I've been upgrading hard drives. Well, from one point of view I've been downgrading hard drives: I have a bunch of 10K U160 SCSI drives that I've been replacing with 7K2 SATA drives. But this means that I can't hear a hard-drive rumble from the PC next door when trying to get to sleep, so it's for the best. In any event, the drives I had may have been fast, but were also a) old, b) small, and c) loud. For instance, the capacity in neither machine exceeded 200Gb... so getting 2 200Gb drives has made it all better without being too expensive.

In a hiatus while waiting for Dabs to take back a non-working drive (and I'm going to be somewhat wary of having to return stuff to Dabs again) I was running two of the old SCSI drives in a software raid-0 which was fun, though :)

I also fried my old Athlon (Duron? I lost track...) Fortunately, I found one shop on TCR that actually had Socket A Semprons in stock, so it's been replaced with one of those. Looks like I managed to damage the die anyway, even if I didn't actually fry it... but in any event, it's just junk now :|

Anyway, after sorting that out, I repaved Debian on the main machine, which was easy-- the new debian-installer seems a step up from the old dbootstrap (?). Then I decided that I might as well try installing the amd64 port instead of sticking with the i386 emulation, so I did that and that's what I'm using now. It still looks a bit wierd to see 64-bit addresses in ldd output :} Wrestled a bit to get the latest kernel and nvidia drivers installed, but all done now.

I'm also experimenting with using KDE as the desktop-- it's pretty slick. It always was quite nice, but I never got in the habit. Some of the chrome is very snappy-- e.g. the chequered fade-in tooltip for the K menu icon.