johnbarrytech.com

The ordeal is over. I upgraded my computer in July. I lazied out and decided to spend a little more money and have experts build it for me. I knew I’d pay a premium for it, but frankly I didn’t know enough about the current high-end gaming rigs and what it takes to put them together.

The last time I built my own computer from scratch was in college, and I was dealing with a bunch of fly-by-night places and buying the cheapest stuff I could find. Naturally, the computer didn’t work and eventually my father had to step in and help me fix it. (Important lesson was learned here: the cheapest is almost never the right solution; you’d better be damn sure you know WHY they’re cheapest if you’re going with them)

This colored my perspective on rolling my own. . . until this one. First off, the company I purchased it from -Vigor Gaming, has been nothing but professional the whole way. The machine I bought from them is a freakin’ beast. Unfortunately, I ordered it in July and ended up getting it working in December. Motherboard issues, damage during shipping, you name it. The last time through we shipped the video card separately from the computer, and I installed it when the machine got here. It worked.
If it had been my own machine, I think it would have been a much faster turnaround time to have it up and running, but all in all it was just bad luck.

But the good news is: THE SYSTEM IS HERE!
I’ve been spending the last week or so getting it configured. Vista’s . . . not as good as Ubuntu but not horrible. It runs Left for Dead and Fallout 3, so it’s serving its purpose.
I’m running VirtualBox inside Vista, with an Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex sitting inside of it. I’ve been configuring it the last week or so, trying to get back up to speed from the configurations on the old development box. The .bash files were fine, but getting some of the applications back to where I want them are taking a bit of time.

Fortunately, I’m pretty close to having a functional development environment again.
This time I’ll get a snapshot of it so it’s frozen.

(minor aside – god bless subversion. I somehow wiped out all the files in my working copy when I moved from my other machine. Just a quick svn checkout and I was good to go, ready to keep on jamming)

So currently it’s:
Vista running VirtuaDesktop, setting up 4 desktops.
I’m running VirtualBox Ubuntu 8.10 on one as a development environment
I’ve started to set up Samurize, but I might end up skipping that. I’m trying to figure out what the balance should be on what gets done where. . . is Ubuntu strictly the “write code and deploy” box, or will I run Evolution there, etc

Work in process.