Reinstalled the home workstation jobs ye ... / 2010-09-27

Reinstalled the home workstation jobs yesterday with Ubuntu desktop. I had to adjust a few things during and after the installation: it has 2 network cards (one on-board at 100 megabit, one pci card at 1000 megabit which is the one actually in use) which left both unconfigured and it boots from a scsi disk while it has an IDE disk (the current hardware is from right before SATA disks) so I had to select a different disk to install the system on and a different disk to install the bootmanager.

But everything worked out nicely, all hardware is recognized. The setup for propetairy drivers came with the suggestion to install the nvidia driver for hardware accelerated video which worked. After the installation I added a few programs I really want to use (thunderbird, gimp, audacity). I had to tweak the sound settings a bit to get the correct default sound settings.

One of the reasons to do the reinstall was to have a good environment for audio editing. I hooked up the usb audio interface and it all works nicely. I will probably have to change the physical setup a few times to make it easier to record voice (a simple radiostudio-like microphone arm might be an idea). Digitizing cassette tape is now easier and I record audio to a disk which is in the backup scheme. Earlier I did audiowork on the laptop and copied the results over to this disk.

Cleaning out the dust bunnies from the system also reduced the noise and the temperature.