[gentoo-user] Re: CPU socket and picking a heat sink.
Dale wrote: Hi, Doing some research on building me a new rig. I have ran into sort of a hick up. The socket types are confusing me here. This is the mobo that I *might* be getting. http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=prodmbspecmaincat_no=1cat2_no=171cat3_no=prod_no=1856 If that link don't work, it is a MSI 790XT-G45 mobo. I do most of my shopping on newegg and was looking for a CPU heat sink to go on that bad boy. The MSI website says AM2+. When I start to looking on newegg, there are several sockets that have AM2+ in it. My question is, which is which or will any of them fit? The CPU I am looking at is a AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition Deneb 3.0GHz and it says it is a AM2+ as well. I assume that will fit the mobo? ;-) It doesn't come with a cooler tho. I may end up picking something else for the mobo and CPU but I do want to figure out what the differences are between these socket types and what fits what. Explanations are good and links are good too. Pictures may even be better. lol Yes all HSF for AM2/AM2+/AM3 should work with your CPU. A good one (price/performance) would be this one : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835233082 But may I suggest that you buy another mobo. It's not that cheap and lack some features : 1. It utilizes DDR2. I think you want this to get that OEM AMD CPU but it's not worth in my opinion. DDR2 modules are generally more expensive than DDR3 ones and will be more so in future. 2. No USB 3 ports. May not be that important but it's available already in most motherboards. 3. No SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports. No big deal in general but might become important if you buy a high performance solid state disk. 4. No e-sata port. A few options for you : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157197 (no 6Gb/s and only 1 USB 3 port but very inexpensive) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131660 (no 6Gb/s, no e-sata, VIA audio codec, but 2 usb 3 ports) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157192 (VIA audio codec, only 1 USB 3 port, up to 2 firewire port, 1 e-sata 6Gb/s, all the features, good price) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130269 (everything right and better components, a little expensive of course) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128435 (great layout, high quality components, lacks e-sata though, but lots of expansion slots, expensive of course but a great one) Good luck
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: change and improvement
Mick wrote: On Friday 07 Oct 2011 08:25:36 Dale wrote: Michael Mol wrote: On one hand, you can configure the locations of things like %PROGRAMFILES% and %SYSTEMROOT%. On the other hand, you can mount a volume wherever you like. I used this to use the same .libpurple directory on a machine dual-booted between WinXP 32-bit and WinVista 64-bit. A data volume was mounted at D:\Data, and I had NTFS junctions pointing my .libpurple on both boots at a directory on that volume. H, this is interesting. My brother has filled up his hard drive and I been planning on reinstalling to a larger drive. Maybe I need to check into this more. He uses XP and I really hate to install windoze. Since he had to spend $8,000.00 on a new mower, his new rig went to second place in the budget. This could be the place for the next couple years. Uhh, he mows grass for a living. Anyway, putting Documents on its own drive would save me some grief. You will get some space back if you move all the backup files created with MSWindows updates out of C:\ (but not the index which is needed to be able to update it properly). If space is running out fast, then you may have a corrupt page file. Delete it and move it to another drive/partition. Finally, clear all cruft in /temp directory (somewhere under local settings) for each user. If you have another drive, move all his data out of C:\ then defrag and shrink the partition a bit, create new partition(s) and install Linux! ;-) Well, I don't know much about windoze. He currently has a 40Gb drive that only has about 2Gbs left. I need to google for a howto or something. I got a 80Gb drive that I wish I could scoot it over onto. He does want Linux tho. We were planning to build a new rig like mine but he had to buy a new mower. He mows grass for a living and the new mower was over $8,000.00. The new rig is on the back burner now. He has a prebuilt rig right now, Gateway I think. I would be scared to compile Gentoo on that stock heat sink. It is a single core ~1.8Ghz with about 768Mbs of ram. It is maxed out ram wise and the CPU won't take much improvement either. It would take me days to install even if it had a nice heat sink on the CPU. I was thinking Mandrake, bunto, slack or something. I been using Gentoo so long, I don't even know what else is out there anymore. lol See the problem? Some of it me. lol Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Hard drive RPMs and data speed.
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am Donnerstag 27 Oktober 2011, 13:09:17 schrieb Nikos Chantziaras: On 10/27/2011 11:15 AM, Dale wrote: Howdy, I'm wanting to get a hard drive that is pretty good size. I'm looking for about 1 to 2TBs or so. Thing is, a lot of them seem to be 5900 or even 5400 rpm drives. I realize that the data on there is packed pretty tight so I want to ask a few people that may have one or more of these things a few questions. Are they as fast as a slower RPM drive? I assume you meant to say as fast as a faster RPM drive. No, of course not. If we're speaking about the same capacity and amount of platters, of course. If we're not, then yes, they can be as fast because of the higher data density. Would they be fast enough to play HD videos and such? I have quite a few 1080 HD videos. I don't want the drive to cause issues. The transfer speed required for playing HD videos is virtually zero. 1080p video compressed using an 8mbps rate require 2MB/s. This can be done even with the slowest drive from 10 years ago. Today's slowest drive are able to play about 40 or 50 of those HD video simultaneously. So the answer is yes. They can play HD video :-) Most of those 5900/5400 disks are meant for pure data storage. The lower RPM is used to market them as green and silent, meaning they don't consume much power and aren't noisy. Installing your OS on them though isn't going to give you good speed. They have good transfer rates, but their access times usually suck. Can someone that has one or more of these post their hdparm -Tt results? Different speeds would be great too. I'd like to compare what a 5400rpm drive would do compared to a 7200rpm drive. Simply Google around for benchmarks of the drivers you're interested in. Note that is in area where it doesn't make any real difference that the benches or reviews you find are performed under MS Windows. The results are applicable to every OS. As a rule of thumb when buying drives: if you want to install software on it, buy an 7200RPM drive with good access times. Of course they're more expensive If you just want to store all your downloaded HD porn and music collection on it, a silent 5400RPM drive is a good choice. indeed. Additionally they don't get really warm. Which reduces the overall thermal load in the case. One important thing: most if not all 2TB drives have 4K sectors, which means you have to be carefull while partitioning those beasts. Looks like some good info. I just need a GOOD sale and some extra money to spend. Maybe in a couple weeks or so. Hopefully. ;-) As for heat in my case, I have a Cooler Master HAF-932 case. It has those huge 230mm fans. Heat is not a problem. I just wonder how much data they will be able to pack into a 3.5 drive tho. Hm. Surely they will run out of room at some point. I mean, the heads have got to have a little room to work with. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] new machine : CPU : 22 nm vs 32 nm
On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 9:32 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Michael Mol wrote: On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 8:21 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: The point made about producing less heat with the smaller nm sounds reasonable tho. Less heat with the smaller nm, but only if all other things remain equal! In reality, manufacturers use additional margin within their TDP to improve the product otherwise. Perhaps they increase the clock speed somewhat. Perhaps they increase the amount of on-die cache. Perhaps they reduce the instruction pipeline. AMD, for example, has tended to maintain keep something in the market for a 125W, 95W and 65W TDPs for several years. Each year, the functionality that used to be in a 125W TDP processor shows up in a 95W TDP processor, and the latest 125W TDP processor beats the pants off of last years'. I found this to be plain weird when I built my new rig. My old rig was a AMD 2500+ single core system with 2Gbs of ram. It pulled about 400 watts or so for normal desktop use. A little more when compiling and such. My new rig, AMD Phenom II 955 with four cores and 16Gbs of ram. Heck, just a single core is much faster than my old rig. Thing is, the new rig pulls less than half of what the old one pulls, WHILE COMPILING. I can't recall the nm part but I think the CPU I got for my old rig was supposed to be for laptop use. AMD sure is getting more efficient as you point out. I still wonder where we will be in 10 years. Just how fast can they make them? Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Definitely OT but that's surely not because of the CPU, or at least not only the CPU. Many people highly underestimate the value of a good and efficient power supply, which can make a huge difference. This is one of those things that companies such as Dell like to cut costs on because the average user neither sees the PSU specifications nor knows enough to ask about it. Of course, efficiency within the entire computer helps, but a bad power supply can really hurt your electric bill. On topic, AMD is definitely getting more efficient but mostly because that's where the technology is headed in general -- Intel seems to do a better job at efficiency per core but they also use hyper threading, whereas AMD is putting their bets into more physical cores. Yes, I'm going to say it again, but AMD is what you want for multitasking. They are switching their goals from high-performance cores to highly-concurrent CPUs, GPUs, and APUs. Concurrency is the future, it's just hard for a lot of people to think in such a way (and our technology doesn't leverage it to its full capacity). Just look at the human brain: a maximum of 1,000 nerve impulses per second is possible. However, firing rates of 1 per second to 300-400 per second are more typical.[1] Basically the average neuron seems to be about only 300Hz, but there are trillions upon trillions of synapses within the brain. I don't know about you, but I am, allegedly, a fully-functioning, self-aware, intelligent being. [1] http://www.noteaccess.com/APPROACHES/ArtEd/ChildDev/1cNeurons.htm
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: OT: new system hardware
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am Samstag, 10. November 2012, 23:46:52 schrieb Dale: Pandu Poluan wrote: Oh, we like digressions :-) I recall that sometimes last year, Tom's Hardware tested running a system without heat sink... but completely immersed in... cooking oil! They made a large acrylic container, poured in gallons of high-quality cooking oil, then proceeded to overclock the CPU and GPU to unholy frequencies... And, IIRC, Seymour Cray likes to use some inert fluoride-based coolant to dunk the components of his supercomputer machines. And he would even go to lengths to design a coolant fountain that's not only functional, but also decorative. The only caveat, is to get a cooling system, that is made of robust, quality components. Also, monitoring the temperature is important, and it'd be nice to have a micro pressure transmitter, downstream of the pumping mechanism to ensure no leaks by detecting tiny leaks BEFORE they happen (delta-P). That's the only qualms I have Re: water-coolant. I always an afraid of leaks. So, I always wimped out and use the thermal wick kind of almost, but not quite, somewhat similar to liquid coolant ;-) Rgds, -- I seen on a show once that they use mineral oil when they put those robots in deep water. You know, the ones that are remote controlled and go VERY VERY deep. Anyway, they put mineral oil in it because it is not conductive, transmits heat pretty well and it doesn't let the water pressure crush the little robot. It can't crush it since it is full of a liquid already. If that is true, why not use mineral oil instead of water? I understand that could mean a change in hoses and such but still, if they can make hoses that can stand up to gas and other really nasty stuff then why not mineral oil too? At least with that, if you get a leak it won't burn out your mobo or whatever else it gets on. It would be messy tho. o_O Dale :-) :-) lets see.. toxic, expensive, has to be recycled... vs water... also, submerging mobos in cooking oil is nothing new nor special. It smells horrible after a while and any change is fucking time consuming (and dirty). I didn't say to use cooking oil, I said to use mineral oil. Also, how is mineral oil toxic? Baby oil is mineral oil. I have psoriasis and I put on baby oil at least once a day, sometimes several times a day. If it is so toxic, why would people be putting it on babies? Heck, if it is so toxic, why am I still alive? How can cooking oil be toxic either? I cook with cooking oil and then eat the food I cook with it. It may be something but hardly toxic. Let's see, baby oil, not toxic, doesn't short out and blow up stuff when it leaks. Water, one leak and you could have to buy a new rig. Cost of mineral oil versus a new rig. I don't think that is even close. lol Also, it doesn't have to be a new idea to work. Just thought it worth a mention. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: OT: new system hardware
Am Sonntag, 11. November 2012, 09:35:35 schrieb Dale: Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am Samstag, 10. November 2012, 23:46:52 schrieb Dale: Pandu Poluan wrote: Oh, we like digressions :-) I recall that sometimes last year, Tom's Hardware tested running a system without heat sink... but completely immersed in... cooking oil! They made a large acrylic container, poured in gallons of high-quality cooking oil, then proceeded to overclock the CPU and GPU to unholy frequencies... And, IIRC, Seymour Cray likes to use some inert fluoride-based coolant to dunk the components of his supercomputer machines. And he would even go to lengths to design a coolant fountain that's not only functional, but also decorative. The only caveat, is to get a cooling system, that is made of robust, quality components. Also, monitoring the temperature is important, and it'd be nice to have a micro pressure transmitter, downstream of the pumping mechanism to ensure no leaks by detecting tiny leaks BEFORE they happen (delta-P). That's the only qualms I have Re: water-coolant. I always an afraid of leaks. So, I always wimped out and use the thermal wick kind of almost, but not quite, somewhat similar to liquid coolant ;-) Rgds, -- I seen on a show once that they use mineral oil when they put those robots in deep water. You know, the ones that are remote controlled and go VERY VERY deep. Anyway, they put mineral oil in it because it is not conductive, transmits heat pretty well and it doesn't let the water pressure crush the little robot. It can't crush it since it is full of a liquid already. If that is true, why not use mineral oil instead of water? I understand that could mean a change in hoses and such but still, if they can make hoses that can stand up to gas and other really nasty stuff then why not mineral oil too? At least with that, if you get a leak it won't burn out your mobo or whatever else it gets on. It would be messy tho. o_O Dale :-) :-) lets see.. toxic, expensive, has to be recycled... vs water... also, submerging mobos in cooking oil is nothing new nor special. It smells horrible after a while and any change is fucking time consuming (and dirty). I didn't say to use cooking oil, I said to use mineral oil. Also, how is mineral oil toxic? Baby oil is mineral oil. I have psoriasis and I put on baby oil at least once a day, sometimes several times a day. If it is so toxic, why would people be putting it on babies? Heck, if it is so toxic, why am I still alive? How can cooking oil be toxic either? I cook with cooking oil and then eat the food I cook with it. It may be something but hardly toxic. Let's see, baby oil, not toxic, doesn't short out and blow up stuff when it leaks. Water, one leak and you could have to buy a new rig. Cost of mineral oil versus a new rig. I don't think that is even close. lol Also, it doesn't have to be a new idea to work. Just thought it worth a mention. Dale and since baby oil is so great for the job we use it as lubcritant and for cooling in engines :-) :-) -- #163933
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: OT: new system hardware
Am Sun, 11 Nov 2012 09:35:35 -0600 schrieb Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com: Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am Samstag, 10. November 2012, 23:46:52 schrieb Dale: Pandu Poluan wrote: Oh, we like digressions :-) I recall that sometimes last year, Tom's Hardware tested running a system without heat sink... but completely immersed in... cooking oil! They made a large acrylic container, poured in gallons of high-quality cooking oil, then proceeded to overclock the CPU and GPU to unholy frequencies... And, IIRC, Seymour Cray likes to use some inert fluoride-based coolant to dunk the components of his supercomputer machines. And he would even go to lengths to design a coolant fountain that's not only functional, but also decorative. The only caveat, is to get a cooling system, that is made of robust, quality components. Also, monitoring the temperature is important, and it'd be nice to have a micro pressure transmitter, downstream of the pumping mechanism to ensure no leaks by detecting tiny leaks BEFORE they happen (delta-P). That's the only qualms I have Re: water-coolant. I always an afraid of leaks. So, I always wimped out and use the thermal wick kind of almost, but not quite, somewhat similar to liquid coolant ;-) Rgds, -- I seen on a show once that they use mineral oil when they put those robots in deep water. You know, the ones that are remote controlled and go VERY VERY deep. Anyway, they put mineral oil in it because it is not conductive, transmits heat pretty well and it doesn't let the water pressure crush the little robot. It can't crush it since it is full of a liquid already. If that is true, why not use mineral oil instead of water? I understand that could mean a change in hoses and such but still, if they can make hoses that can stand up to gas and other really nasty stuff then why not mineral oil too? At least with that, if you get a leak it won't burn out your mobo or whatever else it gets on. It would be messy tho. o_O Dale :-) :-) lets see.. toxic, expensive, has to be recycled... vs water... also, submerging mobos in cooking oil is nothing new nor special. It smells horrible after a while and any change is fucking time consuming (and dirty). I didn't say to use cooking oil, I said to use mineral oil. Also, how is mineral oil toxic? [...] I wasn't sure what he meant, either, although looking it up, it seems that the term mineral oil basically means a petroleum based oil. In fact, according to Wikipedia [0], that holds even for the food product mineral oil - which, according to the same article (see Food preparation), is forbidden in the EU (at least in food products). However, in medical products mineral oil is apparently held to strict standards and translates to Weißöl. So it seems your baby oil is fine, but the cooking oil I'm not so sure about. (And here I thought mineral oil was something akin to vegetable oil and that it just had a weird name.) [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_oil -- Marc Joliet -- People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don't - Bjarne Stroustrup signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: OT: new system hardware
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am Sonntag, 11. November 2012, 15:06:12 schrieb Dale: Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Am Sonntag, 11. November 2012, 12:15:14 schrieb Dale: Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: and since baby oil is so great for the job we use it as lubcritant and for cooling in engines I was trying to overcome the problem that water causes things to short out when it leaks on a mobo, something mineral oil doesn't do according to what I have read. I never said it was the world's greatest heat conductor. ever heard of 'transformer oil'? for some reason or another they move away from mineral oil... I have heard of it. It appears that it is mineral oil also. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_oil Transformer oil or insulating oil is usually a highly-refined mineral oilthat is stable at high temperatures and has excellent electrical insulating properties. I'm not saying that every single transformer out there has mineral oil in it but according to that, it is still in common use. Also, according to that it also does the job of removing the heat from the transformer too. If you want, watch this video. You can see how they are made from start to finish, including the mineral oil fill up. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUO3o5JTGhQ and the oil is very toxic and as I wrote earlier mineral oil is replaced with other coolants. For some very good reasons. ... Again, I use mineral oil every day. How can it be toxic when I put it on my skin? I might add, my Doctor knows I put it on and he has never mentioned it being toxic. Also, baby oil is mineral oil plus fragrances, which is what I use daily. I can send you a picture of one of my baby oil bottles if you want to see it for yourself. Maybe seeing is believing? If you watch the video I linked to, you will see they put in mineral oil. They didn't say they put in a alternative to mineral oil. They even pull a vacuum on the transformer can to make sure it doesn't leave any moisture or air bubbles in it. I watch that show on TV often and I feel quite certain they would not show that if it were not true and accurate. I'm sorry but I'm going with the info I know to be more accurate. Watching that video says a lot. I'm sure there are other things that can be used but the point is, mineral oil is in common use and has been for a long time. It also doesn't cause shortages when it leaks either which water does. That's why I'm not putting water near my computer, cooling or otherwise. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] AMD RX GPU in Gentoo
On 17/6/19 2:16 π.μ., mad.scientist.at.la...@tutanota.com wrote: Sadly, in my experience graphics cards draw a fairly steady current independent of usage (it varies a bit, but less than 20%). Some of the newer cards may be better. There are utilities for at least some cards to adjust the clock on the GPU (normally used by mad gamers/miners to overclock). These might be an option, cmos draw power at a rate determined by clock frequency and it's a squared relationship, half the clock speed means about 1/4 the power draw. I would also like to find some low power graphics cards, The only option I'm aware of is to buy older, used cards on ebay. I have a few machines I'd like to run headless most of the time, but basic text or basic graphics would be nice occasionally, but I don't want to waste 200W+ on a high end graphics card that never gets exercised. Other than that, I've used an external 80mm fan to blow air across the heat sink and out the adjacent slot (after the attached fan failed and i removed it. I mounted the fan in the drive cage. The fans on graphics cards are generally moving air the worst way possible (just like many cpu heat sink/fan combos), blasting it into the face of a heatsink at high speed so there is some flow through the channels with massive, massive turbulence/noise. Oddly enough although the built in fan had a tachometer the card doesn't pay any attention to what it thinks is the fan speed, even if the fan stalls completely so you don't have to "fool" the graphics card when removing the provided fan and using an "external" fan. These are very good points, thanks! (Thanks to all btw who replied). Well, the PC is connected to a 1440p monitor, so it's not headless like that, and although it's not that often I fire up Steam, I do have some games to waste time now and then :-) I will research more on power consumption (which goes hand in hand with being cool and silent). From the little I've seen AMD GPUs should have some sort of power management with the AMDGPU driver. Emmanuel "Would you like to see us rule again, my friend? All you have to do is follow the worms." Pink Floyd, The Wall, Waiting for the worms Jun 16, 2019, 3:36 PM by antli...@youngman.org.uk: On 11/06/2019 20:21, Alec Ten Harmsel wrote: Plus, my current GT730 is passively cooled. Are there any RX cards that at least spin down the fans when I'm working on desktop (no plasma/gnome, simple Openbox with no heavy gpu requirements). I really like silence!:-) I can't hear mine at all right now. The larger the fan, the slower (and quieter) it spins. So if it needs a fan, try and make sure it's a big one. Cheers, Wol
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Very slow POST process
On Tuesday, 28 November 2023 13:13:55 GMT Dale wrote: > Michael wrote: > > Over the last 8-9 months I noticed an old Lenovo G505s laptop is spending > > a > > long time in the POST process, before eventually the OEM logo shows up on > > the screen. Last time I timed it, it took 2.5-3.0 minutes. Normally it > > would only take ~20-30 seconds. Once the logo shows up the boot process > > proceeds without further delay. > > > > Initially, this delay to POST would happen randomly and rarely. Now it > > happens every time. > > > > Things I tried: > > > > 1. Reflashing the UEFI firmware - it didn't work because it already has > > the > > latest firmware. > > > > 2. Removing the main battery and holding down the power button for 15 > > seconds, hoping to reset the firmware. > > > > 3. Leaving the PSU cable connected overnight. > > > > 4. Testing the RAM and HDD. > > > > None of the above improved the situation, or indicated what might be > > wrong. > > > > I'll reseat the RAM sticks and the HDD next, in case a contact is > > oxidised, > > but what else could cause this noticeable delay to POST? A failing RTC > > CMOS battery? > > I recently had this issue as well on my 770T NAS box. I ordered some > video cards and once I replaced the video card, it boots in the time it > should every time. Before that, I tried memtest, checking the CPU was > seated properly and not running hot, checked temps with a IR thingy of > both bridge chips and several other things. I also replaced the battery > and reset the settings to defaults and then adjusted to my way. The > only thing that changed the long POST time, changing the video card. I > might add, I've booted that thing a lot since I changed the video card > and it boots right up each time. > > If you have a built in video system, you stuck. The only option I can > think of, clean the heat sink/cooler for the CPU and such and see if > that helps any. If you doing a cold start, couldn't imagine heat being > a issue tho. If you have a video card that can be changed, might want > to try that. I've never seen a laptop with one of those tho. > > I hope someone else has a better suggestion. > > Dale > > :-) :-) Thank you Dale, this laptop has both an AMD A10-5750M APU with a Richland [Radeon HD 8650G] graphics on the die and a discrete Jet PRO [Radeon R5 M230] GPU, working with the radeon kernel driver and the vga_switcheroo. I can't recall if the Radeon chip is soldered or plugged in a socket on the MoBo. Until I take off the back cover I won't know for sure. Perhaps a red herring, but it may be related to graphics: At some point in the summer I connected an external monitor with HDMI to test it. I then switched from both monitors, only the laptop's LCD and then only the external monitor and back again before I shut it down. All worked as expected on a Wayland Plasma desktop. I am not certain, but have the impression the delay at POST started getting worse thereafter, although the problem existed intermittently for a good 4-5 months before then. :-/ I hope the GPU is not failing, because I doubt I'll be able to source one of these chips, while spending money on a replacement MoBo on flea-bay would not be cost effective. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] Very old machine blocking/update questions
On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 12:32 AM, Neil Bothwick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:11:41 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: Yeah, it's pretty insane. We were using these machines only as MythTV frontend boxes so basically they boot, start mythfrontend, spin down the drive and then talk to the backend over the network. They didn't need much space so I probably bought the smallest thing I could find 4 years ago when I first built them. I've given up on hard drives for MythTV frontends, too much noise, heat, power and space. I tried flash storage for a while but now network boot. -- Neil Bothwick On these Pundit-R machines I tried to get network booting working but never did. Actually that whole idea still eludes me. I did spin the drives down to reduce noise as these old 8GB drives are actually *very* noisy and it's a really ugly high-pitched whine. The worst part of noise from these little boxes now turns out to be the processor fan and since it's a non-standard form factor I haven't found a quiet fan to do a replacement. - Mark -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [wildly OT]advice for a wireless antenna?
I'm talking about the USB wireless adapter (I don't think I can connect the antenna to my laptop directly), not the passphrase key... Ah. I've got a Hawking HWUG1 USB WiFi adapter that works fine with Gentoo (I had to download driver source from somewhere). It's got an R-SMA connector for use with external antennas. I've had good luck using these together: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833164015 Yup, that's the one I have. That's a good price on it, too. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833164110 I've also got one of those antennas and it's exellent. It provides a little (1-2dB) more gain as my double-biquad reflector, but it's a lot cheaper (assuming your time is worth much), and a bit easier to use, since it will sit nicely on a table or windowsill. Seems a nice combo, indeed. A curiosity: by itself, the Hawking USB adapter has more or less sensitivity than the simple Airport glued to my Macbook motherboard? I think it depends a lot on the maturity of the drivers. As I said, my Netgear PCI card uses the madwifi drivers and vastly outperforms the Hawking adapter. The Hawking's drivers are fairly new (rt2x00) and madwifi has been around for quite a while now. I do have another rt2x00 adapter that performs noticeably worse than the Hawking. It's a Linksys and it has no external antenna. Also worth noting is that this item: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833315075 uses rt2x00 but has some type of failure issue. Possibly heat related, possibly not. I've experienced it firsthand. - Grant -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Machine freezes during gcc compile
If it's brand-new, have you ever installed Linux on this particular processor/motherboard combination? I had a problem with freezeups with my TurionX2 laptop until I used -noapic on the kernel line. Nothing much to do with load, except that more work = more chance of encountering the problem. I also had heat-related issues until I got the thermal sensors coupled with the speed governor. But then the machine would just turn off abruptly. I was able to get it to run long enough to recompile by putting a pencil up under the corner where the vents are, for more clearance and airflow. More details about the system might help you get better answers. On 7/30/07, Dan Cowsill [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just got myself a new laptop and wanted to install Gentoo on it. After getting a working base system installed, I tried to install Xorg-x11, but the machine froze while trying to compile gcc. Keep in mind, there were no error messages, logs or anything of that nature. Just a straight up lack of any sort of control over the system. Now, just a little while ago I decided I'd try a different approach. I thought perhaps the problem lies in how I compiled the kernel. I tried to emerge gcc in the livecd environment with my gentoo install chrooted and sure enough, same deal. Does anyone know what could cause this? Or perhaps, what I should look for to solve this problem? Thanks. -- -·=»Ðŧħ«=·-
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] advices about motherboard+cpu+fan(+soundcard) combo?
Am Dienstag 21 August 2007 16:57:02 schrieb brullo nulla: On 8/21/07, Alan E. Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I might add to avoid using on board video or video cards like my own, an NVIDIA based LE 6200, that uses system RAM. Even if you aren't doing games. You are using only 1GB of RAM. Ok, so the specs that are coming out for the motherboard are: - amd x2 (what model of that? the brisbane? something that heats not too much would be better...) - supported Intel onboard video card with its own video RAM - good supported onboard audio with 5.1 surround What are the best matching choices you are aware of? And what about the cpu cooling fan? Thanks, m. I could be wrong but I think there are no onboard graphics solutions with dedicated video RAM. I don't think you'll lose much RAM anyway, maybe 128M. There are AMD X2 with higher efficiency and therefore lower heat emission, they have the suffix EE, BE or LV. Talking about onboard audio, you should not have much to choose from, either AC97 or Intel HD. Both should be okay (as long as you are not at least semi-professional). I've heard about trouble with Intel HD because they are not all the same but most offer AC97 compatibility as a fall back. Concerning the fan, you could stick with the boxed cooler, it's better than the Intel. If you need a cheap silent thing, the Aerocool XFire is okay. I would stay away from the tower design (the ones blowing from the front to the back instead of blowing towards the chip). They are usually more efficient but they do not cooler the CPU's surrounding which can overheat. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] linux desktop search engines are ugly!
On 28 August 2007, Cipher van Byte wrote: As far as I'm concerned the structure of directories and links (hard or symbolic) were invented to eliminate the _need_ of having such searching engines. I've got every file in directory that it belongs to, and I do have tmp directory where I put files that does not belong to any category on my ~/ . Think of secretaries who aren't interested in computers but need to use them. Think of musicians who want to use computers for composing without really under them. Think of any person who just uses computers without actually knowing what a file or a directory is. Computers aren't for geeks only. Using those search engines is like reinventing the wheel or programing embedded devices with java... ;) Or like inventing the next generation wheel. Think of people using a microwave for heating up food. They know they can do that. They don't need to know that only water, fat and sugar actually heat up in a microwave as long as they stick to food. If they start to experiment with other things ... well, they have to understand how microwaves work. Different tools are for different users. That you don't need a certain tool, doesn't mean other people don't. Desktop search engines, or the semantic desktop as some call it, might well be the way of the crisis experienced by users dealing with huge amount of data without knowing what data actually is. BTW, desktop searching is way more than just indexing. How did the data come in? Where did it came from? Who produced it. All that kind of stuff. Metadata in short. ;-) I better stop here. Uwe -- Jack Nicholson: My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son of a bitch. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] linux desktop search engines are ugly!
On Tuesday 28 August 2007, Uwe Thiem [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote about 'Re: [gentoo-user] linux desktop search engines are ugly!': Think of secretaries who aren't interested in computers but need to use them. Think of musicians who want to use computers for composing without really under them. Think of any person who just uses computers without actually knowing what a file or a directory is. Computers aren't for geeks only. Computers are tools, and thus, have some required knowledge to use them. If you don't know what a file or (directory/folder) is, you should stay away from them -- you might hurt yourself. You don't use power tools or even cars without training for the same reason. Using those search engines is like reinventing the wheel or programing embedded devices with java... ;) Or like inventing the next generation wheel. Think of people using a microwave for heating up food. They know they can do that. They don't need to know that only water, fat and sugar actually heat up in a microwave as long as they stick to food. If they start to experiment with other things ... well, they have to understand how microwaves work. I don't expect my users to be able to write a filesystem in C, design an IC, or understand the OSI 7 layer model. I do expect them to be able to use files and folders (a.k.a. directories). Especially since most office workers, and quite a few non-office workers use files and folders to mange their paperwork every day. I'm sure DSE will be a feature many users will like and probably even become dependent on. It's NOT the next generation wheel, it's not even something I'll use, but it has it's place. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. [EMAIL PROTECTED] ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.org/ \_/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] MCE in kernel
On Tue, 4 Sep 2007 06:51:38 +1000 Alan E. Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think your solution is the better one, though. I did follow the instructions of the boot messages and installed an mce log translation utility, but I didn't make sense of what to do with it. The thing is, you are only masking symptoms. There may be something wrong, and perhaps you could save a lot of work later by fixing a problem before it turns catastrophic. from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Check_Exception A Machine Check Exception, also called MCE, is a computer hardware error which occurs when a computer's central processing unit detects an unrecoverable hardware problem. Normal causes for MCE errors are overheating and/or incorrect hardware installation. Overheating can cause electrons to become more animated and thus escape from the silicon tracks, resulting in corrupted data. Some specific manually induced causes could be: Overclocking (naturally increases heat output) Poorly fitted heatsink/computer fans (the same problem can happen with excessive dust in the CPU fan) Computer software can also cause errors in this way (normally by corrupting data they are reading or writing). For example: -Software performing read or write operations to non-existent memory regions which leads to confusion for the processor and/or the system bus. 3rd party programs mcelog mcelog is a Linux program to decode MCE's on x86-64 processors -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] MCE in kernel
Thank you Dan: I'll look into this. Time to tear the old box apart again. Thank you again. Alan On 9/4/07, Dan Farrell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 4 Sep 2007 06:51:38 +1000 Alan E. Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think your solution is the better one, though. I did follow the instructions of the boot messages and installed an mce log translation utility, but I didn't make sense of what to do with it. The thing is, you are only masking symptoms. There may be something wrong, and perhaps you could save a lot of work later by fixing a problem before it turns catastrophic. from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Check_Exception A Machine Check Exception, also called MCE, is a computer hardware error which occurs when a computer's central processing unit detects an unrecoverable hardware problem. Normal causes for MCE errors are overheating and/or incorrect hardware installation. Overheating can cause electrons to become more animated and thus escape from the silicon tracks, resulting in corrupted data. Some specific manually induced causes could be: Overclocking (naturally increases heat output) Poorly fitted heatsink/computer fans (the same problem can happen with excessive dust in the CPU fan) Computer software can also cause errors in this way (normally by corrupting data they are reading or writing). For example: -Software performing read or write operations to non-existent memory regions which leads to confusion for the processor and/or the system bus. 3rd party programs mcelog mcelog is a Linux program to decode MCE's on x86-64 processors -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan [EMAIL PROTECTED] An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for one non-existent. ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Sudden XP death
On Saturday 22 December 2007, maxim wexler wrote: Hi group, Trying to set up vmware, unfortunately the PC dies suddenly after booting WinXP. XP boots OK but anywhere between a couple of seconds to about 5 mins afterwards without any warning the PC simply shuts itself off. And when it reboots it doesn't complain about a sudden shutdown, just churns merrily along for a few moments then, clunk, the PC stops cold. This is a fresh install of XP SP1 with nothing added except for the (native)9250 ATI drivers. It hasn't even been on line yet, so it's not a virus. It's on sda1, which was freshly formatted NTFS; the rest of the drive is given over to gentoo which works fine. Be interested to hear from anyone else this has ever happened to. Maxim Do you mean the host PC shutsdown? And by sda1, do you mean you're installing to a NTFS partition and not to a virtual hard disk? Do I understand right that the installation of XP went OK but booting fails? Or are you trying to boot an installed XP from vmware? Anyway, my experience with such sudden failures were usually linked to either processor heat or Power Supply being not strong enough. But it was never linked to vmware. Thierry -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Advanced routing
Sascha Hlusiak wrote: Am Donnerstag 03 Januar 2008 21:59:59 schrieb Vernon A. Fort: We switched from a cisco router to using a gentoo box with mutiple nics - all appears to be working very well. However, i ran into a major problem when one of my PC's went nuts. It flooded the network with unknown protocol which I saw from tcpdump. What protocol number was is? Maybe you could enable the protocol in the Linux Kernel and then filter it and apply routing rules. What is the router doing usually and how did the flooding bring your network down? Maybe just preventing the router from routing unwanted protocols already help and you don't actually need a bandwidth limiter. This was in the heat of the moment - i was able to get a MAC address from the unknown protocol messages from tcpdump. We tracked it down to a HUNG pc - basically flooding the network. This gentoo box is a firewall / router. We have three NIC's, one for the internet and one for each subnet. I've been at this long enough to see bad network devices HANG an entire network several times but this is the first time i've used Linux as a router. Just trying to come up with a solution to prevent this in the future - i guess i will have to wait until it happens again due to the lack of debugging logs/information. I was just hoping there was some kernel or network setting to help with bad devices that i missed when setting this box up. Vernon -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Constant Load 1.00+ on new Toshiba laptop
On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.comwrote: On Thursday 19 February 2009 01:38:39 Beau Henderson wrote: I've tried manually altering the governor to performance but its the same story. The system doesn't appear sluggish, I'm really more concerned that something is causing the load and this might lead to shorter battery life and and more heat. Right in the beginning you said the load was *exactly* 1.00. Now, load is defined as the _number_ of processes on average waiting for the cpu in the last 1, 5, 15 minutes So it does not mean that the cpu is necessarily working hard (but usually does) if the load is high. Yours is _exactly_ 1.00 (very suspicious) This is almost certainly one of two things: 1. A stupid kernel config that you should not have done :-) 2. Some app is blocking hard on IO I guess #2 - something waits for IO, it is not available, so immediately goes back to sleep waiting for it's next time slice. This happens many times a second and averaged over a minute looks like the cpu is constantly busy. Thus, no real extra cpu load is happening, the machine does not appear at all sluggish and the only harm is that it is annoying as hell. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com Woah, now were getting somewhere. After reading that, I had another look at the top output and noticed that a single hald process was in D state. /etc/init.d/hald stop and the load is lowering as I type. I'm going to have to dig into this deeper as time permits. Thanks everyone :) -- Beau Dylan Henderson No human being should be denied the fundamental right to educate themselves or indulge their curiosities. To deny any person the right to do so, for whatever reason, is nothing more than the safeguarding of ignorance to ensure that enlightenment does not become a threat. For nothing in this world is more dangerous than an open mind. -- Matthew Good
Re: [gentoo-user] Monitoring temperatures
On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 17:58:05 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Neil Bothwick wrote: On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 02:26:36 -0500, Dale wrote: What may also be a good idea is to have some way to shut the systems down when they get to hot or if the A/C fails. Most BIOSes will do this automatically,although they tend to let the temperature get quite high. lm_sensors includes a daemon that will monitor temperatures and send warnings and alarms. I may be wrong here, but doesn't it just shut off like cutting off power? Or does it tell the OS to do the shutdown, like in a real hurry? I never tested that feature so I'm not real clear on how that works. Sometimes there is also an option to send ACPI power button event beforehand, but either way that's usually is the last resort case - last thing I want is a hardware shutdown just because of high load. Besides, it's none too flexible - sometimes just one of the conditioners goes down, so the room temp gets to, say, 25C, but that's still not a reason to panic if the situation is under control. And even when bunch of bioses shut system down all the systems correctly because of cpu/chipset heat when A/C dies, there'd be a lot of hard drive failures in a few weeks. -- Mike Kazantsev // fraggod.net signature.asc Description: PGP signature
[gentoo-user] Re: [OT sort of] S-video support on NVidia-based cards
Mark Knecht markknecht at gmail.com writes: Anyway, one feature I'd like to investigate with this card is MythTV over s-Video. I already use this on another old machine which is ATI-based but that ATI driver requires an old kernel so the machine hasn't been completely updated in a couple of years now. If I can get Myth out on the S-video port of this new card then possibly I can use that machine for something else which would be cool. Some of the newer ATI cards surely support this? I have not ever muck around with S_video, but, it's just another well define interface (port), I would think. Anyway, in the $40 O No! Stop the buss! If you are spending new dollars, I'd highly recommend this ATI card, The 4350! ASUS EAH4350 SILENT, no fan just passively cooled. It uses the latest (smallest transistor) technology to build a very reasonable performing graphics card with little heat and no noise. A Silent video card has to be attractive for any audiophile? It even comes with an HDMI output. I have not gotten into the interfaces (splitting) the video and audio feeds, yet, but it looks encouraging. It was $29 dollars, but, make sure it's fits into your video slot on your mobo. What I guess I'm really trying to say is, if you are spending new money, get a video card that uses the latest GPS technologies and has the outputs you want. Do try to avoid video cards with HDCP built in... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection Although it's only a matter of time before HDCP is reverse engineered and work_arounds developed, methinks... hth, James
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: buying a keyboard
On Thursday 04 June 2009 16:39:39 Dale wrote: Ajai Khattri wrote: On Sun, 31 May 2009, Adrian wrote: It's finally getting worn out, keys are sticking pretty bad. I would like to get a new one, but the company I purchased it from (via the internet) seems to not exist any more. Some google action has not resulted in locating any similar keyboards. About once a year, I wash all my keyboards (no, seriously). Dishwasher, quick wash, cold, then leave somewhere warm to dry for a couple days. Afterwards, the tactile response feels like new :-) When I was working on computers, I used to clean them with pure alcohol then lay them on top of the A/C condenser, you know, the hot part. It would dry real good in a couple hours. Heat plus the large volume of air works very well. Be careful that the air doesn't blow the keyboard off tho. Some A/C systems can blow huge amounts of air. That was mostly done on IBM XT/AT and Wyse 50 terminal keyboards by the way. I'm not sure about some of these new keyboards with the little rubber pad thingys. Those old keyboards sure did click loud tho. lol IBM system M keyboard ... best keyboard ever made. They were so loud the switch construction even got given a name : buckling spring :-) -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
[gentoo-user] Gentoo laptop issues
I just managed to get Gentoo installed on my Presario v6420 which is the first laptop I've ever had linux on and I've got two problems that I thought I'd ask the list about: The most important of the problems involves the fan. The laptop gets a whole lot hotter using linux while compiling than it did using vista while compiling which implies that there is some fan control missing from my install. What sort of ebuilds/apps should I be looking at to solve the problem? Button #2 of the touchpad, which seems to be set as the upper right corner of the pad, controls paste (as in cut and paste). The button works great at first but then after a period, or it may be related to a heat issue, it stops working. Restarting X solves the problem. I have not noticed it failing with gpm but I have not stayed in console as long. Remapping works but I'd like some pointers on solving this problem. I've also noticed two seperate clipboards. One, using the usual middle click button and another using shift-insert. These clipboards are different in what they paste... Anyone know more about this? -- All any drug amounts to is tweaking the incoming data. You have to be incredibly self-centered or pathetic to be satisfied with simply tweaking the incoming data. -- William Gibson
[gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo laptop issues
list-catcher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The most important of the problems involves the fan. The laptop gets a whole lot hotter using linux while compiling than it did using vista while compiling which implies that there is some fan control missing from my install. What sort of ebuilds/apps should I be looking at to solve the problem? How about trying some of these: http://packages.gentoo.org/category/sys-power/?full_cat Button #2 of the touchpad, which seems to be set as the upper right corner of the pad, controls paste (as in cut and paste). The button works great at first but then after a period, or it may be related to a heat issue, it stops working. Restarting X solves the problem. I have not noticed it failing with gpm but I have not stayed in console as long. Remapping works but I'd like some pointers on solving this problem. Maybe install xev to see if it outputs any data when it stops working so you can see if its a hardware or software problem. I've also noticed two seperate clipboards. One, using the usual middle click button and another using shift-insert. These clipboards are different in what they paste... Anyone know more about this? Here you can read about it: http://www.jwz.org/doc/x-cut-and-paste.html -- Miernik http://miernik.name/
Re: [MBZ] SDL a/c not working
Belt, tensioner, shock, spring, a/c compressor are all brand new from Rusty. Compressor was just installed a couple weeks ago. The other parts were done when I installed the 22 head. I will check the speed wiring etc after this weekend. It keeps doing this run then off thing only when the car is cold. Turning the car off and on won't kick it back on. It has to cool off. Luther Peter Frederick wrote: in cool weather, that's about right. You will have to check out the speed sensor, the wiring, and the pushbutton unit, sadly. The wires for the speed sensor can break at the pin on the compressor, or the solder can crack there, causing an intermittant poor connection. Also verify the condition of the belt and tensioner -- the car will run just fine with broken tensioner spring except that the AC will keep kicking out. A slipping belt will do it, and so will a back AC compressor. Check the clutch on the compressor for excessive heat after a short run -- if it slips, the compressor will be shut off by the KLIMA until the ignition is cycled on and off (this is a quick test for a bad clutch or cos-only was a BIG mistake. And as kdesvn-portage shows - it was unneeded. 'We need the features of paludis' was shown as bs. Just another little trick by the paludis-group to convert people. Luckily that failed. You don't need it.
[gentoo-user] Re: ATI video card with water cooler
Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gentoo at gmail.com writes: I've never tried the HDMI, so I can't say how it behaves, but yeah it came with a DVI to HDMI dongle thing. As far as I know the video signal in HDMI and DVI are identical, and that HDMI is basically like DVI with sound. I could be wrong about that though. Electrically DVI-D and HDMI are compatible, with converter (your dongle). HDMI does run software based protocols that dvi do not have the capability to run/understand. That why you need and HDMI output on the video card directly to get into auto negotiated protocols between HDMI devices. This is all not to be confused with Intel's evil HDCP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDCP This is one aspect of why I never purchase anything from Intel. Evil, Evil Evil... One thing to beware of with this particular card is that it is HUGE, both in length and the big Arctic Cooling heat sink causes it to be very tall. I have an enormous thermaltake armour case and it was still a tight squeeze. If your case is less than 9 inches wide I don't know if it would fit. My case is 7 wide. Nice to know. I did find a passively cool 8500GT but I'm not sure it will be sufficient for gaming: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/ item-details.asp?EdpNo=4283330CatId=1826 How would I know if this will work very well with bzflag (that the game my kids are hooked on...)? James
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: ATI video card with water cooler
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:59 AM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gentoo at gmail.com writes: I've never tried the HDMI, so I can't say how it behaves, but yeah it came with a DVI to HDMI dongle thing. As far as I know the video signal in HDMI and DVI are identical, and that HDMI is basically like DVI with sound. I could be wrong about that though. Electrically DVI-D and HDMI are compatible, with converter (your dongle). HDMI does run software based protocols that dvi do not have the capability to run/understand. That why you need and HDMI output on the video card directly to get into auto negotiated protocols between HDMI devices. This is all not to be confused with Intel's evil HDCP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDCP This is one aspect of why I never purchase anything from Intel. Evil, Evil Evil... One thing to beware of with this particular card is that it is HUGE, both in length and the big Arctic Cooling heat sink causes it to be very tall. I have an enormous thermaltake armour case and it was still a tight squeeze. If your case is less than 9 inches wide I don't know if it would fit. My case is 7 wide. Nice to know. I did find a passively cool 8500GT but I'm not sure it will be sufficient for gaming: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/ item-details.asp?EdpNo=4283330CatId=1826 How would I know if this will work very well with bzflag (that the game my kids are hooked on...)? My previous card was an 8500GT in fact, and other than the fan dying and causing the card to melt, it was fine.
Re: [gentoo-user] {OT} Why RAID1?
I'm about to buy a couple Samsung Spinpoint F1 hard drives and I was planning on setting them up in a RAID0 array. Everyone seems to love RAID1 though, and I'm a little confused as to why. Don't daily backups secure 99% of the data that RAID1 does? They even protect in the event of theft or fire which RAID1 doesn't. If one hard drive dies in a RAID1 array, does the system keep running? If so, that's good, but there are so many other components that could die. In 15 years I've lost the power supply, video card, modem, motherboard, and CPU, but never a hard drive. With all these potential points of failure, how much greater system reliability do mirrored hard drives really offer? In fifteen years I've lost roughly fifteen hard drives and one power supply. Hard drives have moving parts and that equals failures. Congratulations on being lucky, though you have wonder why so many thing that don't normally have issues are having issues in your system. :-) Do you guys think RAID1 is unnecessary with an SLC SSD drive? I actually did lose one or two laptop hard drives now that I think about it. The other stuff: power supply - cheapness video cards - heat modem - lightning motherboard and CPU - overclocking (never again) - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] problem booting from a USB flash drive
On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 03:59:16 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: On 6/10/05, Neil Bothwick [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: CF cards aren't lockable, but some CD-IDE adaptors have a write protect jumper. Of course, you'll have problems saving any settings with a write- protected /etc, so JFFS2 may be a better option. This is a filesystem specifically for flash driver, that avoids repeated writing to the same part of the disk. Or, of course, you could simply mount the filesystem ro. For me this is about how to make a quiet MythTV frontend machine, not a 'Gentoo PC.' No hard drive is less noise. My thought was that once the machine was configured I'd like to lock the flash and never write ANYTHING to it. What about the MythTV data? Is that on another box, networked? The only time I'd possibly do anything on the flash was to update the system, maybe once every few months. Other than that if the machine is turned on and playing TV shows then I'd be happy with no logging or any type and the drive doesn't change at all. It sounds like you need something like one of these, which keep the card inside the box, and treat it as a hard disk (but silent). Removing all hard disks would also reduce the amount of heat generated, so you could reduce fan speeds to make it even quieter. -- Neil Bothwick If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast. pgpEXDa0j8gEO.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] power-down during emerge -u world causing library-issues
On 11/1/05, Dale [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Fernando Meira wrote: So, there are some missing libraries and others causing conflicts.. don't know if that was caused by the power-down, or something while updating was running, but how can I fix this? Should I reemerge some packages? If so, which ones? Thanks for the help, FernandoTotally shooting in the dark here.Do you have dbus and udev in yourUSE line in make.conf?You may want to reemerge dbus and then do a etc-update and env-update just to make sure.If you didn't have dbusand udev in there, don't forget the --newuse thing for emerge. udev was in use.defaults but I didn't have dbus! Anyway, that only makes difference to ecore.. no other package in my system has that flag (as it seems so..) That is one problem I have not ran into before.May want to clean thosefans.All the compiling in Gentoo sure does make a lot of heat build up.Only folding could be worse. Yes, indeed.. it will be the 3rd time i do it.. the strange is that it was from one day to the other that cpu temperature started to rise like that.. 2 days ago was not going higher than 60C... during the yesterday's emerge 70C was the average! Hope that helps until a guru comes along.Gives you something to checkanyway. Thanks!! I'll then downgrade dbus back to dbus-0.23.4-r1, and see if it works! Fernando
[gentoo-user] What STABLE nForce 680i based motherboard?
What STABLE nForce 680i based motherboard? I am about to build a new Gentoo system, most of the components I have already chosen and are listed at the end of this post. (It will be a Core 2 Duo E6700 based system, nForce 680i chipset with one GeForce 8800 GTS card.) For gaming (windoze) there seems to be several good motherboard choices. The issue is that while I will get in a gaming session in Windows every few days, the rest of the time the system will be running Gentoo (64-bit) and the Linux sessions need to be stable for tasks like multi-day runs of POV-Ray (and lots of compiling, of course.) Because of the stability requirement I don't plan to over-clock, except for using EPP: (so I want an nForce based system and Corsair memory.) I have read about some great motherboards for gaming but also about some stability issues with some of those boards. With the components listed below, what motherboard(s) would anyone recommend? (If you can think of better components, please mention those as well.) Anyone have any links to good nForce 680i mother-board reviews? PC Power Cooling Silencer 750 power supply Two pair of Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5D (4GB RAM total) Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 with Thermalright Ultra-120 heat sink (and Scythe S-Flex SFF21E 120mm fan) Two Seagate Barracuda ES SATA 3.0Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive One BFG Tech 8800 GTS 640 MB pcHDTV HD-5500 HDTV card (http://pchdtv.com/) All to fit in an existing California PC Products full tower http://www.calpc.com/catalog/full_tower.html
Re: [OT] Re: [gentoo-user] Intel Core Duo Processor - Anyone?
Are you sure that it was a Pentium M and not a Pentium4-M or just the p4s? There is a signicant difference. With all the benchmarks I've seen, the Pentium Ms beat all the other processors in terms of power consumption and heat and in a lot of cases, performance. it even outdoes the P4s and the FX series amds. Tomshardware even has benchmarks claiming such a thing (which is odd since they're usually anti-intel). It is after all, a souped up P3 which allows it to have a faster clock speed than the p4s even when running with fewer ghz. Lord Sauron wrote: http://www-131.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?productId=4611686018425155337storeId=1001langId=-1categoryId=2059153dualCurrId=173catalogId=-840 That's the cheapest X60 with Core Duo. HOWEVER: I'd still highly recommend a AMD Turion. Well... I'd even more strongly suggest just waiting, all you prospective laptop buyers. A Dual Core Turion64 is coming *very* soon. The Turion64s murdered the Pentium M processors in not just speed but power efficiency. My Athlon1400 could kill a Pentium 4 2.4GHz any time. My Athlon64 can destroy the fastest non-dual core Pentium 4 (extreme editions exempted - I don't know anyone with one to compare the performance with). Acer makes good laptops with AMD chips. Just for laughs, Intel just released a new Pentium4 Ext.Ed. (Dual core, 955) to counter the FX-60 from AMD. PC World tested the chip... the FX-60 was ~30% faster while being about $30 cheaper. Okay, I'll stop evangelising AMD now. Thanks for listening (it makes me feel somewhat important). -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Bad mem, over heat and games
On 06/05/06, JimD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 24x7. I am not sure if this is messing it up or not. It seems to stay pretty warm. I bought an extra 1GB of mem for the laptop and put that in today after the first lockup. I ran memtest for about 10 minutes and didn't see any issues. Laptops generally get warm/hot to the touch. What sort of temperatures does it show? memetest should run overnight to get a reliable result. I remember reading either in this list or in the Gentoo forums why memtest is not the best test for memory integrity. There's a script somewhere which will also put your memory controller under some pressure. I'll post back if I can find it. Momentarily getting back the display image that was cached indicates that your swap was not flushed, which is probably more related to the fact that the machine crashed rather than shut down gracefully. If as you say your video card is sharing the system memory and the memory is suspect, then that would explain why you are getting all these video display problems. Does reverting back to the old memory chip improve matters? Some laptops (and desktops for that matter) do not take kindly to mixing and matching memory chips. If your memory upgrade was not sympathetic to the laptop's idiosyncracies the problems you describe are typical. -- Regards, Mick -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Bad mem, over heat and games - update
On 5/6/06, JimD [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: JimD wrote: Ok, this is a three part question. I am on vacation and I am using my wife's laptop that used to have winxp and now has Gentoo. Starting today I started to get garbled video output followed by a lock-up. I have been using the laptop as my dev platform and keeping it running 24x7. I am not sure if this is messing it up or not. It seems to stay pretty warm. I bought an extra 1GB of mem for the laptop and put that in today after the first lockup. I ran memtest for about 10 minutes and didn't see any issues. I took out the OEM 512MB DDR2 and left in just the 1GB DDR2 and things seem stable now. I was able to run abuse.sdl without any lockups. I have never had two different memory modules give me problems before. I would have liked to have 1.5GB, but oh well. One possibility may have to do with the memory timings of the old vs new memory. If the BIOS gives any manual control over the CAS, RAS, etc timings, you might try increasing them. I had to do this with my AMD64 desktop system, even though the memory modules were matched. They just would not run stable at the rated settings... HTH, -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-user] [OT overheat] How to cause shutdown on overheat
Group, I recently built a ventilated stucture around my 4 desktops to try to quiet things down and get rid of the heat. I made no provision for forced shutdown in case of overheat, which is quite likely to happen if, for example the main ventilation fan went down for some reason. Well, that happened due to stupidity on my part with getting used to the new setup. I fired up a computer and neglected to turn the fan on. Then left it running overnight. Well, given the confined space and very little/no ventilation (of my homemade structure) the computer got hot... Sometime this morning I see syslog messages written to tty that say: Message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] at Sat Sep 30 04:41:32 2006 ... reader kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold Message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] at Sat Sep 30 04:41:32 2006 ... reader kernel: CPU0: Running in modulated clock mode [...] Some kind of attempt by kernel to cool things down. But will it actually shutdown if it gets dangerously hot? Further, how can I discover what temperatures were involved when this happened? Or can I set something to make a shutdown happen at a specific temperature? A nicer solution would be somekind of added stand alone temperature monitor in the enclosure that causes a controlled shutdown like one gets with `shutdown -h now'. Anyone here with some experience in this kind of thing that can steer me to some good information? -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Going to Ubuntu - was 1.) Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler
On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 16:50:49 -0600 Joseph [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wasn't clear, the computer runs usually for 20 to 30minus and kernel panic comes up on the screen. I'm still googling for some solutions and I can only find some suggestion; no clear answer. i I think you have hardware problems - maybe a heat issue. have you tried running with the covers off and a fan blowing onto the system? I think I went too fast for AMD64; I should have stayed with x86 and old good IDE drive. Somebody suggested: Enabling 32 bit mode for the drives in the BIOS to cure this problem. I'll check my Bios the next time it will crash :-/ i Yes, 32-bit should be enabled, but I can't see where it would cause this problem. fwiw - this is being sent from an AMD64 3000, nforce3 chipset, Shuttle box, IDE drive, running Gentoo - # uname -av Linux chi 2.6.12-gentoo-r4 #1 Mon Jul 11 19:02:55 PDT 2005 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux [ I] kde-base/kdebase (3.4.1-r1): KDE base packages: the desktop, panel, window [ I] sys-devel/gcc (3.4.3-r1): The GNU Compiler Collection. Includes C/C++, Bob - -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Going to Ubuntu - was 1.) Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler
On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 19:05 -0700, Zac Medico wrote: Bob Sanders wrote: On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 16:50:49 -0600 Joseph [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wasn't clear, the computer runs usually for 20 to 30minus and kernel panic comes up on the screen. I'm still googling for some solutions and I can only find some suggestion; no clear answer. i I think you have hardware problems - maybe a heat issue. have you tried running with the covers off and a fan blowing onto the system? Good thinking Bob! That 20 to 30 minutes certainly seems symptomatic of overheating. I've been confused throughout this whole thread thinking that the kernel panic and kde compile were somehow related. I know, sounds crazy, but that's how I interpreted Joseph's explanation of the situation. Zac The latest news. After taking the cover off; the temp. of the CPU went down by 3C to 37C and Motherboard down by 3C as well to 26C. but that still didn't prevent the the kernel panic message: Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler. So my next solution is to get another Drive but an IDE type and put the SATA one on the shelf, and reinstall Gentoo. -- #Joseph -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Going to Ubuntu - was 1.) Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler
Joseph wrote: On Thu, 2005-07-21 at 19:05 -0700, Zac Medico wrote: Bob Sanders wrote: On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 16:50:49 -0600 Joseph [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wasn't clear, the computer runs usually for 20 to 30minus and kernel panic comes up on the screen. I'm still googling for some solutions and I can only find some suggestion; no clear answer. i I think you have hardware problems - maybe a heat issue. have you tried running with the covers off and a fan blowing onto the system? Good thinking Bob! That 20 to 30 minutes certainly seems symptomatic of overheating. I've been confused throughout this whole thread thinking that the kernel panic and kde compile were somehow related. I know, sounds crazy, but that's how I interpreted Joseph's explanation of the situation. Zac The latest news. After taking the cover off; the temp. of the CPU went down by 3C to 37C and Motherboard down by 3C as well to 26C. but that still didn't prevent the the kernel panic message: Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler. So my next solution is to get another Drive but an IDE type and put the SATA one on the shelf, and reinstall Gentoo. Ideally, it would be nice if you could test this idea before taking such a large step. Maybe you can boot from a livecd, reproduce the error, and then try to reproduce the error again without your sata driver loaded. Zac -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Going to Ubuntu - was 1.) Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler
my bid is: 1) is that sata_via kernel/module actualy loading? 2) update bios 3) check mbr hope i'm not wastig your time. I have similar box, except sata drive, but lot of sata stuf is loadin' Linux 2.6.11.11 #1 Fri Jun 17 11:19:52 EEST 2005 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux martins On Friday 22 July 2005 07:26, Joseph wrote: The latest news. After taking the cover off; the temp. of the CPU went down by 3C to 37C and Motherboard down by 3C as well to 26C. but that still didn't prevent the the kernel panic message: Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler. So my next solution is to get another Drive but an IDE type and put the SATA one on the shelf, and reinstall Gentoo. Ideally, it would be nice if you could test this idea before taking such a large step. Maybe you can boot from a livecd, reproduce the error, and then try to reproduce the error again without your sata driver loaded. Zac I have an old IDE drive, maybe I can squeeze Gentoo on it for testing. Bob has a good idea too regarding the CPU compound under the heat-sink but at CPU temp. 39C I don't see how that could cause any problem. -- #Joseph -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Going to Ubuntu - was 1.) Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler
Joseph wrote: Finally I was able to emerge KDE, it really took a lot of time. Though, looking at the motherboard's ASUS A8V IRQ setting: They put a lot of devices on IRQ5: skge - network controller libata - I think this is sata ATA controller ethci_Hcd:usb2, usb2 VIA8237 - sound ship No wonder I'm having problem (and some others) with Sata Drive, if it is sharing an IRQ with so many devices. In comparison IDE controller have all their own IRQ's Primary IRQ 14 and Secondary IRQ 15 Great! So, did you physically remove the sata drive? The sata drivers are still enabled though? The ouput from dmesg should give you an idea what drivers the kernel is actively using. Zac No, I still have the same Sata Drive is just I'm playing with IRQ assignment and configuration. I've changed to BIOS PnP to YES, so my skge (network controller) and libata (Sata Controller are shifted to IRQ 10 But it makes me wonder both controllers on the Motherboard are different chips, so why do they share IRQ? Is there a way to shift them to a different IRQ since Linux control IRQ assignment now? A quick look through linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt shows that many drivers support direct irq assignment. Also, linux/Documentation/pnp.txt may be of use. Considering the positive results that you've gotten so far, it seems like you may be on the right track here. It makes me less concerned about any possible overheating, but if you wanted to be paranoid about it, you could get another heat probe to double check the readings from the first one ;-). Zac -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
[gentoo-user] Re: update - was 1.) Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler
[snip] No, I still have the same Sata Drive is just I'm playing with IRQ assignment and configuration. I've changed to BIOS PnP to YES, so my skge (network controller) and libata (Sata Controller are shifted to IRQ 10 But it makes me wonder both controllers on the Motherboard are different chips, so why do they share IRQ? Is there a way to shift them to a different IRQ since Linux control IRQ assignment now? A quick look through linux/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt shows that many drivers support direct irq assignment. Also, linux/Documentation/pnp.txt may be of use. Considering the positive results that you've gotten so far, it seems like you may be on the right track here. It makes me less concerned about any possible overheating, but if you wanted to be paranoid about it, you could get another heat probe to double check the readings from the first one ;-). Zac Here is what I have done: 1.) Disable Network controller on the motherboard and install another one on PCI bus - this eliminate possible IRQ conflict. But it didn't help. 2.) Removed the heatsink clean it with 99% isopropyl alcohol and applied thin layer of new heatsink grease. Nothing helped, still getting that message: Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler. Next option, is to try to remove SATA drive and try to install Gentoo on standard IDE drive; this would eliminate SCSI problem and/or buggy driver. Does anybody has any other solutions? -- #Joseph -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [Update] - was 1.) Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler
On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 16:29 -0400, Robert Crawford wrote: If you are using the thermal pad, tape, or grease that came with the stock heatsink, you might try using some arctic silver compound instead. It's good for a 3-5C. drop from the regular stuff. Sometimes even the AMD approved stock heatsinks don't do the job, and you might need to get a better one (assuming heat is the problem). I build a lot of computers, and with AMD cpus, overkill in the cooling dept. is sometimes necessary. Robert Crawford As I posted earlier: -- Here is what I have done: 1.) Disable Network controller on the motherboard and install another one on PCI bus - this eliminate possible IRQ conflict. But it didn't help. 2.) Removed the heatsink clean it with 99% isopropyl alcohol and applied thin layer of new heatsink grease. Nothing helped, still getting that message: Kernel panic - not syncing: Aiee, killing interupt handler. Next option, is to try to remove SATA drive and try to install Gentoo on standard IDE drive; this would eliminate SCSI problem and/or buggy driver. --- If the IDE drive will not solve the problem I'll try as you suggest that arctic silver compound (or just run that useless box only during Winter - here in Edmonton sometimes it gets down to -40C it might help :- I'm simply running out of ideas. [snip] -- #Joseph -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Random Kernel Crashes ... Need more info
I've been experiencing some random kernel crashes, and need a way of finding out what happened. Kris, I'd start by answering the following: 1. What version of the kernel are you using? Your OP is quite old, and many releases of the kernel have come out since then. Have you tried a newer kernel? Does the crashes keep happening regardless of the kernel version? 2. If it doesn't matter about the kernel version, then that would indicate most likely a hardware failure of some kind. Could be as simple as a flakey memory module, or some extreme such as a motherboard and/or chipset issue, some device flaking out, etc. 3. Have you looked at crashes due to heat? Is your box cleaned and have proper airflow? 4. Are you running any esoteric or rare hardware components in the box? 5. Have you ensured that your kernel config matches the hardware? In some cases the selection of drivers is not as simple as selecting a card vendor, you sometimes need to get beyond that and know exactly what the device has installed. 6. random kernel crashes really doesn't provide a lot of info. How frequently does it occur? Every other month or every 3 minutes? What happens to the box, a total lockup, a powerdown, etc.? -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] [Not strictly Gentoo] Touchpad as graphic tablet?
On 6/29/06, Leonardo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, I have a laptop with a touchpad, and was wondering if it's possible to use it as a sort of 'cheap' graphic tablet. I've tried, no success. As it should be possible to configure the threshold pressure to detect the touch, maybe it's even possible to have not only position, but also pressure detection, similarly to what happens for graphic tablets. That's one of the technologies used. http://www.synaptics.com/technology/cps.cfm If you think carefully, you must use something that provides capicitance for it to work, so, a pen or anything like that should not work. Has anybody tried to use it in this way (maybe with Gimp)? I've posted in foruns, where most of the time it was taken as a joke ;) but I only have my synaptic notebook touchpad, maybe another one (I've heard some sense heat, others sense pressure only) can work. Its way easier and not that expensive (but still expensive) to buy a tablet. -- Daniel da Veiga Computer Operator - RS - Brazil -BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK- Version: 3.1 GCM/IT/P/O d-? s:- a? C++$ UBLA++ P+ L++ E--- W+++$ N o+ K- w O M- V- PS PE Y PGP- t+ 5 X+++ R+* tv b+ DI+++ D+ G+ e h+ r+ y++ --END GEEK CODE BLOCK-- -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] Problem with Emerge
On AD 2006 September 07 Thursday 11:11:46 PM -0400, Bill Six wrote: Hi, 3 days ago I just switched back to Gentoo after not using it for about 6 months. However, I've been having issues emerging packages. Frequently, the build will crap out and I'll get something like the following. Any idea why this happens? If you're getting the compiler segmentation fault on many packages at random times you probably have bad hardware. The causes I've seen for this are bad or intermittently bad ram/other hardware, or hardware failure over a certain temperature. The first can be easily diagnosed with memtest86+ as once the probe hits bad sectors you'll know about it. The second is much more difficult to track down but not impossible. If your compiler is segfaulting once the CPU hits a certain temperature, then you can verify this is going on by emerging a package and watching the temperature and observe at which temperature the compiler segfaults. Older Athlons run pretty hot. If this is your case you may want to buy the expensive silver heat sink compound. As for OS problems I don't know what to say except that this may be a sign not to run -mm or better patch sets and expect things to be stable. (: At least all the critical ebuilds should filter out insanity CFLAGS. Justin -- You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
Re: [gentoo-user] ATI-Driver 9.6 support?
On Sat, July 4, 2009 03:58, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: On Samstag 04 Juli 2009, Jesús Guerrero wrote: I don't filter anything. Just default metalog with default settings. I use sysklogd, that shouldn't matter much though. The config is pretty standard, and certainly there's nothing related to fglrx in there. The logs on a normal day are, at most, a few kb's (without fglrx+.30). With that combo into scene, kern.log and syslog grow around 500mb each filling the whole var. I need to delete these two files and restart sysklogd to get some free space in /var (just in case someone around has a similar problem). A quick hack on the printk code in the kernel can be used though to solve all this spam. But the cpu usage doesn't get any better. I know not the reason why, but the truth is that xv wastes lots more of cpu to play video when I have fglrx+.30, with or without the logs, with or without patching the kernel. I really, really doubt that the configuration of my system has anything to do with this, unless it has to do something with some kernel setting. I know how the logs are filled up with 3d apps - but it is not as bad on THIS system. So what might be the reason? No idea. But it's all fglrx spam, that's for sure. Why does it generate more in my system? Well, I blame the hardware, since it's a driver who creates all the spam, there are really few things that I could missconfigure, besides my kernel, that would affect it. I don't use any essoteric stuff in xorg.conf, and I do not even use a compositing wm. sorry about that last line. No harm done. Heat raises easily sometimes. I apologize for anything I've done wrong as well. Regards. -- Jesús Guerrero
Re: [gentoo-user] random reboots
On Freitag 10 Juli 2009, Alan E. Davis wrote: Thank you to members of this list who have gotten me through a couple of serious issues. I have another one. My system reboots at seemingly random times. Usually, this happens during keyboard or mouse input. I have been using kernel 2.6.30-r2. Often this happens when using firefox, but not exclusively. When I checked my machine, it had an uptime of nearly 4 hours after the last reboot, when I had not logged in. However, after logging in, I experienced two reboots in rapid succession. Interestingly, after I recompiled the kernel, enabling more modules of I2C stuff, to enable hardware monitoring for my Motherboard, the system has seemed to become less stable, and reboots readily. I usually use nvidia non-freedom drivers. I am now typing with the x11 drivers, and the system has not rebooted. I am now also using 2.6.29-r5. Once such things happened to me because I had a file with a filename starting with _ in my filesystem. Everytime I started nautilus, firefox, or epiphany, the system would crash. This was some long time ago. I have three SATA drives installed, with a plethora of partitions. I am not sure where to look in logs to look for evidence of problems. May I set up the system to trap for such useful information? Alan Davis ...can the human soul be glimpsed through a microscope? Maybe, but you'd definitely need one of those very good ones with two eyepieces. -- Woody Allen, quoted by B. A. Palevitz sounds like a) heat or b) psu problems or c) triple faults. c) is a lot of time caused by memory problems. One thing causing memory problems is a bad psu. so - in your case - just try a different psu. Ask a friend for one for a couple of days. If your problem stays, you have to look elsewhere.
Re: [gentoo-user] What magic does portage use?
Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: On Samstag 12 Dezember 2009, Dale wrote: Willie Wong wrote: On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 12:54:46PM -0600, Penguin Lover Dale squawked: That is certainly one good example. My little ol desktop is not rebooted to much. I once went 242 days without a reboot. Ahem! While we are busy comparing wang sizes, read my sig please. That is the server formerly known as my desktop. Cheers, W I have noticed that before. There is someone that has like four or five years on here somewhere. Maybe it was the forums. Anyway, we have to reboot eventually. The power company forced me to shut down. Of course, they have been doing a lot better job trimming the trees since then. I got big piles of mulch to prove it too. ;-) We also haven't had a hurricane again either. That helps a little. Dale :-) :-) and what is the advantage? Why do you keep your computer running, wasting energy? Is there any good reason? Well, in the winter time, I run folding and it adds a little extra heat to my room. In the summer time I don't run folding but I do keep it on unless I am going to be gone all day or something like that. I'm on the puter a lot so really no need to cut it off. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] What magic does portage use?
On Samstag 12 Dezember 2009, Dale wrote: Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: On Samstag 12 Dezember 2009, Dale wrote: Willie Wong wrote: On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 12:54:46PM -0600, Penguin Lover Dale squawked: That is certainly one good example. My little ol desktop is not rebooted to much. I once went 242 days without a reboot. Ahem! While we are busy comparing wang sizes, read my sig please. That is the server formerly known as my desktop. Cheers, W I have noticed that before. There is someone that has like four or five years on here somewhere. Maybe it was the forums. Anyway, we have to reboot eventually. The power company forced me to shut down. Of course, they have been doing a lot better job trimming the trees since then. I got big piles of mulch to prove it too. ;-) We also haven't had a hurricane again either. That helps a little. Dale :-) :-) and what is the advantage? Why do you keep your computer running, wasting energy? Is there any good reason? Well, in the winter time, I run folding and it adds a little extra heat to my room. isolation is a lot cheaper on the long run.
Re: [gentoo-user] What magic does portage use?
Alan McKinnon wrote: On Saturday 12 December 2009 21:42:13 Dale wrote: And some would also argue that cycling power on and off is actually bad for the rig as well. Keeping things at a constant temp is better than fluctuating temps. The old expanding and contracting of material argument. Sort of strange that computers that run a lot last a lng time. This is perfectly true and a well-proven fact. Thermal recycling is not good for electronics. It is good for your electricity bill though Tektronix did some proper lab tests many many years ago on their top-of-the- line oscilloscopes. They found that the calibration interval could be tripled if the rig was never switched off (just turn down the brightness overnight) I know I have read that several times but I didn't know someone actually tested the thing. I know my BBQ grill would be better off if I could run it all the time. You have to understand, I had this little table top grill that was stainless steel. I have had that thing for ages and I loved it. I could cook some mean steaks and burgers on it. Anyway, it didn't rust through but it just flaked off on the bottom. It is the heating and cooling cycles that does this. I had the same thing happen to a old wood burning heater we had ages ago. It just got old and the metal was thin even tho it wasn't rusted or anything. It sure was lighter going out of the house than it was coming in. It took six to get it in but only two to take it out. Isn't there metal in CPUs, memory chips and stuff? I know there is silicone but I assume there is metal like copper or something in there too. They can't like heat cycles either. They are so small nowadays. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Has semantic-desktop really become compulsatory for kmail?
On Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:04:38 +0100, walt w41...@gmail.com wrote: On 02/11/2010 01:35 PM, Zeerak Waseem wrote: It just seems silly that if you want to use the newest version of kate, kmail etc. that semantic-desktop is forced upon you, when you're not interested in having the entire DE. By the authority vested in me by My-Wife-the-Windows-User, I welcome you to the gentoo-users mail list. (I don't recall your name from previous months, but, nevermind.) I see that you've taken some heat in return for your opinions, but you've maintained a very civil and polite tone to your replies, and I admire you for that. Why thank you :-) On the other hand, may I politely suggest that, if you wish to use the latest version of kate (or any other software including software from M$) you must necessarily accept the decisions of the author of that software. How could it possibly be otherwise? Well it can't be otherwise, however I do enjoy complaining, well about certain things anyway. Personally I installed kde, and realized I had no idea what on earth was on my computer and why, so I removed it and moved to openbox, and don't use any kde specific apps. But I do find it silly, that the various applications that aren't dependent of the DE, to require a dependency of the DE. It just seems a bit backwards to me :-) I simply don't understand. The Ultimate Solution is to develop your own software, of course, and be the next M$/Google/Whoever. Hey, I'm still working on it -- I'll get there, do-or-die! I just started a degree, to accomplish -something akin to- that ;-) -- Zeerak
[gentoo-user] Re: Old IDE drives and the newer PATA kernel drivers
On 08/27/2010 10:37 AM, Dale wrote: Hi folks, I been putting this off but it looks like the newer kernels are going to push me to changing this real soon. I have a older system, Abit NF7 2.0 motherboard with the older IDE drives. I'm still using the older IDE drivers. This is what I have currently: hda Actual hard drive OS on this hdb Actual hard drive Not in use hdc Actual hard drive home partition hdd DVD burner Duh! It's a burner. sda Actual hard drive connected through a SATA PCI card. Misc stuff. So, hda has the Gentoo OS on it and hdc is my /hone directory. I have videos, mp3's and various other data on sda. Currently hdb is not being used, since for those who keep up with my threads would know, it is the one that is terribly slow. Something along the lines of 10Mbs/sec or something of that nature. It's just hard to get out of the case right now and I can't get to it with a hammer either. :/ You can at least disconnect it then. Right now all it does and eat power, heat the case and make noise :-/ My theory is something like this: hda will become sda; hdb will become sdb; hdc will become sdc; hdd will become sdd; and sda will become sde. Would that be a logical expectation? I'd say sda will stay as is, hda will become sdb, and so forth. Anyway, make sure you have a bootable Linux CD/DVD handy. That way, you won't be able to blow anything up and can boot from it in order to change your /etc/fstab and grub conf.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Old IDE drives and the newer PATA kernel drivers
On Friday 27 August 2010 09:49:41 Nikos Chantziaras wrote: On 08/27/2010 10:37 AM, Dale wrote: Hi folks, I been putting this off but it looks like the newer kernels are going to push me to changing this real soon. I have a older system, Abit NF7 2.0 motherboard with the older IDE drives. I'm still using the older IDE drivers. This is what I have currently: hda Actual hard drive OS on this hdb Actual hard drive Not in use hdc Actual hard drive home partition hdd DVD burner Duh! It's a burner. sda Actual hard drive connected through a SATA PCI card. Misc stuff. So, hda has the Gentoo OS on it and hdc is my /hone directory. I have videos, mp3's and various other data on sda. Currently hdb is not being used, since for those who keep up with my threads would know, it is the one that is terribly slow. Something along the lines of 10Mbs/sec or something of that nature. It's just hard to get out of the case right now and I can't get to it with a hammer either. :/ You can at least disconnect it then. Right now all it does and eat power, heat the case and make noise :-/ My theory is something like this: hda will become sda; hdb will become sdb; hdc will become sdc; hdd will become sdd; and sda will become sde. Would that be a logical expectation? I'd say sda will stay as is, hda will become sdb, and so forth. Anyway, make sure you have a bootable Linux CD/DVD handy. That way, you won't be able to blow anything up and can boot from it in order to change your /etc/fstab and grub conf. Alternatively, give your partitions Labels and reconfigure /etc/fstab to use those. Then you don't have to worry about the changes to the device-names. -- Joost
Re: [gentoo-user] Upgrading from FX-5200 to a GeForce 6200 512MB
Paul Hartman wrote: On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 2:45 AM, Dalerdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: I am thinking of upgrading from a FX-5200 with 128Mb video card to a GeForce 6200 with 512MB. It will be AGP since this is a older rig. My system is something like this: Mobo: Abit NF7 2.0 CPU: AMD 2500+ No overclocking Memory: 2Gbs of 333Mhz. Monitor: Gateway 19 running 1280 x 1024 Based on the selection at Newegg, I would highly recommend going with one of the Radeon HD 3650 or 4650 cards which only cost a little more than the one you're looking at. HD3650 is going to be 5x faster than GeForce 6200 and HD4650 probably 10x faster. I think your motherboard supports AGP 8x, and I'm not sure if there are any power supply considerations or other features (number of DVI heads, etc) but anyway that's my 2 cents. :) I am an Nvidia video card guy through and through, but in this case the AGP Nvidia cards on offer there are ancient and slow compared to their ATI counterparts. I'm a nvidia guy. I'm not big on ATI at all. Just sort of not my cup of tea. I have read they have better Linux support than a long time ago but they came in a little to late for me. I just wish that thing had a bigger heat sink on it with fans. I may change that thing pretty quick. Thanks. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: swap usage creeping up
On Thu, 2010-10-28 at 16:13 +, James wrote: Hello Iain, hey :) From a hardware guy; If you really need hibernate, use it. No laptop was designed to stay powered on continuously despite the features in software and hardware. [snip] If you need hibernate, use it. If you do not, your hardware will last longer being powered down. [snip] er, hibernate IS powering down. S3 powers off everything (Disks, CPU, fans) but leaves a minimal amount of power to the solid-state no-moveable-parts RAM. S4 writes a bunch of stuff to disks and then powers down just like a normal shut down (S5). You can even take out the battery (I even stripped an old laptop, removed the cpu, disks, heat pipes, fans, and put it all back together on S4 and then resumed). S4 can leave some bios function and power for WOL and other devices, but it's not essential. In fact S5 which every modern ATX computer does STILL leaves power to USB, WOL, modems keyboards, if required. So when I say 12 day uptimes, this is calculated by the kernel since I last rebooted, not since I last hibernated. I'm not actually running the laptop for 12 days continuously. Although, IMHO, there's no difference to a laptop or desktop in this regard. Push it to the limits I say ;) -- Iain Buchanan iaindb at netspace dot net dot au serendipity, n.: The process by which human knowledge is advanced.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Upgrading from FX-5200 to a GeForce 6200 512MB
Dale wrote: I was thinking the same thing. I figure something worked for a while and then had some sort of a error and then switched to something else that was slow. I don't know the inner workings of opengl so I am just guessing. I just know it worked for a while then didn't until I told it to switch again. It is weird tho. I did do this last night tho. I upgraded my kernel and updated to the latest nvidia drivers. I checked it again a few minutes ago by playing a video and it is still working like it should. At almost full screen my CPU was running at about 40 to 50% which is about like it was a while back. So, I figure it was either some sort of kernel issue or even more likely a nvidia driver issue. I'm just hoping it keeps working like this. Those little wheels are turning pretty good now. Dale :-) :-) Well, I worked on my air compressor and played in the dirt in my garden for a while and now I get this again: 2 frames in 7.6 seconds = 0.263 FPS 2 frames in 7.7 seconds = 0.259 FPS I don't know what the issue is but it is getting on my nerves. I have not even logged out of KDE and it is slow again. The only thing I have done was to downgrade gtkam to see if the old version crashes too. Nothing else has been messed with since this morning. Any ideas at all? I'm about ready to do a emerge -e world and see if that helps. It's getting cool so I could use the heat anyway. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Upgrading from FX-5200 to a GeForce 6200 512MB
Alex Schuster wrote: Dale writes: Well, I worked on my air compressor and played in the dirt in my garden for a while and now I get this again: 2 frames in 7.6 seconds = 0.263 FPS 2 frames in 7.7 seconds = 0.259 FPS D'ouch! I don't know what the issue is but it is getting on my nerves. I have not even logged out of KDE and it is slow again. The only thing I have done was to downgrade gtkam to see if the old version crashes too. Nothing else has been messed with since this morning. Any ideas at all? I'm about ready to do a emerge -e world and see if that helps. It's getting cool so I could use the heat anyway. Anything in syslog, Xorg.log or dmesg about drm suddenly being turned off? I'd get back into the garden and turn the air compressor to reverse. Wonko I checked messages, Xorg.log and dmesg, nothing out of the ordinary in there. Just me plugging up my camera, ntpd setting the clock and such nothingness as that. I can't think of any other logs that I can check either. That air compressor has been giving me fits. First a dirt dobber built him a nice house in it and then that caused a wire to burn out on a run capacitor. I evicted the wasp a week or so ago and fixed the wire today. That bug better not try to move in again either. I'll evict him next time with bug spray. Make it a permanent eviction. lol Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: netbook
On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 06:56, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Wed, 10 Nov 2010 22:33:13 -0500, Walter Dnes wrote: Do *NOT* get a machine with a Poulsbo video chip. Seconded. I bought a Dell Mini 10 - lovely keyboard and display but the GMA500 video chip sucked, as did the Broadcom wireless that needed out of kernel drivers. It wasn't just the inconvenience, the thing kept locking up. I believe later Dell Minis, like the 10v, have the GMA950 chip, which is a proper Intel chip, but still Broadcom wireless. Had problems with such hardware (some MSI netbooks) like Graphics and Wireless. An Asus EEE solved most issues, the only one remaining is the battery that reports remaining capacity in percentage instead of mwh, everything else works great. I had an old EEE 701, switched to a 900, and so far, I don't see a reson to upgrade. I like SSDs mostly cause I can (and have) drop my netbook from a certain height, or thrown my bag in the sofa (forgetting it was inside, and on) and never worry about my HDD failing. Also, less power, noise, heat, and some (not very big) read speed improve. Besides, its a netbook, its supposed to be a small storage, fast and simple device. I carry a backup of the whole system (Dual boot XP and Ubuntu NR) with me in a pendrive. I used to run Gentoo on it, worked great, I'm planning on installing Gentoo and ditching UNR, but that will take some time. Anyway, my brother have an 1000H, and that works great too with Linux. -- Daniel da Veiga
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: CPU socket and picking a heat sink.
On 12/03/2010 05:38 PM, Dale wrote: masterprometheus wrote: Thanks for confirming that the coolers will fit. I did some googling but it just wasn't making sense to me yet. I found a site later on that said most coolers used different adapters to work with different sockets if needed. That helped me figure out some of it. Picking another mobo was a good idea. I actually ended up picking this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103675 That's a black-box CPU, not OEM. It includes a heatsink/fan. As far as I known, AMD heatsinks are fine for normal usage. You're not getting a high-end board so I assume you're not trying to tax the hell out of the CPU. You should be fine with that. That is a GIGABYTE GA-770T-USB3 AM3 AMD 770 which is a bit better. I'll have to figure out a way to get my UPS, which uses a serial port, to work but I *think* I still have a serial to USB adapter around here somewhere. I'm going to have to cross that bridge one of these days. I have the AMD2+ version of that motherboard and it has a legacy serial header just like it has a legacy floppy connector. You just need to get a cable. Looking at the picture on NewEgg there seems to be a COMMA plug in the upper right corner of the motherboard. You'd need to pull the manual from Gigabyte to be sure.
[gentoo-user] Re: Re: CPU socket and picking a heat sink.
Dale wrote: Thanks for confirming that the coolers will fit. I did some googling but it just wasn't making sense to me yet. I found a site later on that said most coolers used different adapters to work with different sockets if needed. That helped me figure out some of it. Picking another mobo was a good idea. I actually ended up picking this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103675 This is a retail product, it will come with a cooling device. If you're not going to overclock it will be sufficient and you won't need to pay for an HSF. However, some third party coolers produce much less noise if that's a consideration. That is a GIGABYTE GA-770T-USB3 AM3 AMD 770 which is a bit better. A good board and choice. I'll have to figure out a way to get my UPS, which uses a serial port, to work but I *think* I still have a serial to USB adapter around here somewhere. I'm going to have to cross that bridge one of these days. Your motherboard includes a serial port header. The only thing you need is a port like this one : http://www.cablestogo.com/product.asp?cat_id=3543sku=09480# This mobo is not as new as the Gigabyte you linked to but the one I posted above is in my budget. I actually blew my budget and may end up spending a little more than planed. I forgot the the new way for drives is to use SATA instead of IDE. I had to add a DVD burner that was SATA This board supports up to 2 PATA devices. I guess you already had some PATA devices. and also had to get some Artic Silver since I can't find my other tube from years ago. I'll take the opportunity to say this again. The new Cooler Master case is HUGE. lol Which coolermaster you picked ? Good luck.
[gentoo-user] Re: Re: Re: CPU socket and picking a heat sink.
Dale wrote: masterprometheus wrote: Dale wrote: Your motherboard includes a serial port header. The only thing you need is a port like this one : http://www.cablestogo.com/product.asp?cat_id=3543sku=09480# Thanks for the link. If the mobo does have that when it gets here, I'll be ordering that. Your mobo has that connector. You can see it in newegg's pictures. Which coolermaster you picked ? Good luck. I picked this monster: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1689160 I got it in already and it is nice, especially compared to my old case. It's a great one. Would be my choice too if I had to buy a new chassis. The price is more than you paid for your CPU and you're saying you don't have money for a better mobo :) ? Actually paying for a good computer case is a great idea, you won't regret. BTW something I forgot to mention is that the other expensive gigabyte mobo has a dedicated memory (128 MB DDR3) for its integrated graphics (called sideport memory by AMD). Not a big deal but it's a nice feature. Last, I hope you have a good PSU, don't use a crappy one. If you need help picking one, don't hesitate to ask.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Check CPU for throttling
On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 9:38 AM, Bill Longman bill.long...@gmail.com wrote: On 05/10/2011 09:34 AM, James wrote: Alan McKinnon alan.mckinnon at gmail.com writes: otherwise. Just enable ondemand, disable everything else, and et the kernel get on with doing what it does best: So this is what you are saying? [*] CPU Frequency scaling │ │ │ │ [*] Enable CPUfreq debugging │ │ │ │ * CPU frequency translation statistics │ │ │ │ [ ] CPU frequency translation statistics details │ │ │ │ Default CPUFreq governor (performance) --- │ │ │ │ -*- 'performance' governor │ │ │ │ 'powersave' governor │ │ │ │ 'userspace' governor for userspace frequency scaling│ │ │ │ * 'ondemand' cpufreq policy governor │ │ │ │ 'conservative' cpufreq governor │ │ │ │ *** CPUFreq processor drivers *** │ │ │ │ Processor Clocking Control interface driver │ │ │ │ * ACPI Processor P-States driver │ │ │ │ AMD Opteron/Athlon64 PowerNow! │ │ │ │ Intel Enhanced SpeedStep (deprecated) │ │ │ │ Intel Pentium 4 clock modulation Yes but no. Yes, those are the correct choices, but the default governor should be ondemand. Or in the case of the OP who is brave enough (or silly enough?) to risk the long term reliability of his CPU running it with no fan, possibly choose powersave with a specific low clock rate as the default and then switch to either ondemand or conservative manually when he needs more performance. In a machine such as he's playing with I wonder if he really wants ondemand (jumps to max and then slows down over time) vs conservative which more slowly ramps up the clock rate if the job at hand takes more time. It's all a trade off of performance vs power heat. On my 12 thread server I've played with these two and frankly don't see a lot of difference doing any large job. They are both a bot slower than running performance, but I save a lot of power (and over time money) using them so I'm happy. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT - More Router Advice] Cheap Router with decent/reliable VLAN support
You might want to look into Mikrotik's offering. They are not only inexpensive, but they are extremely reliable. Many Internet cafés in my country use Mikrotik: they put the device in an outdoor box, and stuck it on the pole bearing the wireless antennae connecting the café to the ISP. The boxes have endured untold days of heat and cold, and nearly all of them survived to this day (barring some who got hit directly by lightning). The documentation is widely available on the 'net, the CLI is much more intuitive than Cisco IOS, and their features are on a par with the most expensive IOS variant. Rgds, On 2011-05-29, Tanstaafl tansta...@libertytrek.org wrote: After seeing an older thread asking about a router, I figured I'd ask my own question... I'm looking for a cheap but reliable router that has decent and SIMPLE way to add VLANs (I'm not a CISCO guy and don't want to have to become one)... Specifically, I want to have one VLAN that my wireless access points are plugged into, to provide ONLY internet access, and then a separate VLAN for my internal network... This is to protect my internal net from any potentially infected machines that are on the wireless access points (I routinely work on infected computers for friends/family, so, I need internet access, but want them isolated from my internal network). Anyone? Will one of the FLOSS builds for the cheap Cable/DSL routers support VLANs on the different built-in router ports (ie, Tomato, DD-WRT or OpenWRT)? Looking forward to any suggestions/ideas... -- -- Pandu E Poluan - IT Optimizer My website: http://pandu.poluan.info/
Re: [gentoo-user] kde update
Alan McKinnon wrote: Apparently, though unproven, at 22:20 on Tuesday 31 May 2011, Nils Larsson did opine thusly: tisdagen den 31 maj 2011 22:00:28 skrev Dale: Does anyone remember the discussion I had about kde packages being in the system set when doing a emerge -e system? If I for example unmerge kde-meta then run --depclean, I bet I would get the error about system packages being removed. It may be because of USE flags but this was what I was concerned about during the last discussion. Having GUI packages, especially KDE, included in the system set, even if because of USE flags, is going to lead to problems at some point. Or maybe I am reading all this wrong? Dale I assume you have kde enabled on sys-auth/polkit, that pulls in sys- auth/polkit-kde-agent and sys-auth/polkit-kde. Thats all the qt-* and kdelibs packages. It appears I was wrong after all. Manners dictates that apologies to Dale are in order. Sorry Dale. No need. I'm more worried about the heat over here. It's going to be 100F tomorrow. My poor garden is starting to cook the food as well as grow it. O_O I just need to explain it better from now on. ;-) Now, I bet there is no way to get KDE stuff out of that either. I guess one could disable the flags that pull them in but what would that take away from KDE? Then again, doesn't KDE require polkit now? If so, that can't be removed not without some teeth pulling at least. Those pesky USE flags. lol sighs Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] kde update
Apparently, though unproven, at 00:35 on Wednesday 01 June 2011, Dale did opine thusly: Alan McKinnon wrote: Apparently, though unproven, at 23:55 on Tuesday 31 May 2011, Dale did opine thusly: It appears I was wrong after all. Manners dictates that apologies to Dale are in order. Sorry Dale. No need. I'm more worried about the heat over here. It's going to be 100F tomorrow. My poor garden is starting to cook the food as well as grow it. O_O I just need to explain it better from now on. ;-) You live down Louisiana/New Orleans way right? Sticking hot in summer. Fine bourbon though. And blues, don't forget the blues. Or you could come over to Johannesburg and luxuriate in our wonderful high- altitude winters. Tonight is predicted to be -2 deg C I live in Mississippi. Never been to New Orleans but bet it about the same tho. It's sticky and hot plus the sun cooks you pretty good, like being on broil in a oven. I'm just glad I am not a tomato plant out in this. I got some garden pics on here: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1152574063 I think they are public. If not, write on my wall or post here and I'll change it. Maybe my ex isn't still stalking me. :/ So that's what you look like :-) I had a ... very different ... mental picture (also a complete fiction). There's no public photos on your page though :-( And what's that gigantic gate over the river behind you in the profile pic? Looks a bit like the sea wall gates on the Thames. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: thunderbird fixed folders? [SOLVED]
On Mon, 6 Jun 2011 18:01:35 + (UTC) James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: Indi thebeelzebubtrigger at gmail.com writes: Sadly, a lot of people (including developers) seem to think that people either see or are blind and that's it. I see plenty well enough for most things that need doing (the state of GA even says I can drive, but then if you've ever been here you know they say that to anyone who pays the fee for a DL and doesn't have a seeing eye dog or white cane). Ha! Come to Florida; if you are a member of AARP, they'll let you drive until you run over your second or third victim We have folks every week that park their car inside of their neighbor's living room. Mix that traffic pattern with Tourists of vacation and you can see just how fun our roads are here. Florida leads the nation in fatalities on bicycle and the County I live in, has the most annual deaths for bicyclers .. I think it's Randy Cassingham in the This Is True newsletter who often mentions the prevalence of crazy people n FL. Given the weather, it's no great surprise. The heat here makes me feel pretty looney sometimes. Do people down there spend an inordinate amount of time setting off explosives and shooting guns, like they do here in GA? Originally I'm from NE PA, which is a pretty redneck place. But GA is a whole nother thang, as they say. :) Most people are very nice though, it's refreshing. That obsession with explosions though... Nerve wracking. Never been further south than Alachua, which is actually pretty mellow from what I saw -- but that was in early spring. :) -- caveat utilitor ♫ ❤ ♫ ❤ ♫ ❤ ♫
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: {OT} Time for hardware upgrade(s)
Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com [11-07-03 03:08]: Grant wrote: Is Nvidia still the way to go instead of ATI? I use the nouveau drivers with my onboard Nvidia chipset now and they've been fine for the most part. I use a threaded ffmpeg to decode HD video instead of VDPAU so I don't bother with nvidia-drivers. - Grant I don't have any experience with ATI but I still use Nvidia and their drivers. I haven't had any problems as of yet. I did have a video problem once but it was a kernel problem. For me, I see no need in me getting a ATI card. That's just me. Dale I've just read that Nvidia no longer makes onboard video. Has anyone else heard that? Are server motherboard more reliable? - Grant I looked around on newegg and found that there are several mobos that have Nvidia video built in. It seems they do still make them. I'm not sure if the video or mobos are any that you would like but they are being made at least. Me, I tend to buy video cards. They have upgrade options without having to put in a new mobo. YMMV tho. No idea on server boards. I would think they would be more reliable tho. Dale :-) :-) I prefer overclocker boards and dont overclock them. Most of them have a better heat dissipation and the PCB has a better layout HF-wise. Only my two cent...you currency may vary ;) Best regards mcc
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: {OT} Time for hardware upgrade(s)
meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Dalerdalek1...@gmail.com [11-07-03 03:08]: Grant wrote: Is Nvidia still the way to go instead of ATI? I use the nouveau drivers with my onboard Nvidia chipset now and they've been fine for the most part. I use a threaded ffmpeg to decode HD video instead of VDPAU so I don't bother with nvidia-drivers. - Grant I don't have any experience with ATI but I still use Nvidia and their drivers. I haven't had any problems as of yet. I did have a video problem once but it was a kernel problem. For me, I see no need in me getting a ATI card. That's just me. Dale I've just read that Nvidia no longer makes onboard video. Has anyone else heard that? Are server motherboard more reliable? - Grant I looked around on newegg and found that there are several mobos that have Nvidia video built in. It seems they do still make them. I'm not sure if the video or mobos are any that you would like but they are being made at least. Me, I tend to buy video cards. They have upgrade options without having to put in a new mobo. YMMV tho. No idea on server boards. I would think they would be more reliable tho. Dale :-) :-) I prefer overclocker boards and dont overclock them. Most of them have a better heat dissipation and the PCB has a better layout HF-wise. Only my two cent...you currency may vary ;) Best regards mcc I have a Cooler Master HAF932 case. Cooling is not a issue here. BTW, I have a Gigabyte board that is overclockable. I have huge heatsinks in case I decide to but mostly just like to keep everything cool. Oh, no water here either. I don't even have drinks around my rig so why put water into it. o_O Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Any way around Argument list too long?
On Monday 18 July 2011 00:16:40 Neil Bothwick did opine thusly: On Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:35:42 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Okay, everyone, back away slowly from this post and then delete it from your cache. The *real* Alan McKinnon does not top post. He does when his ADSL modem craps out and he's forced to use the GMail app thingamajigy on his Android phone :-) I'd rather tether my netbook to my phone and stick with real email :) My old G1 is stuck on Donut :-( Everything from Eclair onwards just kills the poor thing, and tethering never worked reliably. I hope your employer has better redundancy that you do ;-) Of course :-) Everything on the core network is at least duplicated. As for us plebs at home, our usual backup is the 3G card but between one team member crashing a motorbike badly, another (me) crashing a motorbike poorly, one off sick with flu, one transferred to another team, and everyone at home without petrol (fuel and metal workers strike ... please don't ask), none of us remember where the damn card is anymore. The other redundancy is the back up modem, which I have never needed to use and now suffers from a bad case of electron-rot. OK, it's probably electrolytic caps deteriorated from heat, but electron rot sounds much more dramatic ;-) -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
[gentoo-user] Re: OT: but cool - NASDAQ is gentoo powered
Gregory Shearman zekeyg at gmail.com writes: Is ARM more efficient than the intel atom? Overwhelmingly YES! check out this bad boy that runs gentoo: [1] [2] ARM has chipsets coming in months that are being dubbed the intel killers based on the A15. [3] There are notebooks with arm processors:[4] like the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer (dual ARM Cortex-A9, touchscreen. The future is ARM, bro Super low power, clusters being developed that control resources awake/sleep/awake in micro seconds and full sata interfaces. Intel cannot compete with ARM on similar power/heat comparisons. Several large clusters are being design around new ARM chips and memory resources on the same die. Better start dumping that Intel/Nvidia stock! Arm already rules the new carrier design wins competitions according to chips vendors (FAE's) that I talk too. Unless a miracle happens, Intel is doomed to follow IBM and MS tainted hardware efforts. MS has many secret porting efforts to ARM arch style SOCs, trying to avoid another implosion on is doz lack_ware. hth, James [1] http://pandaboard.org/ [2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/handbook/?part=4chap=9 [3] http://www.anandtech.com/show/4153/ti-reveals-omap-5-the-first-arm-cortex-a15-soc [4] http://www.anandtech.com/show/4445/samsung-galaxy-tab-101-review
[gentoo-user] Re: Suspend to RAM caused crashes
On 08/21/2011 07:08 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 8:43 AM, Nikos Chantziarasrea...@arcor.de wrote: On 08/21/2011 06:33 PM, Mark Knecht wrote: On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 8:12 AM, Nikos Chantziarasrea...@arcor.de wrote: On 08/21/2011 02:19 PM, Francesco Talamona wrote: [...] The RAM gets hot when there's RAM load (meaning being used heavily), not when there's CPU load :*) Do you feel heat when your PC is turned on and running hard? Of course you do. The whole machine heats up. The CPU under load heats the machine so the RAM and drives and everything else heats up also. Not as hot as the CPU, but it heats up. So I might agree with you - the RAM might not be 'hot', but it would certainly be 'warmer'. I'm not suggesting that this would cause a normal DRAM stick to go bad, but only that if he had a very marginal bit of RAM that it might go out of spec... On a laptop maybe. On a desktop, the air around the RAM modules get maybe 1 degree C warmer (I know because I have temp sensor there, connected to the front panel). When it does get warm is when there's GPU and disk load. Those suckers combined can raise the temp inside the box by 5-6 degrees. The meaning of all this is that if memtest can't find any errors after a full run (which can take an hour), the chances of getting an error that is really related to RAM under CPU stress are very slim.
Re: [gentoo-user] Motherboard support?
Nilesh Govindarajan wrote: I'll be soon getting a new desktop. I've fixed the CPU as AMD Phenom II 1075T These two motherboards came to my notice which support the above processor: Gigabyte 880GM - GA 880GM-USB3L 880GM-USB3 How good is Linux support with those? If bad, what other mobos support 1075T and Linux support is awesome? I used this site to get this: http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/Giga-byte/GA-880GM-USB3 That's one of them and I think I saw another one from your list. May I make a suggestion tho. It looks like those have a built in video system, get a separate video card. Of all the video issues I have ever had on Linux, it has been built in video cards. There are other good reasons for this too, heat being one of them. As to Gigabyte as a brand, I have a 770 based mobo and it works great. It's worth every penny and then some. I have also had good luck with Abit several years ago. I have installed on a MSI before too and it was stable. If you want to research other mobos, start here: http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/ There are two ways to do this. If you have the mobo and can, paste the output of lspci -n in the box. If you are researching and don't have the mobo yet, click on the links on the left to see if the one you are looking for is in the list. When researching a mobo, I find that site invaluable to say the least. Hope that helps. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Motherboard support?
On 09/29/2011 04:46 AM, Dale wrote: Nilesh Govindarajan wrote: I'll be soon getting a new desktop. I've fixed the CPU as AMD Phenom II 1075T These two motherboards came to my notice which support the above processor: Gigabyte 880GM - GA 880GM-USB3L 880GM-USB3 How good is Linux support with those? If bad, what other mobos support 1075T and Linux support is awesome? I used this site to get this: http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/Giga-byte/GA-880GM-USB3 That's one of them and I think I saw another one from your list. May I make a suggestion tho. It looks like those have a built in video system, get a separate video card. Of all the video issues I have ever had on Linux, it has been built in video cards. There are other good reasons for this too, heat being one of them. As to Gigabyte as a brand, I have a 770 based mobo and it works great. It's worth every penny and then some. I have also had good luck with Abit several years ago. I have installed on a MSI before too and it was stable. If you want to research other mobos, start here: http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/ There are two ways to do this. If you have the mobo and can, paste the output of lspci -n in the box. If you are researching and don't have the mobo yet, click on the links on the left to see if the one you are looking for is in the list. When researching a mobo, I find that site invaluable to say the least. Hope that helps. Dale :-) :-) That's debian HCL, what about Gentoo? We compile the kernel ourselves man. It would be better if we don't use debian/Ubuntu HCL to decide HW for other distros, they're most popular ones and have lot of support from hardware manufacturers, hence good support for hardware using propreitary drivers which is seldom present in other distros. -- Nilesh Govindarajan http://nileshgr.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Limit number of cores used by emerge?
Mark Knecht wrote:
Hi,
Is there a portage option that will limit the number of cores used
by emerge? For instance, in a chroot on a 12 core machine I want to
limit emerge to not using more than 3 cores?
If possible, I'd also like to limit the total disk bandwidth
consumption during emerge. For instance, when untarring a big file to
do the emerge at times the disk consumption gets to high and the
machine becomes laggy. Is there an option that addresses this?
These questions are mostly about being able to update a chroot
mid-day without other tasks slowing down too much. I don't care how
long the chroot really takes to get a huge emerge done, but rathe just
keeping the machine very responsive while it's happening. I already
use:
MAKEOPTS=-j3
PORTAGE_NICENESS=15
which helps (I think) but it doesn't totally address either of the issues above.
Thanks,
Mark
This may help:
PORTAGE_IONICE_COMMAND=ionice -c -3 -p \${PID}
Make sure you have util-linux installed since it has the ionice
command. I think you have to have it enabled in the kernel as well.
I'm not certain tho.
On my machine, even if I tell emerge to only do one job at a time, it
still staggers around the cores. I guess it makes the CPU heat spread
out evenly or something.
Hope that helps.
Dale
:-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Something weird and I'm confused. BIOS and SATA is empty
J. Roeleveld wrote: On Mon, November 7, 2011 1:32 pm, Dale wrote: SNIP I looked for such a option but I can't find it anywhere. It may be there but I can't find it. Since it is working and the AHCI controller sees the drives, I'm going to leave well enough alone. I checked my desktop at home last night and the disks are only shown for AHCI. The BIOS doesn't see anything. (All connected to SATA) Then I guess it is working as it should. Whew ! I also rebooted to the NEW sysrescue stick and cfdisk worked fine. It displayed all the drive partitions and other info just like it should. I guess there was something off with cfdisk on the stick. Probably :) All this from a raccoon knocking out power. Pesky critter. Raccoons are doing some behaviour studies in your area, didn't you get the memo? :) -- Joost The only report that raccoon will give is a bright flash of light. Shorting out 250,000 volts sort of puts a period on the end of the briefest report there has ever been. Those lines are the TVA lines that come from a few hundred miles away. There is no telling how much power comes through those lines either. Heck, even one amp is a lot. That raccoon better get a new plan. The current one is shockingly the wrong way to do it. lol Plus I hate when the lights go out. Winter is about here and we have electric heat. :/ Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Binary install distro
On Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:25:11 -0600 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, This is maybe a bit off topic but here goes. I want to install Linux on my brothers rig. The heat sink on the CPU is not much, OEM type. I don't want to install Gentoo because of that and it is a older rig with a slow CPU and not a lot of ram either. So, what is a easy to install distro that has KDE4, Seamonkey, gtkam, GIMP and such? Almost any general-purpose distro out there will have those. It really doesn't matter which one you pick so go with the one that has wallpapers your brother likes. Hey, seeing as the distro itself is not so relevant actually, you might as well pick any old arbitrary differentiator. Wallpapers are as good as any. I want something easy because I want to install and leave it be until he can get a new rig built. Then I'll be installing Gentoo for a more permanent install. I looked at Kubuntu, Ubuntu and tried to install Mandriva. Mandriva got to a point and just froze up on me. I tried three times and it did the same thing each time so no clue what is going on there. Ideas? Dale :-) :-) -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Binary install distro
Am 10.11.2011 19:25, schrieb Dale: Hi, This is maybe a bit off topic but here goes. I want to install Linux on my brothers rig. The heat sink on the CPU is not much, OEM type. I don't want to install Gentoo because of that and it is a older rig with a slow CPU and not a lot of ram either. So, what is a easy to install distro that has KDE4, Seamonkey, gtkam, GIMP and such? I want something easy because I want to install and leave it be until he can get a new rig built. Then I'll be installing Gentoo for a more permanent install. I looked at Kubuntu, Ubuntu and tried to install Mandriva. Mandriva got to a point and just froze up on me. I tried three times and it did the same thing each time so no clue what is going on there. Ideas? Dale :-) :-) If you want something carefree for a long time, you might want to look at Scientific Linux. The name is a bit misleading. It is really just a very nice RHEL clone developed at CERN, FermiLab et.al. Bonus points for supporting their old versions till hell freezes over. Just install one of the auxiliary repositories to get media codecs and you have a full consumer distro with the stability of an enterprise distro. They also have a nice and knowledgeable mailing list. https://www.scientificlinux.org/ Regards, Florian Philipp signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Binary install distro
On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, This is maybe a bit off topic but here goes. I want to install Linux on my brothers rig. The heat sink on the CPU is not much, OEM type. I don't want to install Gentoo because of that and it is a older rig with a slow CPU and not a lot of ram either. So, what is a easy to install distro that has KDE4, Seamonkey, gtkam, GIMP and such? I want something easy because I want to install and leave it be until he can get a new rig built. Then I'll be installing Gentoo for a more permanent install. Since you're already familiar with Gentoo, I would take a look at Sabayon. It's basically a binary Gentoo distro (and a gentoo overlay). It comes preconfigured just like ubuntu or others so you don't need to do anything, just install it and you'll have a working graphical desktop and lots of software. Super easy and all of the configuration is done Gentoo-style. They have GTK, KDE and XFCE versions to choose from. I've only played with it briefly in a VM and tried the LiveDVD on my laptop, but I believe you can even still use emerge and use portage like you would in Gentoo.
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Binary install distro
On Nov 11, 2011 5:17 AM, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, This is maybe a bit off topic but here goes. I want to install Linux on my brothers rig. The heat sink on the CPU is not much, OEM type. I don't want to install Gentoo because of that and it is a older rig with a slow CPU and not a lot of ram either. So, what is a easy to install distro that has KDE4, Seamonkey, gtkam, GIMP and such? I want something easy because I want to install and leave it be until he can get a new rig built. Then I'll be installing Gentoo for a more permanent install. Since you're already familiar with Gentoo, I would take a look at Sabayon. It's basically a binary Gentoo distro (and a gentoo overlay). +1 on familiarity. We all know about your (Dale's) daily, um, 'adventures' with Gentoo. So, going Sabayon should be a relative walk in the park for you. We don't really want to tax other Linux distro's mailing list, do we? ;-) It comes preconfigured just like ubuntu or others so you don't need to do anything, just install it and you'll have a working graphical desktop and lots of software. Super easy and all of the configuration is done Gentoo-style. They have GTK, KDE and XFCE versions to choose from. I've only played with it briefly in a VM and tried the LiveDVD on my laptop, but I believe you can even still use emerge and use portage like you would in Gentoo. Indeed: http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title=FAQ#Should_I_use_Sabayon_as_a_source-based_or_binary_based_distribution.3F Rgds,
Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Binary install distro
Dale wrote: Hi, This is maybe a bit off topic but here goes. I want to install Linux on my brothers rig. The heat sink on the CPU is not much, OEM type. I don't want to install Gentoo because of that and it is a older rig with a slow CPU and not a lot of ram either. So, what is a easy to install distro that has KDE4, Seamonkey, gtkam, GIMP and such? I want something easy because I want to install and leave it be until he can get a new rig built. Then I'll be installing Gentoo for a more permanent install. I looked at Kubuntu, Ubuntu and tried to install Mandriva. Mandriva got to a point and just froze up on me. I tried three times and it did the same thing each time so no clue what is going on there. Ideas? Dale :-) :-) One more question. What is a easy to install but WELL tested and STABLE binary distro? I'm thinking something that needs a update 2 or 3 times a year or something. My brother is liking Linux a lot. No more Norton to pop up and aggravate him and he can just surf wherever he wants for the most part. Once I get his emails moved over, windoze is going to take a loong nap. ;-) When I plug up the windoze drive, he dreads it. My sis-n-law is liking Kpat and I installed pysol today. She likes farming on facebook and card games. I think those two alone will keep her happy a long time. Thoughts? By the way, I have read some of the other messages but holding off on a reply in case something doesn't work like I want. I did get grub to come up when booting by hitting the shift key. Progress. I forgot my notes tho. lol Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
Daniel Troeder wrote: I'm using big WD Caviar Green (WDxxEAxx) SATA HDDs for some years now in my home 24/7 server, and haven't had any issues - they run cool and low-noise, and the performance is good. Low power and heat was what was important for me when choosing. HDD performance isn't an issue anyway, when storing media files over a home network :) Sounds like these drives are going to be OK then. My concern was that they would be made cheaper and not be as reliable but it seems folks are happy with them which is good. I like WD drives. The one drive I have had fail was a WD. I have a few of them so maybe it is just a bad apple or is it a lemon? Anyway. I'm getting quite a collection of videos and stuff. I'm thinking 2Tb or 3Tb. The 3Tb is more expensive but it will take longer to fill it up. Decisions. Decisions. Maybe newegg will have a BIG sale soon. While on the thread. Has anyone had any sort of luck with the recertified drives? I see them sometimes and wonder what the deal is. Are they repaired drives or just returned drives? Anyone have any experience, good or bad, with those? Thanks for the replies. Sounds good so far. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
Re: [gentoo-user] Are those green drives any good?
On Wed, 09 May 2012 04:52:57 -0500 Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com wrote: I was thinking the same thing about the speed and them lasting longer because of the slower speed. I mean, it's less wear and less heat. I'd just hate to buy one and it be a piece of junk or something else I wasn't expecting to be wrong. I wish I could afford server grade. Wee!! My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore. Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same with bikes[2]. A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed with new firmware. So it's all good. For video, I would advise you invest in gobs and gobs of RAM (the stuff is dirt cheap these days). Have more RAM than the biggest video you will watch (so go for 8G minimum) and the entire video will fit in memory = read the disc once and watch. Funny lags in video just go away. That's what I did with my HP MicroServers - maxed out the RAM to 8G and bought 4 x 3T WD 5400 drives. It runs FreeNAS (built on FreeBSD) with ZFS = shove the drives in and let them software figure out what the blazes to do. Over the years I've gotten sick and tired of pampering with disk arrays and treating them like fragile china that must be molly-coddled. What I want is lots of storage that will mail me when it detects issues. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] VMWare Hypervisor - SD vs CF card?
On 2012-06-23 7:11 AM, Tanstaafl tansta...@libertytrek.org wrote: On 2012-06-22 12:26 PM, Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: OK, I missed that piece. I presumed there would be writes to the hard disk. Any reason you can't have these guys netboot? Only that I've never done that before with servers, and my only experience with netbooting at all was with LTSP about 10 years ago. I think having 4 CF cards (mirrored pair of mirrored pairs) will be enough redundancy though... ;) Well, these seem to work swimmingly well... now I just need to find some kind of non-flammable/heat resistant insulating material that I can use to keep these cards from touching themselves or the metal cage (see below)... Oh... one other question... These CF adapters only have 2 screw holes (made to go into laptops, not mounted in a cage), so I can't mount them *properly* in the cage... anyone know where I can get 2.5 'shell' cases that I could install these cards in so I can mount them properly? Right now I have to shove a piece of anti-static material in between them and the cage (and each other) to prevent them from accidentally touching (yuck!)...
Re: [gentoo-user] new machine : CPU : 22 nm vs 32 nm
Am 25.07.2012 22:14, schrieb Volker Armin Hemmann: Am Mittwoch, 25. Juli 2012, 16:05:29 schrieb Philip Webb: I've listed what's available at the local store, which I trust to stock reliable items, tho' I wouldn't ask their advice. All the AMD's are 32 nm , while the Intel recommended by one commenter -- Core i5-3570 4-Core Socket LGA1155, 3.4 Ghz, 6MB L3 Cache, 22 nm -- is 22 nm : it costs CAD 230 they have 3 in stock, which suggests demand, but not the most popular ( 9 in stock). Isn't 22 nm going to be faster than 32 nm ? no Lower transistor size gives you two advantages: Lower current (- potentially lower power consumption and heat) and more transistors to do something. The practical effects depend on what the chip maker does with this. In the same price range, AMD offers Bulldozer X8 FX-8150 (125W) 8-Core Socket AM3+, 3.6 GHz, 8Mb Cache, 32 nm ( CAD 220 , 2 in stock). How do you compare cores vs nm ? who cares? You cannot really compare this. If you can use more cores, e.g. because you have an embarrassingly parallel application, by all means, get it. Otherwise you should probably care more about single core performance. How far is cache size important ( 6 vs 8 MB )? depends on the architecture. In short, for all three questions: Look at benchmarks and look at the TDP ratings if that is important to you. nm numbers don't tell you anything that can be directly translated into performance or other qualities. They only allow educated guesses. If you really want to delve so deep into chip design, you could as well look at pipeline depths, cache associativity and such alike (not that you should). Regards, Florian Philipp signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: new machine : CPU : AMD FX-4100 ?
On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 11:55 PM, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@gmail.com wrote: On 30/07/12 06:08, Michael Mol wrote: On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 10:50 PM, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@gmail.com wrote: On 30/07/12 05:23, Philip Webb wrote: i5-2550K FX-4100 both use 95 W (some of the more costly AMDs use 125 W ). Note that power savings are not important if you're not using a laptop. CPU power savings on a desktop don't translate to any relevant amount of money on your electricity bills. This is because neither of those CPUs really use 95W. That's just the thermal upper limit. To be fair, power savings are relevant if you're concerned about your electric bill, or if you're concerned about heat management in your system. Consider my dual E5345...leaving that on 24x7 appears to cost me about 90USD/mo. CPU power savings will transform that into a 89.9USD/mo ;-) That's what I mean. It's not worth much. It helps quite a bit with laptop battery life. But for desktops, it doesn't do anything too useful. If you really want the hard numbers, check out some place like Tom's Hardware or Phoronix. I forget which does the power consumption measurements. At some of the hardware review blogs, you can get numbers on idle vs full-load power consumption, as measured at the wall. The difference truly is striking. Now, at least part of the problem with my E5345 setup is that I'm running two high-performance Xeon processors that only have operational clock speeds: 2.33 GHz and 2.00GHz. Desktop-targeted CPUs often will clock down to just a hair over 1GHz, if not a hair under, if you have proper power management daemons running. -- :wq
[gentoo-user] Re: new machine : CPU : AMD FX-4100 ?
On 30/07/12 07:28, Michael Mol wrote: On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 11:55 PM, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@gmail.com wrote: On 30/07/12 06:08, Michael Mol wrote: On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 10:50 PM, Nikos Chantziaras rea...@gmail.com wrote: On 30/07/12 05:23, Philip Webb wrote: i5-2550K FX-4100 both use 95 W (some of the more costly AMDs use 125 W ). Note that power savings are not important if you're not using a laptop. CPU power savings on a desktop don't translate to any relevant amount of money on your electricity bills. This is because neither of those CPUs really use 95W. That's just the thermal upper limit. To be fair, power savings are relevant if you're concerned about your electric bill, or if you're concerned about heat management in your system. Consider my dual E5345...leaving that on 24x7 appears to cost me about 90USD/mo. CPU power savings will transform that into a 89.9USD/mo ;-) That's what I mean. It's not worth much. It helps quite a bit with laptop battery life. But for desktops, it doesn't do anything too useful. If you really want the hard numbers, check out some place like Tom's Hardware or Phoronix. I forget which does the power consumption measurements. At some of the hardware review blogs, you can get numbers on idle vs full-load power consumption, as measured at the wall. The difference truly is striking. When you have full load, the CPU won't clock down. So nothing saved there. If you don't have full load, the clock-down doesn't save much compared to max clocks while idle. I hope you're getting the logic here :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: new machine : CPU : AMD FX-4100 ?
On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 9:36 AM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: SNIP Amp meters are less than $50 USD. They clamp around the power cord, or any wires inside the computer you can fit the clamp around. SNIP hth, James I haven't read this thread but I do use one of these which costs less than $20: http://www.amazon.com/P3-International-P4400-Electricity-Monitor/dp/B9MDBU/ref=pd_sim_hi_1 Personally I think CPU power consumption is a red herring without including the power consumed by the rest of the box: MB power? Hard drive power? Hard disk power GPU power? DRAM power? The 5 above can easily become the dominant power hogs. I use an Intel i7 980X 6-core hyper-threaded CPU, so that's 12 CPUs in top, which burns _lots_ of power, but I suspect it's not the biggest power consumer when compared to the total of the 6 500GB 7200 RPM hard drives I have in the box. Spinning disks consume surprisingly little power once they're up to speed. My GPU, by comparison, doesn't seem to reduce heat generation very much when relatively idle. WRT to money spent to run a machine I hope someone stated earlier than this that it's the whole system that matters and not just the CPU. I didn't state so explicitly, no, but I believe I mentioned the two machines had been otherwise comparable in their equipment loadout. If I missed that, my bad. -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: new machine : CPU : AMD FX-4100 ?
Am 30.07.2012 19:14, schrieb Michael Mol: On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 9:36 AM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: SNIP Amp meters are less than $50 USD. They clamp around the power cord, or any wires inside the computer you can fit the clamp around. SNIP hth, James I haven't read this thread but I do use one of these which costs less than $20: http://www.amazon.com/P3-International-P4400-Electricity-Monitor/dp/B9MDBU/ref=pd_sim_hi_1 Personally I think CPU power consumption is a red herring without including the power consumed by the rest of the box: MB power? Hard drive power? Hard disk power GPU power? DRAM power? The 5 above can easily become the dominant power hogs. I use an Intel i7 980X 6-core hyper-threaded CPU, so that's 12 CPUs in top, which burns _lots_ of power, but I suspect it's not the biggest power consumer when compared to the total of the 6 500GB 7200 RPM hard drives I have in the box. Spinning disks consume surprisingly little power once they're up to speed. My GPU, by comparison, doesn't seem to reduce heat generation very much when relatively idle. When I built my NAS box I did meassure the power consumption of my box, first with one HD, then two, three and so one. And I figured that one of my (Samsung) HDs uses about 5 Watts when running idle.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: new machine : CPU : AMD FX-4100 ?
On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Michael Hampicke gentoo-u...@hadt.biz wrote: SNIP Spinning disks consume surprisingly little power once they're up to speed. My GPU, by comparison, doesn't seem to reduce heat generation very much when relatively idle. Idle on a GPU (in Linux) might be more when the screen is black. I don't even know how to drive my GPU hard. It's just not part of my life here. Maybe certain games or something? When I built my NAS box I did meassure the power consumption of my box, first with one HD, then two, three and so one. And I figured that one of my (Samsung) HDs uses about 5 Watts when running idle. That's very consistent with the WD numbers I found. Something like 6W idle, 8W max, etc. for my RAID Edition drives which are not WD Green drives which likely have lower numbers. Point is that there's little power saved in a box with 6 drives going from max use to idle, etc. But I know you know that! :-) Anyway, we're getting similar results is what it sounds like to me. - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] Want to seriously test a NEW hard drive
Mick wrote: On Monday 06 Aug 2012 10:42:17 Dale wrote: If it has a issue, hopefully the test will bring that to the front now instead of later. Or it is just going to knacker your drive and make it fail earlier that it would otherwise (esp if you overheat it)? ha, ha! Well, if it is going to fail because of anything, including heat, I would rather it do so BEFORE I put my stuff on it. Right now, a backup is not possible other than a blue ray or something. Also, I have a Cooler Master case with the fan blowing right on the drives. If it gets hot and blows a fuse, it has a problem anyway. It may as well die early while under warranty. P. S. What is a good way to back up something this large BESIDES another drive the same size or larger? I thought about getting a blue ray burner but even that will take a lot of media. Another drive is all I can think of myself. Splitting it? Partimage would do that and so would star/tar for fs level backups. Split what? The drive into two partitions or something? If that is what you mean, if it dies, I'd still loose it all. If you meant two drives, well, I only have one on the way right now. It will be a while before I can get another. In the past, I just backed up stuff on DVDs. 3Tbs is a lot of DVDs tho. It won't take to long to fill that up either. I love my DSL. lol I hope to get another drive in the future tho. Just going to be a little while. ;-) Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] My PC died. What should I try?
v...@ukr.net writes: If the system behaves in such an unpredictable way (freezing at a random point), I usually check the following things: - RAM; - bloated capacitors on the Motherboard; - bloated or dried capacitors in the power supply unit; If your PC is only half a year old, it is unlikely that the capacitors dried. But they could easily bloat, especially if they were of bad quality or situated near some hot surface like heat sinks. Testing the power supply needs not only visual analysis. It would be good to attach the oscilloscope to the output and see the voltage level. It should not have large peaks (voltage jumps). But this is usually true for the old units with dried capacitors, as I said. The power supply is older, I re-used it from the PC I had before this one. I hope it causes the trouble, and will try another one this evening. Thanks for this information, this strengthens my confidence that I do not have to buy a new board or CPU. Now I am driving home with a bag of three PSUs I had lent to a friend (and already forgotten). If I were you, I'd tried to temporarily replace the memory with a 100% working module, and if it does not help - replace the power supply unit (if you do not have the necessary equipment to test it thoroughly). I wish I had :) The RAM is okay, I think, I cannot imagine different memory modules to suddenly go bad all at once. And memtest86 found one error only after an hour, while the crashes happen after a few minutes already. And one more simple test: turn on the PC, enter the BIOS setup utility and keep it running in this state. If it runs ok for some time (like a couple of hours), I'd say the problem is in RAM. It once crashed after ten minutes. That was not reproducable, but I did not try that often. Wonko
Re: [gentoo-user] new machine : a few small queries
On Saturday 15 Sep 2012 01:27:04 Philip Webb wrote:
I've got my new machine basically habitable with a few small problems.
(1) In Fluxbox, Gkrellm insists on starting on Desktop 1 ;
on my existing machine with the same config files, it starts on Desktop 8 .
There must be some setting somewhere which has got changed.
Perhaps something like:
[app] (name=gkrellm)
[Workspace] {0}
[end]
instead of:
[Workspace] {7}
in your ~/.fluxbox/apps file? Or may be you have a [Jump] {yes} command in
there too? Not sure if something similar in ~/.fluxbox/startup could cause
this symptom, so have a look in there just in case.
(2) Luxi Mono is not coming out cleanly in Gvim or (Xfce) Terminal :
IIRC there's a pkg or a setting somewhere to fix it,
but I can't find it in my extensive notes from the past.
(3) I have 4 heat sensors in Gkrellm : 'k10temp' + 3 * 'it87'.
Can anyone suggest which bit of which device each is measuring ?
Emerge lm_sensors and then run sensors to see what's what.
I am guessing the k10temp is the core temperature of the CPU and the it87 the
chip temperature sensors (3-off) from ACPI?
The AMD Bulldozer X4 FX-4170 4-Core 4,2 GHz is taking c 3/8 as long
to compile eg Firefox or GCC as this machine's Intel Core2 Duo ;
they also seem to be using less Portage tempspace on disk.
The variable-rate fan is very impressive, ranging 2200 - 6800 rpm .
--
Regards,
Mick
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Re: [gentoo-user] Kernel options and udisk
Peter Humphrey wrote: On Wednesday 19 September 2012 10:28:44 Dale wrote: I bet it is what we used to call a class AB amp. I bet you're right, now that you remind me of what I used to know. I don't know its power output but I bet it sounds good at low sound levels. On the class AB scale, it is more into class A than most. 96 watts on standby. That doesn't sound like standing by as much as it is ready to make noise. lol Is it old or new? I can see a few watts even maybe 20 watts or so but almost 100 watts on standby. :/ It does make a nice little background space heater. It's a Linn Kinos controller and Chakra power amplifier, about 7 years old. In fact the Kinos was so new that I was offered a pre-production model. I'm going to have to google on those. I have not heard of those. Way back when, I used to love the sound of a Sansui amp. They were DC coupled from right after the RCA input all the way to the speaker. The bass response was . . . awesome. The downside, if one transistor went out, it took them all and it was not good for the woofer either. One output would always be stronger than the other and the woofer would either get a full positive power supply DC voltage or the negative side. Makes for a good thump tho. Sounds like a serial/parallel chip doesn't it? lol Anyone remember the pulse width modulation amps that were tried? http://www.bcae1.com/ampclass.htm I actually heard one of those in a showroom. I can't recall the brand but it was driving a pair of Bose 901's and it was neat. The amps were driving several hundred watts a channel with very little heat. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: wireless dropping connections
On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 8:21 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.comwrote: On Thu, 1 Nov 2012 01:49:21 + Peter Humphrey pe...@humphrey.ukfsn.org wrote: On Thursday 01 November 2012 00:07:36 Alan McKinnon wrote: that phone is the master base station for the other two slave handsets. Unplug it, and the house phone stops working; this will upset missus/daughter mightily as they can't speak to granny 10 time a day anymore. [ don't ask, please don't ask :-) ] Ah, sympathy duly offered. Surely you could negotiate a period of a few minutes in which to conduct a test? At least then you'd know. I'd need a full day to do a reasonable test. I suppose I could just issue a decree: Nov 3 shall now be known as No Phone Day! -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com Keep looking for other EMI sources. Over the summer I took the side of my server case off to clean dust out the CPU heat sink. With the machine back in place but the side of the case off the AP in my office was dropping packets all over the place. Download speeds went to about 30%. Case back on and speeds went right back up. Keep looking for EMI sources near the router. Mess with the antenna positions. If all the machines are having trouble then most likely it's something in that area, phone or otherwise. Good luck, Mark
[gentoo-user] Re: OT: new system hardware
Dale rdalek1967 at gmail.com writes: I guess it is good for the folks that use water cooling tho. I run plenty cool and quiet with air so I'm not planning to switch. I still like my CPUs to be bare when possible then purchase my cooler separately. For me, it's basic thermodynamics. Water as a (liquid at working temperatures) fluid, moves orders of magnitude more heat than air (as working fluid) does, Sure Glycol or TEG (Tetraethylene Glycol) is best, but I do not have time to find a non corrosive, non conducting fluid in lieu of water (although Silicone brake fluid or DOT-5 might just do the trick). Sorry for the digression. The only caveat, is to get a cooling system, that is made of robust, quality components. Also, monitoring the temperature is important, and it'd be nice to have a micro pressure transmitter, downstream of the pumping mechanism to ensure no leaks by detecting tiny leaks BEFORE they happen (delta-P). The quite nature of water cooling is keen for me (old ears do not filter out noise so well anymore) I see other AMD processors (FX8150) with a water cooler included, but not the FX8350? (googling came up short) on Amazon or elsewhere for sale. I did find this: http://www.asetek.com/liquid-cpu-cooling.html suggesting on cost effective water cooling for the FX8350? James
[gentoo-user] Re: ~amd64 compatibility with modern cpus
On 2012-12-14, fe...@crowfix.com fe...@crowfix.com wrote: On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 12:34:49PM -0600, Bruce Hill wrote: Boot with SystemRescueCd and you can't get to a prompt? Currently can't even boot -- it hangs wit a blank screen at the point grub or the rescue DVD would take over. Yes, your southbridge chipset could just happened to have failed at the same time; or it failed on the reboot; or USB and SATA are both on the southbridge that failed so you lost both, basically. Then my natural naive question is, can this be readily replaced, or is it soldered in and/or obsolete? It is about 8 years old. 1) You probably can't get a replacement part. Parts like that have a production lifetime of about 6 months. You _might_ be able to find one on the secondary market -- if you're prepared to buy them by the tray-full. If you find them, they'll either be dirt cheap or ridiculously expensive. 2) If you had a replacement part, it's probably a BGA part, and you have to have special equipment (and/or a _lot_ of luck with a heat-gun) to get the old part off and the new part on without destroying the board or surrounding parts. Your best bet would be to take it to a board house that does prototype builds and have them replace it. But, unless you're a regular customer, they're going to charge you so much for the job that you could probably buy a half-dozen replacement motherboards along with CPUs and RAM to go with them [if there's no hope of real business, they'll probably just say 'no' unless they're bored and feel like doing you a favor]. The only practical thing to do is replace the motherboard. You might be able to find an old one on eBay that will accept the same CPU and RAM, but 8 years is a _long_ time... -- Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Questions about optimal mplayer settings
Bruce Hill wrote: The youtube-dl program works for more sites than just YouTube. And I chose it for the links you provided, specifically because they were YouTube videos. Give /usr/share/doc/youtube-dl-2012.09.27/README.md.bz2 a read. The file fluctuated but the overall speed was 1.77M/s ... don't ever remember getting that type of speed in FF. This shows (via gkrellm) the effects it had playing on this system: http://www.servantsofyeshua.org/XITHbsUUlYI.mp4-screenshot.png Didn't really heat my GPU (temp1) over 38C, and it's normally around 31C. Here's another file check on the MP4: mingdao@workstation ~/test $ md5sum XITHbsUUlYI.mp4 dab460274c1ce3ed8ebaf7caa6c0ad02 XITHbsUUlYI.mp4 Even before Walter's reply to me, I'd rebuilt mesa with new flags: media-libs/mesa-9.0 USE=classic egl g3dvl gallium llvm nptl r600-llvm-compiler shared-glapi xa xvmc -bindist -debug -gbm -gles1 -gles2 -openvg -osmesa -pax_kernel -pic (-selinux) -vdpau (-wayland) -xorg VIDEO_CARDS=r600 -i915 -i965 -intel -nouveau -r100 -r200 -r300 -radeon -radeonsi -vmware Hopefully tomorrow I've have time to check. I'd also saved the old /var/log/Xorg.0.log from before rebuilding mesa. And then there are other comps with other chipsets on this LAN to try. Thanks for the replies. One reason I download them, I play them in full screen mode and it doesn't stutter either. Generally, full screen seems to make it work a bit harder, unless your desktop has things in motion too. ;-) When I use Seamonkey to download, it goes as fast as my DSL will let it. Sometimes, the server on the other end will have high loads and slow things down but generally, it's as fast as my connection either way. For me, downloadhelper is just easier. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] Any way of tracing kernel freezes?
Excerpt from Frank Steinmetzger: I found my old USB Gentoo which has memtest installed (and which I used for my first test also). I let it run for two passes, both successful. So the RAM seems fine. Temperature? - check for dust puppies clogging the heatsinks, cooling etc. It's a netbook with a 6.5 Watt CPU. I'm going through the big emerge again right now (3.5 hours in), and it never goes above 66°. Besides, the freezes also happened when I didn't do anything heavy. Just surfing (though Firefox can also be heave for an Atom ^^). Anyhoo, I'm running 3.8.13 again now. I didn't have my config anymore, so I oldconfig'ed it from 3.9. Let's see whether it's more stable. If yes, hm... I can't really report this to the kernel devs: My netbook freezes since 3.9, that's all I know. Here, have my configs. :-I Is your temperature of 66° F or C? System temperature or surrounding room temperature? I have an old computer whose fan has quit as happened once before. CPUs generate considerable heat, I see system temperature and realize the fan is much more critical than whether the room temperature is a chilly 20 C or sweaty (for humans) 35 C. I don't use that old 2001 computer much, am getting ready to put together a new computer from parts to run FreeBSD and Linux, likely Gentoo; otherwise I'd order a Socket A fan. When I do use that old computer, I open the case and prop a hair dryer to run at low, ambient-temperature air pointed at the CPU. This keeps the CPU down to 47 C according to the BIOS/CMOS screen. This is cool for the CPU if not for us humans. Tom
