Blizzard arrived yesterday (Thursday) and below are a few photo’s of what the lounge looked like after the un-boxing and assembling it.

In case you’re wondering what blizzard is, its the my new computer. I’ve been wanting a new “powerful” machine for a while and finally decided to bite the bullet and get one. So far its assembled and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn is installed and I’m doing all the tweaking and customising that makes the machine feel like mine.

The cool thing is that everything works perfectly with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn out of the box, I did have to install the nVidia drivers and play around to get TwinView working correctly but Twin View isn’t exactly a common thing on work/home PC’s. There are a few minor niggles that I need to sort out, like why under gnome the end key won’t work, works fine in the console and how to get the rest of the fancy buttons on the keyboard to work. (I think this may require a kernel module which isn’t yet in Feisty.)

Here are the specs for the machine in case you want to build something similar, if I could change anything on this it would be the Microsoft Keyboard (I like “old school” keyboards with out all the multimedia buttons.) and the case (don’t like the blue lights.).

Asus P5N32-E SLI Motherboard
XFX Nvidia 7800GT 256MB PCIe Graphics Card
2 x 1024MB DDR2 Dimms
2 x 320GB Seagate Barracuda SATA-300
1 x ASUS DVD Writer
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4 GHz CPU
Aero Cool Masstige-A Case
450W ATX Powersupply
Microsoft Business Pack – USB Keyboard & Optical Mouse
Logitech X230 Speakers
Samsung SyncMaster 931BW 19″ Wide Screen LCD
Fujitsu Siemens 19″ Wide Screen LCD (Already had this one.)

I love the machine it’s fast, reasonably silent and runs Beryl and anything else I throw at it. Only thing I don’t like is the blue LED fans that ship with the Aero Cool case, they’re a little too *bling* for me and the side window which means I’ll have to make it look “pretty” inside the case. This machine is going to be my home development machine so the extra horse power will come in handy when I use Virtual Machines for testing stuff and I’ve also got a machine I mess around on with stuff like Beryl.

So why Blizzard? Well I needed a name for the PC and my other machine’s are called Rain and Fire and after seeing the “cold blue” look of the LED fans I decided that Blizzard wouldn’t be a bad name.

Over the next few days I’ll post a bunch of info about configuring stuff and getting minor things to work (like Twin View) but for the moment I want to sit and play with my new toy.