My New Old Computer

I decided I want a desktop PC again, but I’m cheap and impatient and don’t really care about having the world’s fastest computer, so I’ve repurposed the old server I had, which was a repurposed Windows Vista tower.

That shows how old it is. But in its defence it is an Intel i7, if a first gen i7… It’s got 24GB of RAM, a 1TB hard disk and a PCIe wifi card!

I installed Void Linux on it, and it turned out to be a total nightmare.

The wifi card is a Broadcom 4321, which isn’t directly supported by Linux. I had to do a little dance to appease the corporate gods to get the firmware, but after that it worked. Mostly. It’s incredibly old so only supports 802.11g; the Linux drivers don’t support 802.11n, even though the hardware does. It also had a really bad signal. See my last post for more info on how I resolved that problem.

It also had an old Nvidia graphics card. I’ve never tried to use Nvidia cards under Linux before, but I have heard they can be difficult, and this one turned out to be… well… difficult.

Very difficult.

It just absolutely refused to auto-detect the monitor’s native resolution, so I had to force it with some Xorg config-fu. I tried the Nvidia closed-source drivers and they were quite bad. They would randomly freeze the screen when coming out of suspend, or when the screen blanked. And still didn’t recognise the monitor’s native resolution.

After a couple of days of fighting that I gave in and bought an AMD card off of Ebay, which arrived today and worked immediately, at the correct resolution and without me having to try millions of picom configuration options (the Nvidia would cause Xorg to lag when I looked at the BBC news website with picom set to enforce vsync).

As of right now it seems to be working great, with the caveat that anything that requires disk access is pretty slow. I’d forgotten how SSDs make even slow computers feel fast. I need to work out how to get an SSD into this thing. I have a couple of 2.5" SATA SSDs, but no way to mount a 2.5" drive. I’m struggling to find adapter brackets.

I don’t know if I can buy an MSATA adapter and use one of those Wham Bar shaped drives. I tried that on my NAS and it wouldn’t boot, but that may have been because it was NVMe rather than SATA. I don’t know.

Oh yeah, I also got a TESmart KVM, which was horrendously expensive, but is really handy for switching between this machine and my work laptop.

It’s getting there.