Overclockix 3.7 Released

prostoalex writes "Overclockix 3.7 is released, available via bittorrent. It's a live Linux CD with a bunch of utilities for 'torturing' the PC hardware, hence the name. The authors seem to take a reasonable approach on graphical desktop, cutting out what they consider unnecessary eye candy, but leaving in the tools essential for effective GUI. 'Some new package highlights such as knoppix firewall, vlc, superkaramba, KDE 3.3.1, newer 2.6.7 kernel, NX client, and many more', the site says."

Kinda late...

[ThisNukes4u]

Why is this being posted just now? Not that this isn't really interesting, but the link says it was released on December 7th...

Burn-In

[mboverload]

Some people are sure to mention this, but I want to put out the fire before it starts.

"Burn-In", aka running new components at their max to get them to run faster, is complete hemp. There is no evidence to support this, and you are just decreasing your machine's life. However, burning-in can show a faulty components.

Re:Is this useful for testing computer stability?

[gl4ss]

it's useful because it's a live cd.

no possibility of fucking up the filesystems.

Re:Overclocking damage via software, Possible on P

[X-wes]

For those of us who don't get the joke, this was the text of a fictional advertisement from HomestarRunner.com [homestarrunner.com]. It ran on Bubs' Concession Stand for Strong Bad's damaged computer after Bubs used his shotgun as an antivirus device.

Linky [homestarrunner.com]

Re:Linux doesn't need any more distros

[Dot.Com.CEO]

I am fed up of seeing this stupid comment on every other story posted in slashdot, and equally stupid replies by zealots who value "choice". There IS a standard distro. It is called Linux Standard Base. It is adhered to by Redhat and Novell and that means 99% of SUPPORTED workstations out there adhere to the standards. All the other distros, be it debian, gentoo, overclockix or whatever are either irrelevant (a distro to stress your hardware? Please...) or serve for a specific purpose (hobbyists, GPL freaks etc.). Just accept it and move on,

Re:Overclocking damage via software, Possible on P

[UncleScrooge]

Yeah, ATiTool kills video cards. I know form first hand experience. ggrrmmble. 500% video card fried....

Re:So useful for Windows OC'ers

[Anonymous Coward]

This was mostly true with Win9x, which never used STOPCLK instructions in its idle loop without running some third party utility like Rain or CPUCool. Thus, the CPU tended to get quite hot in Win9x, even when it wasn't doing anything.

Linux, BSD, and every WinNT variant use STOPCLK in their idle loops. This folklore is really no longer true.

Re:Burn-In

[DNS-and-BIND]

I used to work at AMD's Austin fab. Your processor is already burned-in at the factory. Actually, we used the term to mean taking the processors and BAKING THEM IN OVENS for several days, and then returning them to our facility and testing them, where the defective ones were sorted out. I think "burning in" is just a word used by people who don't understand it properly, like "big iron" means anything larger than a Sun 220R these days.

Paper throw! ....

[taniwha]

Of course I remember the "good old days" when line printers were men and a chain break could embed it in the wall across the room ...

Seriously though what you describe was called a 'paper throw' and probably ment the operators had set the thing up wrong ... basicly those old line printers had a control tape - a short length of paper tape with a bunch of holes in it, each time the page advanced a line the tape did too - the tape was the same length as a page (every time the printer had moved to a new page the tape had gone around once) - when the printer got a line to print it looked at the first character on the line (think fortran CC) and if it was a number N look at the Nth column in the tape and skip forward until it finds a hole in the tape in that column. So for example when you print labels you throw on a special tape with holes that match where the labels start etc etc and by convention '1' skips to the start of the next page because column 1 always has exactly one hole punched in it that lines up with the start of the page - you get the idea.

So what's a 'paper throw'? well if the operators ever put on a tape that has a column M that has no holes punched in it anywhere and someone prints a line that sais 'skip to column M' the tape spins forever without printing anything and paper streams (horizontally) out of the printer missing the basket that's supposed to catch it ....

Wow slashdotted!

[arkaine23]

Anyways to answer a few things that have been mentioned... DC apps are preconfigured but the configs are in the ramdisk so its not all that hard to change them. I generally include scripts which reconfigure them and restart them using atyhe newly-generated config. I try stick some instructions about this stuff on KDE's desktop in a folder aptly named Info. Also, I've been putting the default configs outside the clooped filesystem so ppl can edit the iso before burning to change the default DC application configurations for their own use. P.S It's pretty clearly stated that the distro has these apps included and runs folding@home automatically. Its also as easy as "foldoff" to kill the process. WM's- Overclockix has fluxbox and icewm and xfce. The older 3.4 version even have Gnome. You enter a code when booting to use these instead of KDE. Also there's an app in the menu to switch even when running live from the CD. KDE was the logical default choice since its the most popular and most widely-used desktop environment, and my target users are tend to be new to linux. Eye-candy: Lately for eye-candy I use just a single added icon theme and the inclus (not running by default mind you). There are some added KDE service menus for ease of use, and transperancy-configured terminals, backgrounds set for icewm and fluxbox... but not much else. To counter-balance, I disable a lot of services I think most ppl won't be interested in on a live CD. When you come right down to it, Overclockix is Knoppix with a little face-lift, some extra tools for stress-testing and distributed computing nuts, and slighttly different package selection whuich includes some popular user-reqit's more up-to-date on the whole than Knoppix is, being upgraded to Debian unstable packages.

Re:So useful for Windows OC'ers

[wrecked]

That is exactly how I got started with Linux. My Duron / Abit-KT7 / Matrox G450 box was chugging along fine from 1999 to 2002 under Windows 98se. Then one day in the summer of 2002, it "black screened" ie. "your registry is corrupt, press any key to restart system". Thereafter, it refused to load Windows except in Safe mode, and it crashed everytime I tried to increase the video mode beyond 640x480x16.

I swapped out all the cards, and isolated the problem to the Matrox G450. However, when I booted with a Knoppix CD, everything was fine at 1024x768, so I knew that the videocard was functional.

After spending the weekend downloading, installing and reinstalling the Windows drivers for both the VIA chipset and the Matrox videocard to no avail, my wife got pissed off at me. She asked me, "What's wrong with it?" and I said, "Well, the card works because Knoppix runs fine, but Windows seems to have a problem with it." So she told me, "Then get rid of Windows, and put Linux on it!" (bless her!). So since that day, we've been Linux only...

In case anyone is interested, this last summer, I installed Windows 2000 briefly for a specific application. Still encountered the same problem with the videocard. However, this time after much, much googling and experimenting, I came across a suggestion to lower the AGP Aperture to 4MB, and it worked. Apparently, the problem is the combination of the Matrox videocard and the Abit motherboard. Sorry, don't have the URL of the solution handy. But at this point, we're pretty used to Linux, and we're never going back (I removed the Windows 2k install after I was done with it).