Really Big Computer Ramble: SolydX Linux and a Dell Dimension 8300

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• published: 25 Jan 2016
• views: 6498

As promised: you can skip over my complaining and general cattiness by seeking to the eight minute mark. Sometimes a person just has to vent, and so I did. I make no apologies for this, and even as much as I consider myself to be a nice guy, would suggest that anyone offended by such promptly get over it. The rest of this video discusses in my usual rambling style (you have been warned!) giving an old Dell Dimension 8300 a new lease on life with a Linux distribution that was new to me: SolydX. In working with it so far I've been pretty happy. (And in a continued bid to remain that way, I still haven't set up the printer.) I'm not yet 100% certain on this, but I think the only support for the Radeon HD 2400 at this point is via open source drivers. I've received conflicting information. Documentation from Ubuntu and Debian (upon which SolydX bases) suggests that only HD 5000 and better GPUs are supported via closed source drivers (fglrx). AMD disagrees -- they offer a 2013-era closed source driver bundle for PCI Express Radeon HD 2400 GPUs. Those drivers disappear if an AGP compatible GPU is selected, implying that perhaps bridged GPUs are not supported. Thankfully the open source drivers seem to be working perfectly well: I've noticed no glitching, instability or corruption. The only functionality that seems to be missing is a facility for general purpose GPU computing: and other than being silly, there's no real point to doing that on a Radeon HD 2400. And maybe that wouldn't work with a bridged GPU either. (As best I remember, the Radeon HD 2400 GPU is minimally capable of this.) That odd ghosting effect you see is a quirk of the image sensor used in Canon's FS200 camcorder. It is most prominent when shooting in low light, although what part of being almost directly under a four tube F32T8 fixture counts as "low light" is beyond me. I wish at times that the FS200 were a better camcorder than it is -- it feels like such a nice precision instrument in the hand, certainly better than any other flash memory camcorders I've tried, which feel like cheap plasticky toys. This video was losslessly (and very, very quickly!) edited with VideoReDo Plus. Unfortunately, Youtube appears to be unfairly penalizing those of us who do (or at present, can only) shoot and upload in standard definition by imposing a very low data rate for new uploads. Compare this video to much older examples that I've uploaded and I think you'll agree -- there's quite a difference between new and old! Almost equally unfortunate is my having totally misplaced my registration information for VideoReDo Plus...or it would have been if its developer hadn't issued me another demonstration key. There are, as usual, some mistakes and things I forgot to talk about in this video. I noticed them while watching it prior to upload. Which means I'm the first viewer and you're not. So there. :-) Of course, I then had to take care of some other stuff, so I forgot what these mistakes and omissions were. I'm not dedicated enough to rewatch this video in the name of finding them. If you think you've found one, feel free to point it out (be nice) and I'll clarify as appropriate. And just to head it off at the pass: it's practically certain that whatever money I've put into this computer, I'll more than make it back through this video.