Titan has arrived

Not sure I've named my rig Titan yet, as it's the main character in one of my very favorite short stories of all time, called Shared Experience by Keith Laumer in Bolos Book II: Unconquerable. Titan is, as you might imagine, gigantic and loud and powerful.

However as this is my first workstation rig I'll probably use a different name. Possibly the first of Titan's friends in the book. I have to get ahold of a copy of the book to put the character names down. I'll name my network components after them.

So for now I'll call it Titan but only as a placeholder. Titan arrived today at work! And while it certainly is not loud, it is damn heavy...had to bring it down to my car on my wheeled chair.

I had a hell of a time getting it to boot from USB and I'm still struggling with that, actually. I *think* I needed to have a harddrive in, which I didn't at first - so I read a little while I used my wife's borrowed win8 ultrabook to put Ubuntu on one USB drive and Server 2012 R2 on another. I finally got the Server 2012R2 stick to boot from the internal USB port (inside the case) with the SSD attached. Server 2012R2 installed in like 10 minutes, it was pretty amazing.

Getting drivers installed was a little more of a pain than with a desktop OS, but not much really. My main issue is that I tried to get the damn thing to display on my monitor correctly and totally failed. Max resolution it would recognize was 1600x1200 which is technically a supported resolution but it doesn't look good at all. Things are sharp enough to read but there's bad color bleed and ghosting which is really distracting.

So I found a little app that allows you to manipulate EDIDs which I really don't even understand and I tried to force it to it's native resolution - which failed, and might have confused the hell out of the monitor as now it won't even display the lower resolution correctly (it's significantly offset).

 I'm looking at two potential explanations, one that my video card doesn't support the resolution I'm looking for, which bears more investigation (diferent sources say diff't things on this card, a shitty Radeon HD 3450), and the other that this monitor may only support it's native 1920x1200 resolution on HDMI. I currently have it plugged in through a cheapo VGA cable. I have an HDMI cable which I might go ahead and buy an adapter for, DVI-HDMI. The cable is much longer so it'll be a lot less awkward to maneuver around the system, which is a total PITA right now because there's about 3 inches of slack in my VGA cable.

So all in all I've got all the drivers from Dell at least downloaded, got my bluetooth working, got my video working OK, updated BIOS (it was 16 releases behind!)...still lots and lots of crap to do before I start messing with plugging in additional ram and optimizing the SSD. And I still haven't been able to boot Linux on this thing yet.

And then it's off to Hyper-V land, I think! I've got about a dozen courses lined up at the Microsoft Academy. As I find really good stuff I might make a sticky blog to keep track of it for interested people.

Once again it's way too damned late for me to be doing this, ha.