I got my potato CDs Saturday and I installed the beast yesterday at home, no surprise, it is Debian. I'm running a woody at work, thanks to the large bandwith but at home I just have a little cnx, only IRC, little dls and a little web surfing. It will be cool to have a tested platform so I can work without do software install and worrying about that. I plan to test GTK developpment, GNOME libs and XML stuff, I have some ideas in mind so I will play with that. Unfortunaly, I don't have the source CDs but I can buy them at Ikarios and I will.

I also switched on lwm, E annoyed me. lwm is cool, although I made some "configuration" : put the cursor in black instead of red, the borders are 6 pixels wide, I use helvetica, I set the DEFAULT_TERMINAL to "term-custom" which is a alias on 'xterm -bg grey -fg black' so I can change that easily, and I swapped button 1 and 2 on the mouse. I also removed the "hostname:" in the title of the windows. The lack of "Alt-Tab" combo annoy me cause I must use the mouse to change windows and the lack of virtual desktops also. I will see if I can hack this one easily from wm2 and for the "Alt-Tab", it will be harder cause I never do X coding.

This afternoon, I tested our demo NetApp, I will put some results online when finished. I had some trouble cause the bottleneck is IMO the network system, not the disks system. There is the built-in 10/100 NIC and a Quad 10/100 NIC which support trunking or fail over. So a 4 * 100 Mbits virtual interface would be cool if we had a switch which support trunking. And we don't have one. The test procedure is : NFS mount, bonnie -s 1000 and look at results. I will say more on this tomorrow.

You will find the preliminary report here. There is also a screenshot of my lwm desktop.

I didn't put the NetApp benchmark but I had 2900 K/sec versus 5017 K/sec for my box. As sh pointed to me, "it sucks". But I will redo the test tomorrow.