bobpeers -> blog

Being one of those people that ‘knows’ about computers I often get asked if I can recommend computers to people.

I always find this very difficult for quite a few reasons.

• If they give me a budget do they actually want to spend up to the budget or do they really want the cheapest possible under the budget. I can always recommend very cheap computers but would they rather spend more and get one that is slightly more ‘future proof’.
• Understanding their priorities is very difficult. Would they rather have more RAM or is a wireless keyboard and mouse more important. If they want wireless, do they want 802.11g or are they moving large files over a network and are prepared to pay for 802.11n? They say they play games but are we talking hardcore gamer or the odd game of Solitaire?

It’s often made worse by the fact they they probably don’t fully understand what they want either, it’s just that I’m always a bit nervous recommending something that they might not approve of after they’ve bought it. In reality I know that this is very unlikely since they are far less critical than I am.

One interesting problem I have right concerns Windows 64 versions. A friend is looking to buy a gaming pc probably with and Intel E8400 processor. Having looked at the website of the company they might buy it from it’s clear that they recommend Windows 64 Bit especially since the default set-up of the computer has a whopping 8GB or RAM!. My problems are:

• With Vista 64 Bit many of his old games will not run at all since they will not be compatible with Vista, plus Vista 64 Bit requires signed drivers so many of his current peripherals just won’t work and new drivers don’t exist (nor will they ever)
• Vista 32 Bit still has compatibility problems plus only supports 4GB of RAM (see here and here for more information).
• In Denmark Windows XP 64 Bit is only available in the Professional Edition localised to the UK, it must be a Danish edition so that won’t work.
• Windows XP Home 32 Bit will work with his current games but only support 4GB of RAM. This is not a major problem but it seems like I’m going for the lowest common denominator.

Overall the situation is very confusing. I would really like to jump on the 64 Bit bandwagon since it’s they way of the future but until you can be sure all your hardware will work happily together.

I don’t want to obsolete all his games and current hardware by upgrading to Vista 64 Bit so I have no choice but to recommend a 7 year old operating system that will be officially discontinued as of June 30, 2008, not an ideal situation.

After realizing that my Windows NTFS partition was larger than required and running out of space on my Fedora partition I decoded I needed to move things around a bit.

My hard drive partitions look like this in fdisk.

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        1559    12522636    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            1560        2603     8385930    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda3            2604        2628      200812+  83  Linux
/dev/sda4            2629        9729    57038782+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            3880        9729    46990093+  8e  Linux LVM
/dev/sda6            2629        3879    10048594+  83  Linux

Basically after resizing sda1 I then had to move sda2 and sda3 to the left by the amount I reduced sda1. After this sda4 was extended to include the extra space.

After this my problems started as gparted does not deal with Logical Volumes so I then tried to use the system-config-lvm package in Fedora. The problem here was that I needed to extend one of my logical volumes into the free space instead of created a new logical volume.

As I was trying to extend the volume mounted as my /home partition I could not do this while the partition was mounted and there was no way to unmount home without booting into single user mode (init 1). Of course by doing this I no longer have a the X server running so I cannot use a GUI front end like system-config-lvm.

You also cannot change logical volumes without running the system you wish to use, by this I mean that you cannot boot into a live Linux distribution and work from there. I tried this using system-config-lvm from Fedora 9 beta on a USB drive and Fedora 8 failed to start on next boot as it still expected the old logical volume setup.

There was nothing to do but to learn the terminal command and go into single user mode.

# /sbin/init 1

This extends a volume by 9792MB larger than it’s current size

# lvextend -L+9792M /dev/Linux_volume/LogVol02

This extends the file system to cover the new size.

# /sbin/resize2fs /dev/Linux_volume/LogVol02

It all worked in the end but ws much harder than I expected.