I'm going to join madduck, Gunnar Wolf and Julien with their negative experiences with XFS.

The celeron 412 I mentioned before had an XFS filesystem since a few years. It replaced a raisswolffs.

It certainly worked better than raiser. But as said, that old machine has been crashing, and when I copied over the data for my dad to his new machine, I noticed that his .gconf file was destroyed by XFS. All 0-bytes, typical for XFS. If the file is damaged, just fill it up with zeroes? I've seen 0-bytes a couple of times before in log files on XFS partitions that were open during a crash. It sucks that gconf didn't keep a backup.

Anyway, the .gconf file includes his evolution configuration, amonst other stuff. Thats how we noticed (apart from all other gnome settings being gone, too), since restoring evolution was the top priority item for me.

Fortunately, I picked ext3 when setting up the new system. I never had experiences with ext2 or ext3 as bad as with xfs. Or reiserfs, which just trashed the whole filesystem when I ran "reiserfsck". Thats not what a fsck is supposed to do, is it?

Up to now, my dad was using my old desktop PC, a celeron 412 MHz (366 overclocked) with Linux. Unfortunately, this trusty companion started to freeze within a few minutes after boot (even in BIOS). So after some 7 years, a replacement was needed.

The guys at the computer shop (Computer Gallerie in munich) tried to convince me that nvidia is best for Linux. Basically I followed this recommendation because ATI isn't better, and there are not Intel-based onboard graphics for AMD. And AMD Sempron sounded like the cheapest CPU. And definitely cheaper than an Intel Core... But dudes: Nvidia is NOT included in the kernel. Trust me on that one. Nvidia is non-free, and their drivers most likely violate the GPL.

So I ended up buying an ASRock 939NF4G-VSTA mainboard and an AMD Sempron CPU. 1 GB of RAM, an HDD, an okay housing. Just below 400 Euro, that is what I had expected.

After some fighting with the hardware (the HDD didn't fit into its slot, I had to bend away some metal. No docs on which way to put the power LED plug on etc.), I was finally able to boot the system.

I used todays daily-build of the netinstall CD image for AMD64. I.e. the to-be etch installer. Worked like a charm. After some downloading over my 2 mbit DSL line the system was up and running. Graphics were VESA, as expected. With some fighting with the annoying non-free Nvidia drivers, I had them working, too. Ethernet worked out of the box; I don't know about S-ATA (a driver is loaded though), temperature sensors seem to work, too.

Sound doesn't work yet. The snd_hda_intel driver is loaded, however there is no sound to be heard on any of the 7.1 channels. The mixer only shows "Master" and "Capture" volume controls.

If anyone knows how to get sound out of a

00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)
Subsystem: ASRock Incorporation Unknown device 0888

[Update: this is a realtek ALC 888, there is a patch for this to come in 2.6.18...]

Anyway, I now have a AMD64 box, and as soon as I've setup some i386 chroot I'll have a useable build-box after all. ;-) And maybe I can do some SELinux testing on it, too. OTOH, I should get myself a diploma thesis topic now, and work on my final thesis.