Linux-Hardware Digest #226, Volume #13 Thu, 13 Jul 00 08:13:04 EDT
Contents:
Re: RH6.2 install fails on new Dell Dimension: can find hard drive (IvanK)
Faulty BIOS in Dell Dimension XPS R___ (T___ as well) ??? (IvanK)
Hauppauge WinTV/USB under Linux? (IvanK)
Multisession CD-R - Reading previous tracks (Wolfgang Fohl)
Mandrake Linux 7.02 Install - PCI Problem? ("Grant Williamson")
Re: Mandrake Linux 7.02 Install - PCI Problem? ("Gerald Waugh")
Re: Dual Processor MotherBoard ("qwerty")
Re: Promise Ultra66 Controller ("John Mazza")
Re: List of Compatable Hardware ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Avermedia Tv capture ("Mimo")
Networking card MAC reads 5A:5A:5A:5A:5A ("Mark Barr")
Re: Athlon Motherboards (Eric)
CPIA Driver compile problem (Stephen Mulraney)
Re: Sound card config problem (Romek Pitera)
AHA-2940UW Post BIOS 2.57.2 Blues ("PJC")
Abnormality errors while install (rouxmout)
Re: Athlon Motherboards ("Gavin Carey")
Compaq LTE5000 (joerg)
Re: Multiple CPUs performance ("Mick")
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: IvanK <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: RH6.2 install fails on new Dell Dimension: can find hard drive
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 00:57:23 -0400
I don't know if anyone ever responded to your question. I'll assume
nobody did.
The problem is that almost no distro supports ATA-66 controllers
out-of-the-box. You need to patch your kernel and recompile it to
support these PCI cards. The catch here is that in order to compile
your kernel you need to have installed linux first.
Head over to http://www.linuxdoc.org and search in the mini HOWTO
section for the ultradma HOWTO. Can't remember the exact name of the
HOWTO, but the list is not too long for you to scroll down and find it.
There are some workarounds to installing linux on a system like yours.
One of them was to connect the hard drive to the builtin IDE controller,
install linux, recompile the kernel, change /etc/fstab and
/etc/lilo.conf to read /dev/hdeX instead of /dev/hdaX, shutdown,
reconnect the HD to the comtroller, boot up (possibly with a floppy),
run lilo and enjoy.
That's how it should work theoretically. In practice, it's a bit more
complicated. I bought one of these new Dells at work and had a bitch of
a time getting ATA-66 to work. In fact I still haven't made it to work
with that Promise-66 card. The problem, as I discovered after much
trial and error, seems to be with a faulty implementation of the BIOS on
these Dell motherboards. For some reason booting from a linux bootable
floppy takes about five minutes, instead of the normal few seconds.
Every time I disconnected the hard drive from the Promise card and
connected it to the internal IDE, or vise versa, LILO would freeze at
LI- and I had to boot with a floppy, wait 5 minutes to boot, then run
lilo, only to experience the same thing the next time I moved the HD
from one controller to another. As my annoyance with this Dimension
reached an all time high, I got the ATA-66 controller and the HD
(Quantum if I recall correctly) and put it in an older (a mere one year
older) Dell, that has a different mobo, and voila! it worked like a
charm.
The morale of the story? There's something wrong with the BIOS of these
Dells. I haven't looked at BIOS updates, but then I again the one we
just bought is supposed to have the newest BIOS, isn't it?
Good luck if you're still trying to get it working. Or sorry to have
wasted your time otherwise.
Chepati.
Charlie Zender wrote:
> Promise Technology Inc. Ultra66 IDE Controller
> From the error message it appears that the installation procedure
> does not recognize the hard disk. What should I do?
--
In GNU/Linux We Trust!
http://www.linux.com
http://www.fsf.org
------------------------------
From: IvanK <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Faulty BIOS in Dell Dimension XPS R___ (T___ as well) ???
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 01:08:24 -0400
Hi everyone,
I bought a Dimension XPS T800 and I was surprised to find out that
booting this machine with a linux boot floppy (brand new floppy, no bad
sectors, boots another computer just fine) takes more than five
minutes!!!
Also, if I disconnect the HD from the IDE controller and connect it to
the Promise 66 controller it came with, LILO would freeze at LI-. In
comparison I do this all the time on my home-brew computer at home and
Lilo is perfectly happy. But on this Dell I have to run lilo every time
I disconnect the HD. That's not ok, if someone is going to try to
convince me so.
What gives?
Chepati.
--
In GNU/Linux We Trust!
http://www.linux.com
http://www.fsf.org
------------------------------
From: IvanK <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Hauppauge WinTV/USB under Linux?
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 01:22:26 -0400
Hey everyone.
I would like to purchase one of these USB TV cards that Hauppauge
makes. I have the PCI version and I love it. If I had the USB one
though, I could hook it up to my laptop and watch TV on the road.
That'd be great.
The only show stopper seems to be USB support in the kernel. I know
it's progressing by leaps and bounds, but I never saw anywhere a mention
of USB TV cards being supported or even anyone being interested in
supporting them yet.
Any idea if this TV card has any chance in the forseeable future of
working under Linux - sorry, I erased all traces of Windows 98 from my
laptop the minute I opened the box.
Thanks,
Chepati.
--
In GNU/Linux We Trust!
http://www.linux.com
http://www.fsf.org
------------------------------
From: Wolfgang Fohl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Multisession CD-R - Reading previous tracks
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 07:32:55 +0200
Is it possible to mount previous sessions of a multisession CD-R?
(I am using it for periodic backup and want to restore the previous
states of changed configuration files)
My CD-RW-burner is a RICOH MP 7060A
Wolfgang Fohl
------------------------------
From: "Grant Williamson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Mandrake Linux 7.02 Install - PCI Problem?
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 15:42:36 +0930
Hey,
I'm trying to install Mandrake-Linux 7.02 on an old Pentium 120, but it
always crashes with a "X11 errno: 111" error before it reaches the graphical
install stage. This _seems_ to suggest that it doesn't like my video card,
but when I put in the video card from my current PC, which runs Mandrake
fine, I got the same error. I'm thinking there may be some problem with it
detecting PCI generally, because when i look at the install log
(CTRL-ALT-F3) an error:
PCI Bridge Probe:
Not found
And other similar errors pop up. Is there any way to get around this? Maybe
someone could suggest some BIOS settings I could muck around with.
Motherboard is: P54C TR4... MSI I think.
Grant Williamson
Webzone Internet
------------------------------
From: "Gerald Waugh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Mandrake Linux 7.02 Install - PCI Problem?
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 02:18:06 -0400
> I'm trying to install Mandrake-Linux 7.02 on an old Pentium 120, but it
> always crashes with a "X11 errno: 111" error before it reaches the
graphical
> install stage. This _seems_ to suggest that it doesn't like my video
card,
> but when I put in the video card from my current PC, which runs Mandrake
> fine, I got the same error. I'm thinking there may be some problem with it
> detecting PCI generally, because when i look at the install log
> (CTRL-ALT-F3) an error:
>
> PCI Bridge Probe:
> Not found
>
Try fiddling with PNP settings in the BIOS setup - Enabled/Disabled.
------------------------------
From: "qwerty" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Dual Processor MotherBoard
Date: 13 Jul 2000 06:17:43 GMT
I guess you're right. There's one other thing I forgot to mention though,
the High Point UDMA66 controller can be a huge pain in the butt as well.
Fortunately there's also the 440BX UDMA33 controller onboard.
smp root <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in article
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> you either love or hate the bp6. if you're lucky all you're
> hardware will run like a dream and you'll have a good cheap smp
> system. if not you'll spend a great part of the rest of your
> life trying out new BIOSes, and reading message boards whilst
> losing hair by the fistful. nothing appears to be sure and
> certain about this board, and that's the problem with it.
>
> take a look over at www.bp6.com
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>
> Got questions? Get answers over the phone at Keen.com.
> Up to 100 minutes free!
> http://www.keen.com
>
>
------------------------------
From: "John Mazza" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Promise Ultra66 Controller
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 08:02:42 GMT
Sometimes the Promise (and other) controllers support different LBA
translations for the drives. I ran into a situation where I had to
completely repartition and reformat a drive to make it work with one. That
may well be the case with your setup.
You may have a problem with the ISA modem. Make sure to go into your BIOS
and under PCI/PNP (or similar) be sure to reserve whatever IRQ it is using
to ISA or Legacy ISA. Make sure to do the same for all Non-PnP cards in the
system.
Also, some BIOSes let you manually set the IRQ by PCI slot number. You may
want to give this a try.
In a setup like this I would initially use:
IRQ Device
4 Modem (Assuming it is set as COM1 or COM3)
5 Sound Card (Some old SoundBlasters are not PNP - see above)
10 Ultra66 Adapter
11 Network Card (if installed)
The Primary onbord IDE will be IRQ 14, and the Secondary will go to 15.
Both of these are defaults that should not be messed around with.
If you want to try a repartition, first obtain a copy of Norton Ghost and
put it on a DOS boot disk, along with FDISK, FORMAT, and SYS.COM.
Make sure that the disk you want to repartition has less data in use than
you have free space on the other drive. Connect both drives to the onboard
controller and boot from a floppy that contains Ghost, and use it to create
an image of the smaller drive in a file on the larger one. Then repartition
the drive with FDISK, leaving enough free space for a later Linux install.
Then use GHOST to copy everything back.
It's kind of a pain, but sometimes you run across things like these.
Timothy Moll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>
> I have recently purchased an Ultra66 controller from Promise. A Quantum
> Fireball lm 20.5 is running off it. I have a Quantum EL 5.1, running off
> the primary mainboard eide, with Linux and Win95 in a dual boot
> configuration. This setup works fine without the ata controller.
>
> When I connect the Quantum LM to the controller, windows crashes just
> after loading, and Linux does the same when loading the Linux drivers;
> the whole system, freezes irretrievably. Also when a drive is connected
> to the controller my system will not read a dos/win95 boot disk, but
> will read my linux ones. Both disk are set to master. I think It might
> be a conflict but I don't know how to proceed.
>
> I have a three year old system with award bios v 6.17J900, with a s3
> virge graphics card, a Soundblaster 16 and an unbranded isa modem.
>
> Any help will be gratefully received,
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Timothy Moll
> t . moll @ usa . net
>
>
>
>
>
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: List of Compatable Hardware
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 00:24:22 -0700
On or about Wed, 12 Jul 2000 17:46:31 -0700, B+Dcouple
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> scrivened:
> Anyone know where I can find a list of Linux compatable hardware.
> I'm going to set up and older PC ( 75mhz) as a Linux system and I
> need to know what works and what doesn't. I also need to get some
> more components for it.
> Thanks
Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO at http://www.linuxdox.org/
--
Karsten M. Self <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.netcom.com/~kmself
Evangelist, Opensales, Inc. http://www.opensales.org
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Debian GNU/Linux rocks!
http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ K5: http://www.kuro5hin.org
GPG fingerprint: F932 8B25 5FDD 2528 D595 DC61 3847 889F 55F2 B9B0
------------------------------
Reply-To: "Mimo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: "Mimo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Avermedia Tv capture
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 08:32:33 GMT
Does anybody know how to configure an Avermedia TV 98 Capture (Bt878 Chip)
to work under Linux?
Thanks a Lot
------------------------------
From: "Mark Barr" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Networking card MAC reads 5A:5A:5A:5A:5A
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 03:32:40 -0500
Hello. I have a networking problem that I think is with the card. I am using
a card that I know works & I know what linux drivers to use. Also, this
card works when I dual-boot over to windows.
I installed RH 6.1 & RH automatically found the correct driver for the
networking card. I configured the rest of the networking stuff.
When I bring eth0 up, everything seems fine, no errors. But, I cannot even
ping. When I run "ifconfig" I get HWaddr 5A:5A:5A:5A:5A. This doesn't look
correct?
Any suggestions?
I have a SCSI card in the PC. Could this be causig a conflict?
Where should I start?
Does Linux store any stats (like the interrupt level & i/o base) for a
specific card that I can look at? .
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Eric)
Subject: Re: Athlon Motherboards
Date: 13 Jul 2000 05:19:13 -0500
On Wed, 12 Jul 2000 16:29:35 -0500, Francesco Spadini wrote:
> I am building a new Athlon-based system. RedHat's compatibility
>documentation says that there are no promises when it comes to Athlon
>motherboards though. Could anyone recommend some boards that are known to
>work well with RH 6.1 or 6.2? Thanks in advance.
I've been using a Asus K7V motherboard for over a week now and it's been
great.
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Stephen Mulraney)
Subject: CPIA Driver compile problem
Date: 13 Jul 2000 11:28:27 +0100
Has anyone managed to get the cpia driver to compile?
I'm running kernel 2.3.5 on RH linux 6.0.
I'm compiling v1.0, but I get some errors on line 1436
- it says
'structure has no member named owner'
'THIS_MODULE undeclared' (yadda yadda)
Commenting out this line give huge amounts
of parse errors and other junk in cpia_usb.c
and cpia_pp.c (but cpia.c itself compiles fine)
Same thing happens with v0.7.4 of cpia...
Thanks
E.
------------------------------
From: Romek Pitera <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Sound card config problem
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 11:24:30 +0100
On Wed, 12 Jul 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Module Size Used by
> soundcore 2372 0 (autoclean)
> lockd 30632 1 (autoclean)
> sunrpc 51588 1 (autoclean) [lockd]
> ntfs 33640 0 (unused)
> msdos 5276 0 (unused)
> fat 28800 0 [msdos]
> 3c59x 18336 1
>
> No other sound drivers are running as far as i can tell (soundcore
> should not cause a conflict, right?)
Have you tried insmod sound before you do insmod sb?
The sequence I've been following with SB Vibra16 is:
insmod soundcore
insmod sound
insmod uart401
insmod sb <with irq etc as desired>
I've been struggling with Vibra 16 chip too. The above at least allows me
to play WAV files. I'm still unable to play audio CDs for some reason.
romek pitera
Direct your response to: r dot pitera at qmw dot ac dot uk
Direct spam or unsolicited commercial e-mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
From: "PJC" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.periphs.scsi
Subject: AHA-2940UW Post BIOS 2.57.2 Blues
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 06:31:13 -0400
I have two AHA-2940UW cards on two machine. Machine one is running Win2K and
Mandrake Linux 7.1 (dual boot - same disk) and machine two has just Red Hat
Linux 6.2. After I flashed the 2.57.2 BIOS into both cards, on machine 1,
Linux crashed when trying to boot. I can't tell you if Win2K would have
crashed since I tried the Linux first. After rebooting, I tried to get into
Win2K with no luck (its a nice blue screen of death by the way). I think the
problem was a faulty Linux driver so has anyone else had this problem? any
ideas? I tried to put the old bios back, but the disk was already corrupted
I guess, b/c I could not get into Linux or Win2K.
------------------------------
From: rouxmout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Abnormality errors while install
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 03:28:39 -0700
I installed some old 486 hardware to get into linux
webserver application stuff, to create my own 'web'
environment.
now i had some problems to install a redhat 6.1 linux
engine. while installing there have been different errors:
- hanging up when starting kernel for installation
- aborting caused by 'abnormalities' when trying to format
hda/searching for packages on cd
i got a cyrix dx2 66 cpu, 8 mb ram, old '94 bios
maybe you can give me a hint what to do
(i'm just waiting for some reply from the bios manufacturer)
:)
* Sent from AltaVista http://www.altavista.com Where you can also find related Web
Pages, Images, Audios, Videos, News, and Shopping. Smart is Beautiful
------------------------------
From: "Gavin Carey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Athlon Motherboards
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 12:14:48 +0100
I'm using an Abit KA7 and it works fantastically!
Regards
Gavin.
Francesco Spadini wrote in message ...
> I am building a new Athlon-based system. RedHat's compatibility
>documentation says that there are no promises when it comes to Athlon
>motherboards though. Could anyone recommend some boards that are known to
>work well with RH 6.1 or 6.2? Thanks in advance.
>
------------------------------
From: joerg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Compaq LTE5000
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 13:25:22 +0200
Hi!
I've got a problem with a Compaq LTE5000 notebook and/or with a
IDE-harddisk (IBM DCRA-22160, 2.1 GB), on which I tried to install Suse
Linux 6.3.
The harddisk is for some reason not recognized by the BIOS; when I boot
Linux from a boot-disk, the harddisk appears in the kernel-messages with
the right parameters. I started then to write a partition table on the
disk (root and boot-partition below the 1024th cylinder), whithout any
problems so far, and created a swap-partition, again without problems.
After that, when creating the file-systems on the other partitions, the
harddisk starts working very rhythmically and never comes to an end, so
obviously here something is wrong, and it's hard to go on without the
filesystems...
Additionally I tried booting Linux with a lot of different
kernel-parameters (like hda=... or ide0=...), but always without
success. Has anybody any idea what to do?
Thanks
J�rg
P.S: My other problem (or maybe it's the same) is, that I cannot make
any interesting decisions in the BIOS, only things like power-managment
etc. Does anybody know if there is a possibility, maybe by setting a
jumper or something like this, to get access to the more interesting
points? Needless to say that the Compaq-manual is completely useless.
------------------------------
From: "Mick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: alt.comp.hardware
Subject: Re: Multiple CPUs performance
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 19:44:46 +0800
> cache. If you are running only program at a time and it does not hog up
all
> available threads for your processor and your OS will not split all
threads
> evenly across cpu's then you will not see much of a difference.
Thanks for response. Much appreciated. Actually my office wants to set up a
server and wants to investigate whether it is better to buy a single CPU
system say Pentium III 1.0Ghz or a dual processor Pentium III 600Mhz or
700Mhz system. We plan to run Linux Redhat 6.2 and Apache.
------------------------------
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End of Linux-Hardware Digest
******************************
