Where'd My Second Core Go?

While discussing the specs of our new workstations with a coworker, I ssh’ed to my blazingly fast home machine and catted /proc/cpuinfo for a quick comparison. My pride in my hand crafted workhorse was quickly squelched when only one CPU appeared in the output. “What is up with that?” I wondered. After some unaming and googling I discovered that Ubuntu had somehow switched me to the lame 386 kernel when I really wanted the generic kernel. Funny thing is, the generic kernel was installed, just not the grub default. Editing my menu.lst and rebooting quickly lead me to my next problem, no nvidia driver. Thankfully google found me the answer again.

I can’t believe I’ve been computing with only one of my cores. And for who knows how long! The shame of it all. I'll be watching you much more closely from now on, Ubuntu.

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