The GPU project has now a new strange sort of guestbook: it is a globe map where everyone can add his/her/its node. Many thanks to the Globetrotters for turning phantasy into reality.

spartacus, spartacus

Three heavy days of hacking with Nigia to bring spartacus back in life. On Wednesday, we installed the AK39N with the Athlon XP 2400 and 512 Mega RAM on board, substituing the old AMD 400 MHz. After plugging in CD-ROM and motherboard, we tried to install SuSE Linux 9. SuSE refused to install, probably because of the old Matrox Millenium 4MB graphic card. Windows 98 refused to recognize the old CD-ROM (we did not have the original floppy disk). Fortunately, SuSE Linux 7.3 Server Edition recognized everything and installed: spartacus was then very very fast, a rocket in the sky, a hunting-leopard in a turtle competition. The only problem was the cooler: we could not hear each other while working on the monster. It was like being in the bowel of a huge ship with Diesel engines.

On Thursday, we decided to buy a new cooler: 15$ housed in my pocket lost their home. I bought a timer and a new power rack for 40$ as well, so that spartacus would power on and off by itself. We were excited: we could understand Dr. Frankenstein while he was blowing life into Frankenstein junior.

While giving power to the mainboard for short times, we saw the new cooler running only for two-three seconds. Nigia could solve the problem by building inside IT another old power supply (without 3.3V output), which dedicated its power to the new cooler. The monster was now featuring two power supplies, one motherboard, three CD-ROMS, two Ethernet cards and one 15 GB hard disk... Nonetheless, the speakers were playing an acheronting sirene. The TCP/IP Oracle gave us two possible answers for that problem: wrong voltage or overheating.

But the motherboard was still refusing to run normally. Yesterday, we went to another computer shop. The Indian keymaker showed us a box filled with overheated AMD Athlons: they feature a black spot below the processor. It seems that while Pentiums can run half an hour without cooler, Athlons break after one minute. We then went back home to check if our Athlon was having this "feature", but it was not. Currently, we are investigating what could be broken...