To that end, just some of my new years resolutions are below.

• Environmental
  Recycle more. We actively recycle as much as we can at home, or I should rephrase that, we recycle as much as is currently collected. Our council don’t collect certain items that could be recycled and we tend not to make the effort to get these said items recycled either. We should collect these and make sure they are recycled.
  Expand our space. Somewhat in contrast to the above is my family either need to move house or expand the one we are in. Currently we are four persons living in a smallish three bedroomed house. We will either move house or extend the one we are in, which ever is environmentally and financially sound.
• Technical
  Lead an open source project I’m proud of. It been a while since I had a major project that I was ‘leading’. What I mean by leading is ‘lead developer’, ‘founder’, ’steering force’. I’ve concentrated in making improvements in existing projects for so long that I’ve forgotten what its like to create one. This year I hope to make a difference with an open source project that is born from my own grey matter.
  Become a MOTU. Something that means a lot to me is becoming a MOTU. I’ve always been an active contributor to open source software and kind of prided myself in being a free-software hitman. I’ve flitted between projects, fixing problems, adding functionality, and moving on when projects seem to increase momentum under their own steam. But one thing that has been consistent since Warty, has been my use of Ubuntu as my operating system of choice. I’ve often looked at the MOTU program and thought I should make strides to become a MOTU but I’ve always had some other excuse. This year I will become a MOTU.
  Be a game changer. Contribute to a ‘game-changing’ project. This is on the wish-list, not only for me but for my employer, Canonical. In modern times the iPod was game-changing, as was Google’s emergence from search engine to software giant. This year I want to be right there contributing to something I can talk about with members of the family that are ‘too old to understand computers’ but will of heard of it none-the-less.
• Physical and spiritual goals:
  Explore religion. Lets get this straight, I’m pretty religion-neutral, mainly due to my scientific background. I see lots of merit in people believing in ’something’ and the power that brings but every religions rules, scriptures and tales seem to fall down when science is applied to it. One religion that I personally feel has more merit that others is Buddhism. This coming 12 months I will devote time to learning more than I know now about this belief with the hope of bringing something of it into my life.
  Be healthy. My diet is pretty ad-hoc. Sometimes its extremely healthy with many portions of fresh fruit and vegetables, sometimes its random items from the heart-attack list of shame. My goal this coming year is to have a consistently ‘good’ diet. No extremes, no highs, no lows, just a healthy and balanced diet.
  Be alcohol free. This is a hard one. I’ve been a very active sports fanatic for sometime, 6 years of rugby union, getting seriously into weight training for many years, running 500+ miles a year but 3 years ago I really busted my shoulder up bad on a cold and rainy afternoon playing rugby. With no chance of training at all for 12 months and doctors advice to never play rugby again I slipped into the habit of ‘a few beers’. A ‘few beers’ with mates down the pub, a ‘few beers’ watching a film at home, its all taken its toll. I’m still going to the gym semi-regular now that my shoulder is somewhat better but my waist-line has expanded and I seem to have picked up a bad habit in the process. My goal is to go 12 months alcohol free, which is an extremely lofty goal given today’s society, perhaps the hardest of all my new years resolutions. Alcohol seems to have slipped under the radar of what is acceptable in today’s society making it seem ‘abnormal’ not to drink but I’m not one for conforming and I like a challenge.

There are many more resolutions but the ones above are a good sub-section of what I want 2010 to bring. I hope my 2010 happens and I wish you all the success that I’m hoping for too.

I know what I want

I first thought that one of the new i7 CPU’s from Intel would be way to go but on careful consideration I found that the price for the chip itself is at a premium and a motherboard to support it is also expensive. I settled on a nice quad core instead.

Another thing on my wish list was lots of RAM. Again my initial assumptions were wrong. I thought either 6GB or 8GB would be the right way to go but after doing a lot of research online it seems that anything over 4GB isn’t really worth it unless you have a special use case, which I don’t. I settled on 4GB.

What I actually got

The full list of parts was:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz (Retail 775)
ASRock G43Twins-FullHD 775 DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard
Corsair 4GB TwinX DDR3 PC3-10600 1333Mhz Dual Channel DHX DDR3 (2×2GB)
1.5TB Samsung EcoGreen F2 SATA-2 Hard Drive
LG GGW-H20L Blu-ray Disc Rewriter & HD DVD ROM Retail Kit
Thermaltake TTM5 Midi Case
OCZ 400W StealthXStream Power Supply PSU

Bought later (see below)
Gainward nVidia 8400GS 256MB Fanless Graphics Card, TV/DVI/HDTV

So as you can see, the PC isn’t a screaming, bleeding edge computer but it is a great example of price vs performance. If you take out the Bluray burner which was an indulgence of mine, the above parts came in at just over £400. Not too bad for a very over-clockable quad core CPU, a good amount of RAM and hard drive space and a recent motherboard.

Problems

The only part of the list which I was a little concerned with was the motherboard. Traditionally motherboards can cause problems with Linux, especially new ones but my fears were seemingly unfounded as there were examples of it working fine. But it seems I was right to be concerned.

With the add-on graphics card that came with the board, Karmic wouldn’t even boot to the installer Launchpad Bug:429908. Jaunty would install but gave a lot of problems with the X server. The on-board graphics worked with Jaunty but performed terribly so my only answer was to purchase another graphics card. Fortunately the Geforce 8400GS was less that £25 delivered and works flawlessly with the Nvidia proprietary drivers.

Conclusion

So I now have a fast PC running Jaunty. I really want to upgrade it to Karmic but my experience with Karmic isn’t great at the moment. Alpha 4 on my laptop ran great but a ’sudo apt-get upgrade’ a couple of days ago resulted in a non-booting machine. I suspect its something to do with the change to upstart that Karmic is doing at the moment but I’m not sure. I’ve also had a lot of trouble initially trying to installing Karmic on the PC. Maybe now the Geforce 8400GS is there instead of the add-on card it will work but I can’t afford to risk it yet.

All in all I’m happy with the machine. Bluray movies work (although I have to rip them under a Windows XP virtual machine) and the speed is great, I’ve even tried some overclocking; I’ve had it at 3.2GHz stable.

Now if only I could get Karmic working.

Update

I bit the bullet and did an “update-manager -d“. Everything is working as far as I can see, yeah!