Nothing new...

Things have been fairly uneventful on the BOINC front as AQUA don't have any FP work-units. My average has fallen to a point where I am just keeping my position in the world rankings and occasionally going up a place or two.

On a non-BOINC related front, I bought a 1TB Seagate "Expansion" drive which is a USB2 device that has its own power-supply. I plugged it into my home PC to move some backup files around and to my horror, the brand new drive started emitting some troubling "click ... click" sounds followed by "Device Not Found". I was on the point of taking it back to the vendor when I had a quick look in Seagate's forums to see if the issue is wide-spread. Turns out that it is a problem especially with the 1.5TB drives.

A user on the forum stated that he had overcome the problem by using a higher grade USB cable with a ferrite core on it ... I thought that was worth a try and used a cable off a Garmin GPS. What do you know? That solved the problem for me! I won't trust anything too important to that drive but at the moment it is doing service on a digital video recorder and seems to be working OK

Update

I am admitting defeat! Despite trying for a couple of days, I can not get both the PCI-e and the onboard GPU to work together on the JW-A785GM-Fusion motherboard. They each work fine on their own but the best I can achieve is a hung GRUB when they are both enabled. I have even tried "long-shots" like starting the kernel with the "nopat" parameter.
On the topic of the JW-A785GM-Fusion motherboard, I am not very impressed with this item. The user-manual actually refers to a completely different board layout, their website contains 3 versions of the BIOS are either "Beta" or are not very well documented and in normal operation, the board hangs on POST about 1 out of every 3 start ups. Generally I would say to avoid this product for any application.

On a happier note, I have passed the 7 million credit mark today! :-)

It works! ... well, in principle ...

Ok, so if you are using 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) and want to run Collatz on an ATI card, here is how it can be done. While it is really not the most elegant approach, it does the job.

1. Don't bother with downloading Catalyst from the AMD site, just go System > Administration > Hardware Drivers. After a search, there should be a "ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver". It turns out that this is Catalyst 10.4 anyway and gets rid of the issues with using .run files etc. As is also in the restricted drivers repository you will automatically get updates (time will tell if this is a good thing...)
2. Download BOINC in .sh format from Berkeley. Do not use GetDeb or the repository version, they will not work and this is what took me so long to get around. The GetDeb version should have worked as it is version "6.10.36". I used 6.10.17 which is the current recommended version. The only problem is that this worked in the middle of trying a large number of hit-and-miss options, so I have the installation on my Desktop and it requires root privileges. You may want to be a little more careful where you run the .sh file...
   
3. The only work available for 64-bit Linux/ATI is from Collatz and it is a manual install from their Power (Optimized) Application section. Read the good included "Readme" in the package if you are not familiar with where to put the library files for optimized GPU apps etc.

I still have a few things to do before this installation is complete, the most obvious one is to get the second (on-board) GPU up and running too. At this point, I think I might have a BIOS issue as the Catalyst Control Center reports it as an "Unknown Adapter"

Progress? ... Um, no...

Well, after 2 evenings of playing around with the new motherboard and ATI card, I have the appropriate ATI Catalyst 10.4 installed along with Boinc 6.10.36 and the Collatz 64-bit ATI application (along with its library files) ... and thats where things end. I can't see get Boinc to recognize either the PCI-e card or the onboard GPU. I have tried all the tricks I gathered when installing the nVidia cards and have added "boinc" to the "video" group etc
Reading a couple of forum posts I am getting the distinct impression that this might be as a result of an incompatibility between my hardware and the specific ATI driver or Linux kernel that I currently have installed. I may try older versions over the weekend to see if anything works.

Let the fun begin...

My new JW-A785GM-Fusion motherboard and XFX HD4550 graphics card arrived today. There seem to be a few options to play around with, the first is the motherboards ability to support "Hybrid Crossfire" between the built-in GPU and the card in the PCI-E slot. I assume that in BOINC terms this means both cards will land up working on a single work unit? While kinder in terms of memory usage, I think it will slow everything down to the lowest common denominator? Time will tell!
The other slightly alarming feature is the "128MB DDR3 Sideport" memory. While I understand that this makes the graphics card quicker as the system memory is not addressed every time, I just wonder if BOINC will see more than 128MB on the card?
I am planning to install Ubuntu's new 10.04LTS tonight along with the 10.4 ATI Catalyst drivers. I'm not convinced I will get it all up and working with Collatz work in one evening but as usual I live in my own little world of misguided optimism...

Hardware problems again...

A few months ago, I was unhappy to discover that my heat-pipe cooled 9400GT GPU was no longer visible to BOINC and as a result was not processing data-units. I assumed (based on the trouble I have had with nVidia cards in the past) that the graphics card was to blame.
When trying to boot the Athlon X2 this morning, it couldn't see the hard-drive ... panic set in as the back-up drive was cannibalized for a server a few weeks back and as a result there is a huge collection of photos that were not backed up anywhere.
I then had a revelation that it may be the mother-board, so tried another hard-drive and that didn't auto-detect either.
I brought the original drive into the office this morning and thankfully it works fine on another machine (and has now been backed up!)
I ordered a JW motherboard from my usual supplier and as this has a Radon ATI chipset have decided to give that a try. I also ordered a 4550 to go in the PCI-E slot. I know this isn't the ultimate in high speed cards but it is dirt cheap and has a low power consumption which is important for a computer that must survive summers without air-conditioning.
The only problem now is that the X2 will not be crunching AQUA FP units until the parts arrive and I find the appropriate Ubuntu drivers (I'm hoping this will not be too much of an issue...)