08.11.04

Hardware Change (2)

Posted in English, Linux at 12:41 am by Rodrigo

Damn IRQ’s..

The USB devices (including Firewire) still share the same IRQ (21). I tried to balance them using the acpi_irq_balance kernel option.. it didn’t work. The only remaining option to use is append="pirq=xx[,xx[..]]", and hope for the best. If only the “xx” were easy to calculate..

The “other O.S.” upgrade has gone.. emm.. well. I just booted there and it worked, though I had to reinstall all the PCI device drivers, because they were lost in the upgrade. Just two problems remain:

  • Everytime I boot I receive two warnings about bad drivers.. Those are the two IDE channel device drivers.. something about an “hdc” (not the same as Linux, I believe). I tried deleting them, restoring them, reinstalling the VIA 4-in-1.. nothing works. I will have to try safe mode one of these days.
  • There are a lot of devices sharing the same IRQ’s. Apparently, Windows XP doesn’t recognize the IO-APIC in my new motherboard, so I have to reinstall it, just to make it work better. Well, that’s hardly something new for a lot of people, but for me it’s terrible: I have reinstalled it just once in 4 years..

08.07.04

Hardware Change

Posted in English, Linux at 12:37 am by Rodrigo

  • My old MSI K7T266 motherboard for a new Soyo SY-KT600.
  • My old Athlon Thunderbird 1400 for a new Athlon XP Barton 2800+.
  • A new CPU cooler (Zalman CNPS7000A-AlCu) and round 80-pin IDE cables.

This was a good upgrade.. I could not run some games (True Crime for example) because the Thunderbirds don’t have SSE capability.. the same with some NVidia demos. And finally, it was the Doom 3 hardware upgrade :).

Upgrading Linux was a breeze. My old motherboard also had a VIA chipset, so the support was compiled in the kernel. I had some problems with lm-sensors and the ethernet card, but they were solved quickly.

IO-APIC was a different matter. Nothing worked when I enabled it in the BIOS. It took me some time to realize that the MPS version was wrong: When I had it set at 1.1, PCI devices didn’t work. But if I changed it to 1.4, everything was ok. But I still have every USB 1.1, USB 2.0 and Firewire in the same IRQ: 

           CPU0       
  0:     122473    IO-APIC-edge  timer
  1:        513    IO-APIC-edge  i8042
  8:          1    IO-APIC-edge  rtc
  9:          0   IO-APIC-level  acpi
 14:      20799    IO-APIC-edge  ide0
 15:         19    IO-APIC-edge  ide1
 16:        236   IO-APIC-level  nvidia
 17:        124   IO-APIC-level  eth0
 19:          0   IO-APIC-level  EMU10K1
 21:        154   IO-APIC-level  uhci_hcd, uhci_hcd, uhci_hcd, uhci_hcd, ehci_hcd, ohci1394
NMI:          0 
LOC:     122416 
ERR:          0
MIS:          0

Well.. I’ll see into that problem later. Now, the hard part: trying to upgrade Windows XP without re-installing (yeah, I know it’s hard).. I hope it doesn’t take too much time..

08.06.04

LSHW

Posted in English, Linux at 12:34 am by Rodrigo

This is a very nice tool to list your hardware. Something like this (lshw -html, as root).

Mozilla Tabs

Posted in English, Linux at 12:26 am by Rodrigo

This is a little script I wrote to ease the interaction between mozilla and the rss-grab gdesklet.

The script checks if there’s an instance of mozilla running. If there is, it opens the url given as argument in a tab inside the running mozilla instance. If there isn’t, it creates a new instance of the browser.

Run this script (instead of mozilla) when there’s a click in one of the gdesklet url’s, and bingo! No more multiple mozilla instances!

Reference: http://www.mozilla.org/unix/remote.html.