-o-sphere back, by any chance? If so you're SOL, that system was so broken it's not funny and asking ferram to do that to FAR is almost an insult. "I want to change some constants and see what happens" is just fine, but "FAR is broken and I need this feature so I can 'fix' it" implies that you know better than the dude that wrote the thing. Step up or shut up. If you want a treacle atmosphere, knock yourself out. Just don't insist it's an improvement, and everyone else has got it wrong. Unless of course you can back it up, with math and citations.

I take it you're referring to the default Ubuntu/gnome/unity abortion of a UI... in which case I agree.If you don't like the UI, just install another. With Windows or OS X you essentially get one choice, with GNU you can simply replace your desktop GUI if the default doesn't suit. While no one option is as polished as the OS X UI, they're pretty nice these days, and you can even mix & match components individually to find something you like. If you're that lazy, so be it. For me it was : Download KSP, unpack archive, ./KSP.x86_64. No idea where you found those hoops. Do I complain about jumping through hoops when I must run a game in Windows? Installing an OS is not much more trouble than any other software.

In my day job, I find this kind of irrationality especially infuriating. I mean, cool, wire cross-section has its own unit of measurement... But as it is a cross section why not use the same units as everything else? You know, so basic math can answer that question without converting any specialised units, or trying to figure out where the equipment was made. While imperial units can be convenient - I often use feet and inches in common discussion - for science, engineering, finance, etc. it's more efficient to use a common base and standardised units. So yeah, go metric. Be nice if we could all decide on common voltages and colour codes too, but that'll never happen.

Nobody likes a backseat hacker. While the settings page being broken is a valid bug, "you're doing it all wrong" isn't going to fly here without some impressive math and proof-of-concept code. Your extraordinary claim that FAR is somehow fundamentally broken and doomed to imminent extinction requires extraordinary evidence, otherwise it is just noise. If you really don't like how it works, FAR is GPL. Fork it, fix it, and prove your case.

Meh, just change your user-agent. Aside, that wiki page is a bit old, no? there's been no 'firefox' since sarge. Or do you have a secret repo I don't know about?While I can usually remember how to use VI, that doesn't mean I have to like it... I'll use it if it's all I have on hand, but the very next step is to install something that doesn't expect you to remember a bunch of key combos and commands for basic functions. Most of the time that 'something else' is midnight commander. Fond memories of DOS & a fine file manager / editor etc. in it's own right. Given a VI/Emacs choice, I'll go for "neither, unless backed into a corner." - - - Updated - - - FWIW, the atmo/re-entry effects are a dog with an NVIDIA card too - I suspect it's more the games OpenGL implementation than the driver or GPU here.

Well, "sink or swim" was my first escape from Microsoft too... Slackware 3.5 on a 486 Back then just getting a GUI with 16-bit colour was a mission and there was no package management - working out library dependencies etc. was by hand... OOTB = Out Of The Box. Ubuntu aims to provide a comfortable default desktop and lots of clicky helper apps, while Debian is more about sensible base system and infrastructure - as testified to by the sheer number of spin-offs and derivatives.

Almost exactly like Firefox in fact... so much so that one might think it's just a repackage Try a few desktops if you're not sold on Cinnamon, you can install others alongside & pick at login

Any debian-based distro will do what you want, the only real differentiating factors are OOTB software loadout, default configuration & community support. I personally find mainline Debian well suited to just about anything, and run it on servers and desktops both. It's not quite as polished desktop-wise as *buntu, and the community can be a little less, ahh... welcoming, though the SNR and overall quality of information is better. To quote: "Ubuntu forums try to be like a coffee shop in Seattle. Debian forums strive for the charm and ambience of a skinhead bar in Bacau. We intend to keep it that way. " Your first hurdle on any distro is going to be GPU drivers, as most contain proprietary code and are not installed by default. Many distros automate this with some kind of GUI "driver wizard", use it if it's easier but be aware it's just a frontend to the package management system. Whatever you decide to go with (try some livecd/usb images or install in a VM to test drive) the best advice I can give is this: GNU/Linux is GNU/Linux, no matter the 'flavour'. Learn how to use the package management tools and the command-line. You will need to sooner or later and it's better to get comfortable with this stuff... before you break the graphics drivers and need to fix things without a GUI. GUIs come in all manner of shapes and sizes, but bash is bash Package managers are arguably the core feature of a "distribution" and can be a fairly alien concept to people used to Windows, with it's "run the app vendors installer" installation process. If you get a grip on APT, you'll be able to work with any debian-derivative, whether the particular desktop GUI provides a helper app or not. Of course there's no reason you can't run KSP on another distro - e.g. Fedora or Slackware. It's much the same, I've run all the big distros at some stage but come back to Debian - because I am lazy, and Debian 'just works' (so long as you don't break it) VI is the most obnoxious, counter-intuitive editor I have ever encountered. And I have my fire retardant suit