Where are the Opteron X Series C/APUs?

On May 29, 2013 AMD announced the launch of the Opteron X-Series family of processors, namely the Opteron X1150, and the Opteron X2150. At the time of this writing, it looks like only the latter survived.

For those of you searching for these chips, and boards to run them on, I hate to disappoint you, but:

I was in contact with someone at AMD, and was told that these chips are currently being sold to partners only, and are not in the consumer channels at this time. Whether they will become available to consumers later is not known. Bummer Fisherman.

This means you can technically buy them, but only as part of an HP ProLiant m700 Moonshot server cartridge. Of course that is going to cost a wee bit more than the $99 MSRP given for the X2150 chip. How much more? Rougly $37,000. That cost reflects the minimum purchase of "15 identically configured Moonshot m700 server cartridges." (source). Double Bummer Fisherman.

So for now, I won't be building my NAS server with Opteron parts. Instead, I will probably start with an HP ProLiant N54L, and do a few upgrades.

CES 2014: AMD Kaveri Tidbits

"It's the most wonderful time of the year..." OK, aside from the Polar Vortex as of late, for all us tech junkies it's a special time of year because CES is upon us! This year AMD has unveiled their new chip, Kaveri, and though there was not a lot of new info (no benchmarks publicly available yet), there are a few particularly interesting details.

A while back AMD joined The Document Foundation, offering to help refactor the code for LibreOffice Calc. Essentially what the folks at LibreOffice have accomplished since then is to leverage the hardware found in AMD systems (in particular, the GPU, or in the case of Kaveri, the APU) to do some very heavy lifting. Exactly how much the new hardware and code improved performance was revealed at CES:

Dual boot FreeBSD 10 with Windows 7

If you have installed FreeBSD 10 (this applies to 9.x as well), on top of a pre-existing Windows 7 install, you have noticed that there is no option (at least not by default) to dual boot. To enable dual booting open a shell in FreeBSD, su to root, and enter the following:

boot0cfg -B ada0

Reboot. Now when the system begins to boot, you should have options for booting into Windows 7 or FreeBSD.

HT: Edubuddy - Dual boot Windows 7 and FreeBSD 9.0

Change GDM login background image on OpenSUSE 11.4

First, let me start off by saying I truly dislike Gnome, and the attitude by the Gnome devs that somehow giving people options is a bad thing.  Why is it that I cannot easily change the background image of the Gnome login screen?  Why do I have to use hacks like this one?  Why do the hacks always have to change?  Anyway, for Gnome 2.32.1 which shipped with OpenSUSE 11.4 the way to change the login background image is like this:

As root:

mv your_new_image.jpg /usr/share/pixmaps/backgrounds/gnome/background-default.jpg

Where your_new_image.jpg  is the image you want to be the new background image.

Cygwin top

If you want to use top in Cygwin, you will need to install the procps package.  I have spoken.

W3 CSS3 validation

I was fiddling around with some text-shadow stuff (which is part of the CSS3 draft) on the gdb tutorial.  When I validated the CSS at W3C, I noticed that the validator, by default, chooses CSS level 2.1 instead of CSS level 3.  You can manually select CSS3 in the drop down menu here, but I want to be able to click on the link from each of my pages.  After all, the reason I have the valid HTML5 and CSS images on every page is to have a handy way to validate each one quickly and easily.  Anyway, the fix is pretty simple, which I found in this post.  Change the link for the CSS validator to this:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer?profile=css3

The part you need to add is in red.

Getting TweetDeck (Adobe Air) to use your default browser in Gnome

This has been a bit of an issue in the past. See this lifehacker article, which was inspired by Roy Tanck's blog post.  Currently, I am using Adobe Air 2.5.1 on OpenSUSE 11.3 - i386 (Yes, I have a crappy Atom powered net book).  Every time I would open a link in TweetDeck, it would open in Firefox rather than Chromium.  To make matters worse, the place in Chromium where I could set it as the default browser, the button is grayed out, and it says "Chromium cannot determine or set the default browser."  Bummer.  But fear not, as the solution is somewhat simple.  If you have the "custom menu bar" (not the default one which ships with OpenSUSE) you can do System->System->Preferred Applications, and change the default browser there.  Alternatively, you could run "gnome-default-applications-properties" in your shell to get the dialogue box opened up.  Once I got it open, on the "Internet" tab, I dropped down the menu under "Web Browser" and selected "Custom".  Then I put in /usr/bin/Chromium.  You would obviously replace that command with the browser you want to use.  And that's it!  I didn't even have to restart TweetDeck.  It just worked from there on out.