Got some good news and I’ve got some bad news…

First, the good news. The Everex PC is a nice computer. I’m glad that I bought it. It’s ultra quiet and ultra light. True…the case is rather generic looking, although, I expected it to be. I didn’t even take the speakers out of the packaging because the kids already have a 2.1 speaker setup that already rattles the pictures on the walls. The keyboard is really cheap looking but ultra quiet. Typing is pretty comfortable (<- whatever that means). The mouse is a ball mouse. Not surprised nor disappointed since their old mouse was a ball mouse too.

Now for the bad. The kids thought that gOS was cool for about 5 minutes. I was hoping that they would like it but even I got a little frustrated with things while I was setting it up. It isn’t because Enlightenment sucks or anything. It has more to do with me being a KDE, Gnome, XFCE user for my entire Linux life. I’m a noob regarding gOS/Enlightenment. So rather than piss with it in frustration I just let them decide what they wanted. It’s their computer after all. That turned out to be Edubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy). They chose wisely. So I formatted the whole drive and installed a clean OS in about 20 minutes. After that I had 136 updates and some tweaking to do. 

Finally, the graphics situation wasn’t the best. The Everex PC comes with an onboard Via UniChrome Pro graphics chip. I know nothing about these. Edubuntu did not have the openChrome driver already installed (at least I couldn’t find it). It didn’t matter because I gave up rather quickly. I decided not to research this and just dump in a PCI nVidia 5200 FX card with a 128MB of memory that I already had. It’s an old card but it still worked and was plenty for SuperTux or Torcs. I knew that it would work well. Unfortunately the Everex does not have an AGP slot so you’ll have to get a PCI card if you can still find them. After getting the nVidia driver in check I was ready to go. I even have compositing running. The kids love the wobbly windows.

So in conclusion, if someone out there is wishing to use the gOS Everex PC as a light gaming rig for the kids or for yourself then you may have to invest in a PCI graphics card. I was fortunate that I already had one, especially on Christmas day when I was trying to get it set up. Not often that I have that kind of luck.

The kids are happy with their new PC. Of course…they also got Guitar Hero 3 and Star Wars Complete Saga for the Wii…soooo…they haven’t spent a lot of time on the computer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Authors Sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.