System Upgrade

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This morning I woke up wanting to live life on the edge- so I began upgrading my Linux kernel on my 'BlackFlame Hydra' workstation. Not a particularly riveting way for most people to spend a Saturday afternoon- but then, I'm not like most people.

When I build 'BlackFlame' just over two years ago, I immediately began installing my favorite Linux distro, 'Slackware' (ver. 10.1), and have been periodically tinkering and upgrading various components of it over the years. One thing I have largely left intact is my Linux kernel. It's been steadily chugging along at version 2.4.30. But today I decided to bring the system up to 2007 and upgrade the kernel to version 2.6.21.5. And while I was playing the role of 'Linux Admin' today, I figured I would work on fixing a few known problems with the system- such as the horrendous performance when burning a DVD disc, which typically would send the CPU usage to almost 100%., as well as getting Cedega (which allows me to play WIndows games under Linux) up and running without error.

I was very surprised when the system came to a login prompt upon booting the new kernel for the first time. I'm usually not that lucky on a kernel upgrade- especially jumping between major kernel releases- like going from 2.4.to 2.6. Unfortunately my DVD situation isn't resolved quite yet- now I'm not even sure how to access the drives much less enable DMA on them.
Video card seems to be working so far- still not sure of 3D acceleration, but once I get Cedega running, that should answer that question quickly (I'm not expecting to have 3D acceleration- ATI linux support sucks!). And I'm not completely certain I have sound working yet either. But besides those issues, everything seems to be in working order thus far. At least the system isn't struggling or is crashing programs.

I've also come to determine that it's probably time for a RAM upgrade in the near future as well- as my current 1GB of Kingston SIngle-Channel SDRAM probably is a big hindrance to the overall performance of the hardware. While there are plenty of other upgrades I'd love to make to the system (3rd monitor- 22" LCD widescreen, 500GB more Hard Drive space- which would bring me almost to 1 TB (Terabyte) in disk space), this is probably the one that would make a real difference in the overall performance of the system.

I've had some success with the upgrade so far- but there is still plenty more to upgrade and fix before this little project of mine is finished. But once all is said and done- I know it'll be worth it.