As I said previously, abydos was dead. I bought new hardware some days after, mainly a new Enermax Liberty ELT 500 W power supply (ATX 2.2 compliant, sick, my old Enermax ATX 1.2 could not work with new mainboards), an Asus P5K, 2 GB of G.Skill DDR2 PC6400, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 and a GeForce 8400 GS 512 MB.

At that time, I just switched the hard drives without reinstalling the box. However, I had to reinstall some days because my old was an old Intel Pentium 4 (i386) and the new is 64 bits-ready.

Before that, I played with some kind of stuff. First, installing cpufrequtils is just magic, because now my processor is set at 2 GHz instead of 2.66 GHz, and rise to 2.66 GHz on demand. Just cool: less power, less warm, less noise.

I tried to tweak my SATA drives. I did something very wrong: hdparm -s. Kids, don't do this at home, it killed my hard drives! Yes, you're warned if you read the hdparm manual and you have to force the command, but I'm mad anyway. After that, the drives were no more detected at boot time by the buggy BIOS. Why buggy? Because after some googling, I found that they were NOT dead, just sleeping. And the fucking BIOSes around never try to wake them up. Fortunately, hdparm people distribute an bootable ISO that will wake your drives... It saved me.

The Asus P5K is not well supported by the 2.6.18 kernel, so you won't have network during install of etch (or lenny beta 1), and when you will reboot you won't be able to boot correctly because initrd is stuck with hard drive detection. Furthermore 2.6.18 on this mainboard is fucking slow anyway.

Fortunately, I just added another NIC in the box, boot on the CD, mount disks, chrooted and dist-upgrade to sid with a 2.6.22 kernel which work perfectly.

So now, everything's ready and set up, I can play!