TOPIC: IBM
A bigger screen?
23rd February 2010A recent bit of thinking has caused me to cast my mind back over all the screens that have sat in front of me while working with computers over the years. Well, things have come a long way from the spare television that I used with a Commodore 64 that I occasionally got to explore the thing. Needless to say, a variety of dedicated CRT screens ensued as I started to make use of Apple and IBM compatible PC's provided in computing labs and other such places before I bought an example of the latter as my first ever PC of my own. That sported a 15" display that stood out a little in times when 14" ones were mainstream, but a 17" Iiyama followed it when its operational quality deteriorated. That Iiyama came south with me from Edinburgh as I moved to where the work was and offered sterling service before it too started to succumb to ageing.
During the time that the Iiyama CRT screen was my mainstay at home, there were changes afoot in the world of computer displays. A weighty 21" Philips screen was what greeted me on my first day at work, only for 21" Eizo LCD monitors were set to replace those behemoths and remain in use as if to prove the longevity of LCD panels and the validity of using what had been sufficient for laptops for a decade or so. In fact, the same remark regarding reliability applies to the screen that now is what I use at home, a 17" Iiyama LCD panel (yes, I stuck with the same brand when I changed technologies longer ago than I like to remember).
However, that hasn't stopped me wondering about my display needs, and it's screen size that is making me think rather than the reliability of the current panel. While that is a reflection on how my home computing needs have changed over time, they also show how my non-computing interests have evolved too. Photography is but one of these and the move to digital capture has brought with a greater deal of image processing, so much that I wonder if I need to make less photos rather than bringing home so many that it can be challenging to pick out the ones that are deserving of a wider viewing. Though that is but one area where a bigger screen would help, there is another that arises from my interest in exploring some countryside on foot or on my bike: digital mapping. When planning outings, it would be nice to have a wider field of view to be able to see more at a larger scale.
None of the above is a showstopper that would be the case if the screen itself was unreliable, so I am going to take my time on this one. The prospect of sharing desktops across two screens is another idea, one that needs some thought about where it all would fit; the room that I have set aside for working at my computer isn't the largest. After the space side of things, then there's the matter of setting up the hardware. Quite how a dual display is going to work with a KVM setup is something to explore, as is the adding of extra video cards to existing machines. After the hardware fiddling, the software side of things is not a concern that I have because of when I used a laptop as my main machine for a while last year. That confirmed that Windows (Vista, but it has been possible since 2000 anyway...) and Ubuntu (other modern Linux distributions should work too...) can cope with desktop sharing out of the box.
Apart from the nice thoughts of having more desktop space, the other tempting side to all of this is what you can get for not much outlay. It isn't impossible to get a 22" display for less than £200 and the prices for 24" ones are tempting too. That's a far cry from paying next to £300 (if my memory serves me correctly) for that 17" Iiyama, and I'd hope that the quality is as good as ever.
It's all very well talking about pricing, but you need to sit down and choose a make and model when you get to deciding on a purchase. There is plenty of choice so that would take a while with magazine reviews coming in handy here. Saying that, last year's computing misadventures have me questioning the sense of going for what a magazine places on its A-list. They also have me thinking of going to a nearby computer shop to make a purchase rather than choosing a supplier on the web; it is easier to take back a faulty unit if you don't have far to go. Speaking of faulty units, last year has left me contemplating waiting until the year is older before making any acquisitions of computer kit. All of that has put the idea of buying a new screen on the low priority list, nice to have but not essential. For now, that is where it stays, but you never know what the attractions of a shiny new thing can do...
Adding a new hard drive to Ubuntu
19th January 2009While this is a subject that I thought that I had discussed on this blog before, I can't seem to find any reference to it now. Instead, I have discussed the subject of adding hard drives to Windows machines a while back, which might explain what I was thinking. Trusting the searchability of what you find on here, I'll go through the process.
The rate at which digital images were filling my hard disks brought all of this to pass. Because even extra housekeeping could not stop the collection growing, I went and ordered a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green Power from Misco. City Link did the honours with the delivery, and I can credit their customer service for organising that without my needing to get to the depot to collect the thing; that was a refreshing experience that left me pleasantly surprised.
For the most of the time, hard drives that I have had generally got on with the job. However, there was one experience from a time laden with computing mishaps that has left me wary. Assured by good reviews, I went and got myself an IBM DeskStar and its reliability didn't fill me with confidence. Though the business was acquired by Hitachi equivalents, that means that I am touching their version of the same product line either. Travails with an Asus motherboard put me off that brand around the same time as well; I now blame it for going through a succession of AMD Athlon CPU's on me.
The result of that episode is that I have a tendency to go for brands that I can trust from personal experience. Western Digital falls into this category, as does Gigabyte for motherboards, which explains my latest hard drive purchasing decision. That's not to say that other hard drive makers wouldn't satisfy my needs, since I have had no problems with disks from Maxtor or Samsung. For now though, I am sticking with those makers that I know until they leave me down, something that I hope never happens.
GParted running on Ubuntu
Anyway, let's get back to installing the hard drive. The physical side of the business was the usual shuffle within the PC to add the SATA drive before starting up Ubuntu. From there, it was a matter of firing up GParted (System > Administration > Partition Editor on the menus if you already have it installed). The next step was to find the new empty drive and create a partition table on it. At this point, I selected msdos from the menu before proceeding to set up a single ext3 partition on the drive. You need to select Edit > Apply All Operations from the menus to set things into motion before sitting back and waiting for GParted to do its thing.
After the GParted activities, the next task is to set up automatic mounting for the drive to make it available every time that Ubuntu starts up. The first thing to be done is to create the folder that will be the mount point for your new drive, /newdrive in this example. This involves editing /etc/fstab with superuser access to add a line like the following with the correct UUID for your situation:
UUID="32cf775f-9d3d-4c66-b943-bad96049da53" /newdrive ext3 defaults,noatime,errors=remount-ro
You can also add a comment like "# /dev/sdd1" above that so that you know what's what in the future. To get the actual UUID that you need to add to fstab, issue a command like one of those below, changing /dev/sdd1 to what is right for you:
sudo vol_id /dev/sdd1 | grep "UUID=" /* Older Ubuntu versions */
sudo blkid /dev/sdd1 | grep "UUID=" /* Newer Ubuntu versions *
This is the sort of thing that you get back, and the part beyond the "=" is what you need:
ID_FS_UUID=32cf775f-9d3d-4c66-b943-bad96049da53
Once all of this has been done, a reboot gets done to mount the device. Once that is complete, you then need to set up folder permissions as required before you can use the drive. This part gets me firing up Nautilus, using gksu and adding myself to the user group in the Permissions tab of the Properties dialogue for the mount point (/newdrive, for example). After that, I issued something akin to the following command to set global permissions:
chmod 775 /newdrive
With that, I had completed what I needed to do to get the WD drive going under Ubuntu. After that IBM DeskStar experience, the new drive remains on probation but moving some non-essential things on there has allowed me to free some space elsewhere and carry out a reorganisation. Further consolidation will follow while I hope that the new 931.51 GiB (binary gigabytes or 1024*1024*1024 rather the decimal gigabytes (1,000,000,000) preferred by hard disk manufacturers) will keep me going for a good while before I need to add extra space again.