Hardware

I’ve been trying to find these blasted mounting clips for the stock intel socket lga775 heatsink/fan units for the better part of the last month. If you’ve ever tried to install them, or even worse, remove the heatsink after a not-perfect installation, you’ll know why I need replacements. They break easily! Well, after spending a few hours looking at complete new replacement heatsink units and noting that half of them use these pins in the first place, I renewed my search and finally found a forum post link directly to the intel site where they sell them in packs of 4! ...

Continuing in the vein of ‘stupid hardware problems’, this week I discovered that the ASUS A7N8x deluxe motherboard I’ve been trying to nurse along as the backbone of my MythTV PVR basically doesn’t play nicely with linux, period. Don’t ask me why I didn’t try searching the web a little harder before, since most of the threads I’ve referenced below are ancient. Basically there is something screwy with its ACPI implementation, SATA controller, and just about everything else. ...

So I finally got my WatchGuard eval unit. 2 months after I would have liked, but c’est la vie, I guess they had some employee turnover over there and my box got lost in the shuffle. Upon opening the box, everything looks very nice, and yes, its all red, and very cute looking. Turning it on, however, the LCD screen just says ‘Booting OS …’ and never makes it farther… Not a great sign. ...