I just finished making some upgrades to my desktop system at home. I added a Netgear WNDR4500 dual-band router to my network. This increases my LAN to gigabit network speeds and wireless N (at least for those devices I have that support those things). I transfer a lot of data over my network, so a 100Mbps network just wasn't cutting it anymore.
I also added 2 more sticks of DDR3 1600MHz to my machine, bringing the total amount of RAM up to 12 GB. And finally, I replaced my quad-core AMD Phenom II processor with a six-core Phenom II 1100t.
I'd really like to switch out my SATA hard disk with some SSD's, but I think I'm going to wait a while longer. It's a matter of capacity vs price point, and the price just isn't where I think it should be for SSD's.
After making all those hardware upgrades, I decided that I'd try updating some software. I remembered that kernel 3.1 had been released and decided that I'd give it a shot on my Slackware64 13.37 desktop.
It wasn't listed on the main page of kernel.org, but I was able to go to http://kernel.org.pub/ and find it there. After compiling the new kernel I rebooted, re-installed my NVIDIA driver, and everything seemed okay. After the next reboot or two I noticed that each time the system started that the clock was off by a few hours. I checked the BIOS on the machine and the time was set correctly. Under the new kernel, running hwclock also gave an error. I ended up recompiling the kernel because I had not selected RTC (Real Time Clock) in my kernel options last time. After that, the system time is fine under the new kernel.
I use NetworkManager with Slackware and have an entry to start it and then mount my NFS shares n /etc/rc.d/rc.M. This worked fine with the stock Slackware kernel, but now my NFS shares were not being mounted at boot. If I manually ran mount -a, they would mount. I ended up putting a 5 second sleep in rc.M in between starting NetworkManager and attempting to run the mount command. This worked like a charm.
