Hi Folx,
after using a Compaq Armada for 1.5 years I now got the above
laptop. Well, after shrinking the pre-installed Win98 partitions and
installing RedHat Linux I tried to get everything in place. So far
this worked ok. Problems left are as follows:
1. Sound
Tha Yamaha OPL3-SA2 chip doesn't work correctly with either OSS/Free
or commercial OSS. Both drivers crash the system reproducable when
playing mp3 files. The configuration for comm. OSS looks as:
OSS/Linux 3.9.1j (C) 4Front Technologies 1996-1998
Kernel: Linux localhost 2.0.36 #3 Sat Jan 2 21:06:28 GMT 1999 i586
Build: 2.0.36
Card config:
Generic PnP support
OPL-2/OPL-3 FM at 0x388
SoundPort at 0x534 irq 5 drq 0,3
MPU-401 (UART) at 0x330 irq 7
Audio devices:
0: YAMAHA OPL3-SAx Audio System (CS4231) (DUPLEX)
1: Shadow of audio device #0 (DUPLEX)
Synth devices:
0: Yamaha OPL-3
Midi devices:
0: YAMAHA OPL3-SAx Audio System
Timers:
0: System clock
1: YAMAHA OPL3-SAx Audio System (CS4231)
Mixers:
0: YAMAHA OPL3-SAx Audio System (CS4231)
BTW: The mixer is missing a control for the CD volume, as the OSS/free
is missing a general volume control in the mixer. What's that?
While the system freezes already after a couple of seconds when I use
OSS/free it takes sometimes a few songs with the commercial driver. I
heard about a bug concerning DMA access from a friend but I haven't
got a clue about that.
Does anyone know how to fix this?
2. APM
The issue with APM seems to be different between 2.0.36 and 2.2.0pre6.
With the latter one at least Standby (apm -S) works ok, while the
system comes back after suspending to Standby with 2.0.36
immediately, even after I changed apm_bios.c concerning the referenced
NO_INTS definition.
But with both versions hibernation is a mess :-/
Issuing `apm -s` or using the Fn+F12 seems to put the laptop correctly
into Hibernation mode. A blue screen comes up and a progress bar
indicates the status when writing the memory to disk (hibernation file
on VFAT partition). After that the laptop gets powered down.
When I switch it back on the resume from hard disk doesn't work. Even
worse it seems that the continous read access to certain blocks on the
disk causes damage to the drive. So far it never came back succesfuly,
I always have to stop it. Once it got stuck at 1% the other time at
50% and so on.
Running then a surface scan with M$ scandisk on the VFAT partition
show bad blocks at the position of the hibernation file. Very strange
is that I can't finish this scandisk run to 100% anymore. Last Sunday
I stopped it manually after it was stuck for more then 10(!) hours at
70%. This seems very strange to me and I really would like to get this
sorted.
After this problem happened the first time I thought it might be a
matter of the BIOS and updated to the latest found on IBM's web page.
I know it doesn't really matter but with M$ Sux98 both, Sound and APM
(Standby and Hibernation), works ok. I'd really like to get the same
status with my favourite OS :-)
Hopefully someone of you will be able to help me! :-)
If you need/want more information please let me know
Best regards,
Achim
--
Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
-- Alan Watts
