Remember how I ordered my PSU from the one place that had 4 in stock? Well, I just got an e-mail this morning telling me it’s actually on order and they won’t get it until 9/19. So much for getting up and running again quickly.

I’m not impressed by their “real-time stock” listing being wrong and deceptive. Incidentally, the place is shopblt.com. I sent them an e-mail letting them know what I think of this.

I was attempting to get my “new” old laptop to a usable point. It’s a P3-500 with 64MB of PC100 RAM and a 6GB hard drive.

Although the specs say 256MB is the memory max, I got it up to 384 (It couldn’t handle 512). When attempting to upgrade the hard drive to a 20GB spare I had around, however, I managed to somehow rip the 1.5″ IDE cable.

The problem wasn’t apparent until I was unable to format the new disk, and when regressing to the old disk, the same problems happened. But it took a disk utility I found at the IBM/Hitachi site to tell me that the cable was the problem, and I wasn’t just somehow destroying disks.

Unfortunately, a replacement for this 1.5″ cable runs $25 at the cheapest parts site I could find, and up to $50 at others. Tack on $10 shipping and that’s a fairly expensive mistake.

Oh well. Guess I should sleep more before next time I attempt computer maintenance.

Fortunately Gentoo’s brand-new X-enabled LiveCD saved the day. I was able to work without a functional hard drive by using that and ssh-ing to the Pegasos, my temporary workstation.

I decided to go with the Seasonic over the Antec for a few reasons:

• I didn’t feel that 500W was enough over the 450, which was underpowered.
• It has six 4-pin plugs instead of five, and I will use all of them for 2 optical drives, 2 hard disks and 2 fans.
• It got much better ratings on the Tom’s Hardware 6-week stress test, and never ventured outside ATX12V spec.
• The main draw of the Antec was that its fan stayed off until 200W was drawn, but my board will probably always require at least that much.

As a testament to how good the Seasonic is, I had to go to close to 20 different sites to find one where the S12-600 wasn’t either back-ordered or selling at a rip-off price.

Chris, you’ll be happy to know that the nv driver has a preliminary patch for EXA, Xorg’s next-generation acceleration architecture.

I’m happy to see eselect growing in acceptance and buy-in, because it accomplishes the same purpose as a deferred GLEP I wrote a while back, “Consistent Gentoo tool naming scheme.”

Thank you to everyone working on it!

I just picked up the copy of Linux User and Developer at Border’s tonight, to see the main story be on PPC — and in specific, Terra Soft … and Genesi! They were even mentioned on the cover, and there was a huge box on the second page of the story all about Genesi. I hadn’t realized they’d given out 200 boxes to devs.

Now that’s some good PR.

Four of the Papst 8412N/GL case fans (rated the quietest, by far, in my 2-in/2-out combination).

Perhaps two more for the CPUs, if the PSU I get has enough 4-pin connectors for all of them plus my 3-4 drives.

Two Thermalright SLK800 heatsinks, if I can find somewhere that sells them.