New desktop

Saturday, I finally built the new desktop system for work, which I also use as my primary home directory and mail server and a build system for Debian packages and other software. Today, I switched over to the new system. It's pretty and much faster, and also has the advantage of being built within the last five years, so I don't have to worry as much about the hard drive dying.

The new system is an HP Firebird 802, bought straight off their web site. The drawback from a Debian perspective is that it uses nVidia motherboard video (nForce 760i SLI), but it's supported by the non-free Linux drivers (despite being missing from the README). I'd prefer ATI or Intel video with free drivers, but not enough to veto the system for it. Otherwise, it's water-cooled, very quiet, and has a four-core Intel processor, 4GB of memory, and two 250GB hard drives.

I kept notes on the build and configuration in case they prove helpful for anyone else.

This is the first time I've built a system with LVM, and I even did an online resize of the root logical volume since the installer used an extremely small 7GB default size and I couldn't figure out the easy way to increase it in the installer. I like the flexibility of allocating space as I need it into separate logical volumes.