FX 6100 Six Core CPU System Still Working After Years

CPU: AMD FX 6100 Six core
8 gigs ram, Gigabyte $10 mobo

I added a SDD that actually died on me, not good....

So for a while I was just booting from USB flash and saving any data on another USB flash.

I got tired of that and got a super cheapo refurbished sata hdd for around $15, and installed Linux Mint 17 and it is awesome!

I love this feature:
Scroll wheel on mouse works on anything that the mouse pointer just hovers over, no need to click on the window to scroll it like M$ forces you to do, I keep trying that when I'm in windo$ but....

Everything just works, including sound and all the drives, usb device recognition....

This thing was only around $200 without the drive and it is over 2 years old now and still great.

AMD FX1600 CPU Svm Virtualization Extensions Check

# grep --color svm /proc/cpuinfo

svm present in the output in a terminal.

LinuxMint 13 Maya First Time Look On New Hardware

Look at earlier posts and you'll see I had an older, 32-bit, LinuxMint 12 Live CD that I tried out on this new set of hardware.

I got a Gigabyte motherboard, AMD FX 1600 6-core (!!) CPU, and a sick deal on DDR3 RAM, 8 gigs.  Insane prices... so I didn't even go thru my old HDDs hanging around to put one in there, but with all these various distros, I figured I'd check to see if any work.

Lots of them worked, and way better than the very old hardware I've been testing them all on.  Not all of them worked, and with 8gigs of ram, I really wanted to see if I could load the thing into ram to speed it up and eliminate the need for the bottleneck of the optical disk.

With Mint 12, I downloaded 13 to the download directory, pretty cool considering I wasn't even sure if that would work, it was darn fast with the Transmission bit torrent app already associated with the torrent file and popped right up.  Then I used Brasero to burn a DVD, it was just over the limit for a CD.

Rather than burn another, since so much has been going well lately, (unlike the old days, Linux has come amazingly far) I just trusted the burn and the disk and rebooted with it in the drive and it worked.

Next was using the boot option, "toram."  Debian has this option and it worked with Knoppix, SUSE, and maybe another distro, but not Ubuntu, surprisingly.  It did work with Mint as it is really Debian and Ubuntu-based.

Many distros don't have flash or the latest flash or codecs etc.  With Mint 13 Maya, it's been a very rare, strange ride so far.  Audio, video, apps, display, it's all good, so far.

Next step is to look for a DVD with more apps on it.  Although, Firefox, Gimp, Media player, and the others on this version could definitely do the job for a while.  No Pidgin, but Kapote, have to try that now.  Okular, really nice PDF reader.

Combine it with Google Docs, (soon to be Google Drive - why?...) and I don't even need persistent install. 

Debian FAQ in Old School Text Format

Debian old-fashioned text FAQ is still being updated, cool.

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ch-pkgtools.en.html

Lots of Apps Running All In Ram Including the Operating System LinuxMint Maya Version 13

Plenty of RAM available also, only using about 1.5gigs showing in system monitor.

Loaded OS with the "toram" boot option.

I'm impressed...

Image of CPU Load Shared Over 6 CPU Cores Linux Mint

This is so awesome, and it's running off the LiveCD.

And, I even was able to use Torrent to get another Linux Mint version and burned it to DVD, while the entire OS was loaded into RAM using the toram option on boot to free up the optical drive!

I haven't even installed a hard drive in this new box yet.

IDG News Service Found Embedded in Linuxforums

linuxforums regarding Suse toram, but also this IDG news service embedded news thing about new products.  Pretty interesting, I need to find this elsewhere, obviously....