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WHAT'S UP
[2014-12-23] I ended up with this machine a couple of weeks ago almost by accident. The Kontron motherboard of Nanite had been unstable from the beginning, and it has a very nice CPU for its time, so I had been planning a replacement mobo for a long while. Finding a decent board for these CPUs turned out quite hard, and the one I ended up buying had SODIMM slots, prompting me to find new memory too. Fortunately for me, a friend had a few spares from a fried machine. I also had some spares in the power, cooling and disk fronts, meaning I was just a CPU short of a full machine. Incidentally, I also had a CPU-heavy project going on, and the various cryptocurrencies are also hungry for hardware (disk/RAM mostly), so it made sense to finalize the setup with a used T7200 for just a few euros.
| CPU temperature monitor | coretemp, ISA bus | lm_sensors |
| CPU undervolting | acpi_cpufreq | Inactive, see below |
| Ethernet | sky2 | |
| Integrated graphics | i915 | |
| IDE/ATA | ata_piix | |
| SATA | AHCI | Or emulating IDE if set in BIOS |
| Sound | Intel HDA |
This motherboard exhibits the first issue described at the PHC troubleshooting thread. While the CPU is well undervoltable and I believe I can manage building and loading the module after all these years, a bad BIOS prevents this.
It is not a huge practical problem with good cooling, but certainly a matter of principle to keep in mind when buying motherboards in the future.
A rather typical "feature" of motherboards from this era, presumably related Redmondian restrictions. If 32-bit Windows cannot access more than 3 GB of RAM, then nobody else should have the privilege either, including 64-bit Linux. On a slight positive side, memory used by the integrated video is not counted, so we get the "full" 3072 MB for the OS.
Another typical misfeature of Windowsy workstation paradigm; who on Earth would use a computer without display and keyboard? Fortunately, this warning can be turned off.
The undocumented RCA connector at the back panel turns out to be a digital audio output, which is nice, so no need to play with the header.
Part of a computing cluster. I heard it on the grepvine. Also, I heard you like penguins (pingvin or pingvine in many languages) so you can "ping vine" on your penguin.