Earlier when I reported on my hardware wishlist, I mentioned that I want a new screen and one that's flat. My sister's workplace had a special offer of such a screen so we decided to buy one. I got it today, and my father and I set it up at the evening.

It's a ViewSonic VA903m screen, a flat one, and it's either 19" or 17", but still bigger than my previous CRT one. Mandriva 2007 did not have an Xorg pre-definition for it, so I used the VA800 one (which was the closest) and it seems fine. I'm doing 1280*1024 on this screen, and can see two konsoles (KDE's terminal emulator) one below the other. It comes with speakers, but when my father and I tested them they sounded awful so we reverted to our standalone speakers.

The picture is very sharp, but some of the colours are wrong. Using the screen's controls, I set the brightness and contrast to their minimum, but some colours still look weird. I still like it better than the previous screen, due to the size and the resolution.

I have a long weekend ahead of me due to Tish'ah Be'Av and one thing I'm planning to do is blogging. The first thing I'd like to blog about is my hardware wishlist.

First is memory. At the moment I have 512 MB, but with KDE, two Apache's, SpamAssassin, akregator, Amarok, and Firefox, it is no longer enough. So I'd like to upgrade it to 2 GB (or 2.something GB, witht the old memory units). A friend of mine is going to drive me to a hardware store in downtown Tel Aviv, and we're going to buy them there then. My board supports up to 4 GB of memory.

Next on my list is a flat screen. My screen at the moment is a 17"" MAG screen, that occupies too much space and plus has a large frame, which makes the image smaller. I'd like a nice 19" flat screen. This things don't cost too much, and at least I could put more stuff on my desktop without straining my eyes.

Another thing I'd like is a new hard disk. At the moment, I have two 80 GB hard disks, both of them quite full. With the new disk we can put all the largish video and audio files we have. I still don't know whether I'm going to get a SATA disk or an external USB disk.

Finally - the video card. At the moment, I have an Hang-vidia card, which I run without the 3-D drivers (so at least my computer will be stable). I'd like a card with some free-as-in-GPL 3-D drivers. I know that Intel cards have just that, but I'd like to see what will happen with the AMD and ATI merger, and whether it will cause the ATI proprietary drivers to be open-sourced too. In the meantime - no 3-D games for me on my Linux machine, but I still mostly only play PySol and some random puzzle games.

Oh and if you're going to tell me that the Nvidia drivers version 6666 or whatever works for you, and that I should use it - forget it. I have better things to do than to play with different versions of a huge and quirky binary blob. I want it free-as-in-speech and problem-free!

(For the record, I am making use of some high-quality binary-only software on my Linux machine (much less on my family's Windows' machine). But I think that binary kernel drivers are Evil, and do not wish to use them. Plus, I never depend on such software.)