Makiimoto-chan
2025-01-09
I present to you, my beloved Makiimoto-chan. I got her from Aliexpress and she's a dual-CPU Xeon E5 2698 V3 monstruosity with a total of 64 virtual cores. This beast has got eight 16GB memory cards for a total of 128GB RAM. The brand is MACHINIST, and while it's not very well known I haven't had any issues with drivers so far, since I'm not running Microsoft Winbloats on it. I bought her for about $6K mxn, which was incredibly cheap; and I specifically chose this model because I wanted something that would be as future proof as possible and that I could use to code and game. The rest of the pieces I got from a local tech-store.
Here on the left you can see the motherboard as I unboxed it. You can appreciate the two sockets for the xeon CPUs and the eight RAM cards.
I called her Makiimoto-chan because I love giving silly names to especial things in my life. Especially if they are things that I use very often. The name comes from the original brand, which is MACHINIST, hence the 'Maki'. The second part 'imōto' just means little sister in japanese and I chose it because it sounded cool, and because this machine is now part of the family.
Now, this website is currently running on this machine, which means that sometimes it will be up, and some other times there will be downtime (because I need to sleep and so does my machine, or else my electricity bill might kill me). I have plans to get myself a VPS in the future, so that I can run this website without any pause and continue learning more.
The story
I got this motherboard from Aliexpress, and I've seen it described online as a chinese frankenstein of used parts glued together with pure distilled evil (I made that last one up). But in my experience it's been quite good!
Of course, It's had a couple of quirks here and there, but I've learned to fix them and now she's running without any hiccups. The first problem I had happened while I was trying to access the BIOS (no UEFI saddly), because I didn't seem to find the correct key to boot into the firmware options; I tried all the F-keys and 'Esc' without much success. In the end it turned out to be the 'Del' or 'supr' keys (obviously, duh); but I remember this to be a lot more annoying due to the second problem, which is that it took a considerably long time to get to the manufacturer's logo from being powered-off (about 30 seconds or so), which in modern times it's rather outrageous. Imagine, to look at an empty black screen for such a long time waiting for the stupid logo to appear. Currently I haven't found a solution to that, but it's stopped bothering me since. I guess I just got used to that. Now I just click the power button and then go do something else while I wait for it to boot.
Speaking of booting-up. I messed-up my linux installation multiple times in the beginning.
I had already installed arch on another laptop by myself (as a complete linux noob) without the intervention of any install scripts (I'm proud of that). However, I was following a video-tutorial and reading the arch wiki from time to time. Many Linux pros, specially of the arch-btw variety, will tell you not to follow a video-tutorial; and while this is certainly good advice, as a noob, I couldn't find any other way. So, on I went, watching tutorials and learning about the wonderful world of Linux.
So, when I first got Makiimoto, I tried to install GRUB by creating a UEFI partition (which, was completely unnecesary and wrong, since I had a BIOS system). It took me far more failed attempts than I'd like to admit to realise my stupidity; then I corrected my error and everything worked like a charm. In hindsight, I should have just sticked with the wiki, since it was there that I noticed my error. Hence why many people will advice against watching a tutorial. However, in the tutorial's creator defense, I was flat-out being an idiot, there was no reason for me to do that, I was just mechanised to do it that way.
I had another little issue, but that was also my fault. When I got the machine, I was in a hurry to test it out and make sure there weren't any issues, since I got it for cheap from Aliexpress and many people mentioned that getting one of these was a gamble, sometimes they worked very well and sometimes they didn't work at all, and since I wanted to sort everyting out as quick as possible I rushed to purchase all the necessary parts to build it and test it. Since I had very little money (as a result of purchasing the motherboard and the other components), I had to cut some corners, and so, I chose the cheapest Nvidia GPU I could find. It was a massive pain for such a long time.
Every single time I booted up the machine, I crossed my fingers and prayed; prayed that there wouldn't be an issue with the display manager, since it often didn't load correctly and the whole thing crashed, or it was just frozen on an empty screen and I had to SSH into it through my phone or laptop to ask SystemD to re-start the sddm.service. Then I learned about initramfs and I added the Nvidia drivers there. It improved the situation a bit, but I still got a 1 in 10 chance that the screen would freeze during boot up, but it was more manageable.
I saved up a bit of money for a while, and finally got myself a decent GPU. An AMD RX6600 in fact. Now I feel tempted to condemn the pesky little Nvidia card to a life of mining crypto for its crimes against Linuxhood. Let me know if I should be more lenient with the punishment.
I'm now happy with my current hardware and I will continue experimenting and learning. There are still many projects that I'd like to start.
