Just wanted to put up a quick post here, I’ll fill in more as I have time, but….
*** Update ***
12-8-2012 – really early in the morning
So I only got to play for about 45 minutes, and made three characters and got one to level 4. A couple of notes, yes you can start playing before downloading is finished, BUT it does not download in the background while you play. When you get to a point that has not finished downloading it takes you to a screen with no details, just says “Downloading Update” and sits there. It took my system 30-50 minutes to finish downloading the next part. So I highly recommend waiting till it finishes before starting the game. Granted I have been having internet connection issues for the last 20 hours or so and even lost my internet a couple of times. I don’t think the initial download, even using peer to peer ever got over 400KB/s and I’ve hit 2MB/s on good days (sustained).
I love what I have seen, the game is exactly what one would expect after waiting this long to see it! I wish the beta had come out earlier so I would have had more time to play it, but I’ll do my best to play it a lot anyway! The cash based auction house has just gone live in the Beta system, but I have nothing to put in there, so I won’t be partaking anytime soon. I have been unsuccessful in taking screenshots even though the invite recommends it. Windows screenshots are coming out as blank grey screens. I am looking into another way to capture more screens.
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- downloading the game files, installer requested 15.1GB of disk space
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- Diablo III invite email
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- p2p-transfer in use for downloading
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- you can start playing before it has finished downloading
I’ve been having all kinds of video issues since I purchased my new hardware, the strangest is with the video card… Worst part is that I don’t have time to deal with this right now, I have a baby on the way (as in less than 15 days, and need everything working!).
Part of my new hardware purchase was an XFX Radeon 6850 cooler, quieter, lower power usage, and 20% performance increase, an upgrade from my XFX Radeon 4890 monster. I first installed windows 7 with my new hardware and had lots of problems. After I gave up on that, I moved to Linux (I used windows 7 first, because Ubuntu 11.10 was due out in 7 days and I did not feel like spending a week setting up my computer, just to upgrade it) and decided that I have always liked XFCE and LXDE as my default window manager in other linux distros and so I would give them a shot now. I downloaded the Beta 2 release of both versions of Ubuntu and tested them via the live CD. I decided on LXDE as my WM of choice and went with it. 13 or so days later I went to download LUbuntu.
Well, to start it was not available at 5am on the release day (eastern time, GMT -5), nor was it available at 11am. so I stopped checking and just decided to wait until later. about 7pm I decided to check again, and Ubuntu 11.10 was available, and after hunting repositories, and it took 5 or 6, I finally found LUbuntu 11.10 non-beta on one of them. I of course chose the torrent file, and while it was still a bit slow (I’ve seen downloads on my computer hit 1.84Mb/s and this even via torrent was crawling along at 287Kb/s) it was going along well enough. I also started Kubuntu at the same time as you never know, and I used KUbuntu for years before I switched from Windows.
The installation went fine, other than the fact that my network adapter was not working (I expected this from the live CD and was prepared with a driver from the chipset vendor. After installation I put the NIC driver on the system, still no internet… I did a lot of searching and spent several hours trying to get the internal adapter working, no dice (even found other users who had the same motherboard and were not having issues after downloading the driver…) finally I got tired of it, I have not had a completely working computer in almost 2 weeks, and work (personal work) was starting to back up to enormous quantities and you could no longer see the top of my desk! So, I grabbed an old 1GB NiC out of the closet in my box ‘o parts, and slapped it in the computer, rebooted, disabled the on-board NiC and boom everything worked. (just a note, I did have the exact same issues in Windows, except the MB CD has Win7 drivers, and they worked). I downloaded the new AMD Radeon drivers and they installed fine, had my two monitors running, even got VMWare workstation working with only 2-3 days worth of research and troubleshooting.
Now I was happily installing my applications and setting everything up, that is when I noticed the lack of GUI system settings applications. Sure there are plenty out there, but most wanted me to install Gnome2 or nearly all of KDE to get them working. All I wanted was:
- To be able to see in real time the CPU usage of all 6 cores at the same time, with or without a graph.
- To customize my power settings so the monitor stopped cutting off every 15 minutes (I set the default time out to 180, in case I am watching a movie, as not all players stop the screen saver).
- To be able to change alternatives without installing half of Gnome2.
- To have the settings I changed in AMDCCLE actually save! and to be able to use them!
- There were some other things, but I can’t think of them now, I’ll add them if/when I remember.
I know most of what I want can be done from the command line, and I was doing some of it from there, but some of the things I wanted to make changes to, without using a GUI app, I did not know where all the setting are located, as they are not always in the same directory. (try editing Grub settings if you don’t believe me, they are located in 4 different places!) and I always miss something… So I decided to install KDE over top of LUbuntu, that way I could use LXDE when I wanted to, but I already knew where the settings and plasmoids were that I needed to do the other things I wanted. Not to mention at this point I was going on 3 weeks without a working computer. (as of when I was writing this, it has been 25 days since my new hardware was ordered and I had 2 day shipping on that!). Installation went well, although it missed a few things from just running : sudo apt-get install kde-desktop but I was able to resolve those with a sudo apt-get -f install and all seemed good.
Then about 3 days later something happened. I was working on setting up an application, I cannot remember what, and I was watching a pre-recorded TV show at the same time. suddenly my screen froze, mouse worked, but no response from the Keyboard. Since then I have not had a working display, and that was 6 days ago. Nothing has worked, I’ve even reinstalled KUbuntu from the KUbunutu install disk. I still cannot get my video working, I get video from one screen, a little less than half the time, the rest of the time the desktop fails to load, or I get a blinking blue or flashing white display. I’ve done a LOT trying to get it working, in fact I have not spent less than 6 hours a day trying to get it working, for 6 days! I’ve tried reinstalling LUbuntu, KUbuntu (the installer keeps crashing during partitioning, so I’ve given up on that one), and when I started writing this I was installing Ubuntu, even though I am not a fan of Unity. I’ve even gone so far as to unplug one of my monitors, thinking having two was causing the issues (during every attempt to reinstall the AMD drivers in the last 3 days I have been getting a message “configuration has more monitor than detected” and this was after using the auto configure to setup the configuration…). I’ve followed the sticky display issues during upgrade post on the Ubuntu Forums, not much there of use after spending 4 days googling the issue already. Nothing seems to fix it, not even copying my old, “working” xorg.conf file. part of the problem is that Ubuntu no longer requires an xorg.conf file, part of the problem is that the AMDCCCLE only saves in the home folder of the user who ran it (if you run it with root privileges, which are needed to make changes, it saves it in Root’s home folder!), but Ubuntu uses the file (if it exists) from /etc/X11! no wonder nothing was working… (any settings changes did not take affect when I made them from the GUI, and if I closed the AMDCCLE and relaunched it, they were reset to the defaults; however using the command line worked fine… the first time.).
Right now, with a clean installation (several posters on the Ubuntu forums have reported this resolved their issues, and nothing else), I am giving it a go, I only have 1 monitor connected right now, and still have to get most of my applications working again, but at least I have a desktop running, internet access, video drivers installed, and it has not crashed yet. I have not completely ruled out a crappy (but quite expensive) motherboard. A bit upset, I spent more on the upgrades for my computer, than I spent on my computer (which I built from parts, like always, in my life I’ve only ever bought 1 pre-assembled computer, and that was because my wife wanted it. and it lasted 5 years without upgrades and cost more than twice what I spent building this one, before my new upgrades anyway), and when I bought it everything was top of the line (except the video card and it was not too far down the list) and it almost all worked right away, but i never had any problems like I do now.
So, back to trying to get things running again. I’ll comment on the current status later if all is well, else I’ll post more headaches.
I started having an issue with my computer maybe back in May, where anytime I powered my machine off I had to reconfigure my Bios settings, as my primary Bios had failed, after several months of this I guess I just got tired of dealing with it, so I sold my android tablet (yes I did! and no I didn’t own more than one…) and bought a new Gigabyte Ga-990FX`-UD3 motherboard, which right now I am not very happy with, but I’ll get to that later, a new MD PhenomII x6 1090T CPU, a new XFX AMD Radeon 6850 Video Card, and 3 new Seagate 1.5TB HDDs. I have to reimburse myself for the hard drives however, as they were not paid for by selling my tablet. Hopefully selling my old Video Card, Motherboard, and CPU will cover their costs.
I’ve had all kinds of interesting episodes while trying to get this new hardware to work over the last, almost, 3 weeks. the good = back on linux, bye bye Microsoft. The bad=bye bye Google cloud print (kind of), possibility of getting Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking to work (outside of a VM), possibility of getting my digital camera to work by just plugging it in the computer (for now). Here are a list of some of the issues I’ve run into, if they have lengthy resolutions, or attempted resolutions, I’ll link to another post (after I write it!) describing my efforts to get things working.
First up: Microsoft Windows 7 x64 Ultimate edition
- The only thing on the motherboard that works immediately after installation are the CPU, Ram, Keyboard, and Mouse.
- NIC, eSATA, on-board RAID, USB 3.0, none of it worked until after installing the drivers from the MB CD.
- The motherboard has 2 or 3 different RAID chipsets, at least one Marvell 88SE9172 and a Realtek (I think), each can be enabled separately as IDE/AHCI/RAID, I’ll check and get back to you on this one.
- One for the internal SATA ports 0-3.
- One for the internal SATA ports 4 and 5.
- Can only be enabled as RAID when ports 0-3 are also enabled as RAID.
- This seems a little bit backwards to me, as the only way to mirror your boot drive is to enable RAID on all ports… or lose ports 2&3 and mirror on 0&1, then not set RAID on 4&5 giving you only a mirror plus 2 drive slots on the MB. Else you are forced to RAID 0/1 on ports 0-3 and to use 4/5 for your boot mirror.
- One for the eSATA port
- When enabled and nothing is connected, it reports 2 available ports; however when the cable is connected I have gotten 3 drives (out of 4) in my external drive caddy to show up.
- I ran into one issue where I had a device not identified in Windows 7, even after installing the drivers from the CD. I checked on the CD again and it actually has an installer to put Driver Agent on your computer to scan for out of date drivers. well I ran it.
- It found the missing driver and also told me about 6 others were either out of date or had the wrong drivers installed. of the ones it wanted me to update, only one was free, the others were available after paying a $29.99 annual fee.
- The first link took me to the Gigabyte home page for the MB but did not list any driver that was not also included on the CD.
- The second link took me to a driver website download page for an Nvidia driver package!
- Well I gave it a shot, and sure enough it recognized the device and installed the driver, from an Nvidia driver package on my AMD chipset MB.
- Then I started getting BSODs on the RAID driver MV91xx.dll.
- After moving all my data around so I could setup a RAID5 5 drive array of 1.5TB drives, I had to undo it all and move data around to use them as normal disks, so I could disable the Marvell RAID in the BIOS (internal SATA ports 0-5) to prevent windows from loading the driver (which was the newest version from their website).
- This did indeed stop the BSOD for that DLL.
- Then the system started shutting itself off randomly after 4-45 minutes from windows bootup.
- I have not yet figured this one out, Gigabyte support wants me to disconnect all USB devices to test… (no mention of how I am to connect my KB or mouse) fyi no issues with the USB devices when my old MB was in the case, and no issue with the USB devices when booted to a linux live CD, nor any issues with random power offs at all, now that I am booting to Ubuntu 11.10 x64.
- If you press a key (such as ctrl+f or del or F4 or F8 or Shift or anything else really) at anytime during bootup that the system is not expecting a keypress, the boot up process hangs and you have to press the reset button or manually power off the computer.
- What this means is if you are trying to get into the RAID BIOS controller setup, or the “change boot device” menu, or to get the GRUB menu to show up when hidden, or to start windows in safe mode, and you do not press the key/key combination one time at the exact time necessary, the system will hang and you cannot get in to that boot submenu
- It often takes me 10-30 boot attempts to get into what ever submenu I need to change the configuration.
- Ubuntu runs fine on the system, except for two issues…
- The network adapter will not work. I’ve tried many suggestions from forums, even downloaded the Realtek 8111e driver direct from realtek. It will not connect to anything (you may need to blacklist the wrong drivers, there are some 8 different models included in the linux driver package download).
- Current resolution, I installed a GB NIC PCI card, works great.
- I cannot get my Radeon HD6850 working, multiple issues.
- Any changes to the AMDCCLE configuration disappears after closing the interface. even if I open it right back up, the settings are back the way they were. Help with manually configuring AMDCCCLE
- Any time I restart the computer it hangs after “checking battery state [ok]“.
- This is when it loads the graphical settings to launch X.
- As a note, I have a dual monitor setup, both on the two DVI ports; however because one DVI port is a DVI-d I have to have my right monitor connected as monitor0 and my left one connected as monitor1 (this makes things backwards, moving the mouse to the right puts it on the left screen and vice versa, unless you specify it in the configuration.
- Current resolution for this problem (short incomplete version):
- Reboot into Ubuntu recovery mode from GRUB (good luck!).
- Mount/remount all devices and read/write.
- Then press enter to exit that screen.
- Then select root command prompt.
- Because the onboard NIC does not work, there is no point in selecting root command prompt with networking, as it won’t enable the PCI NIC.
- Now enter the following to remove all AMD video drivers from the system:
- learn more about the xorg.conf settings
- Hopefully you have manually created the deb packages for your ati drivers, if not, you can reboot now and use the default drivers for xorg to download the drivers and put them in the /root/amd6xxx directory on your system (you will need to create the amd6xxx directory under /root) and follow these instructions after booting back in to the recovery mode root command prompt after remounting devices as read/write, instructions above.
- You either already had the files, or you just created them (only follow the creating .deb files section), so we can move on to install the AMD drivers for the Radeon 6xxx series card.
- This should run without much of an issue, might be a couple of mini errors (file not found, skipping), but nothing to prevent the installation from finishing.
- And to finish up:
- I am not 100% sure the “effective=startup” part is necessary or even works.
- You can now reboot and cross your fingers.
- I have to do this every time I restart my system, and sometimes it does not work and I have to do it 2-5 times before I can get back in.
- There are also times when I boot and get 1 flickering screen and one working screen (both tinted like my background image).
- There are also times when I get one flickering screen and the other not, but both are nearly all white. Pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL initiates a reboot, so I know Ubuntu booted at least.
- There are some times when I get cloned displays in 1024×768 resolution (not my default or preferred).
Next up: Ubuntu 11.10 x64
apt-get purge -qq --no-download fglrx* xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon
rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf*
Xorg -configure
sudo /root/amd6xxx
./ati-driver-installer-11-9-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Ubuntu/oneiric
dpkg -i *.deb
aticonfig --initial=dual-head --screen-layout=right --xinerama=on --effective=startup --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf
Any attempt at a total and complete resolution is still a work in progress…
Ok, as a followup to my favorite Netflix is down post, I am unable to reach zdnet.com/news or zdnet.com/blog
Anyone one else experiencing this issue? or did I mess something up again on my network security settings? Everything else seems to work for me, including downloads.zdnet.com
downornot.com shows zdnet is working good, but I cannot reach anything on that site. My ISP is Comcast. I am not sure when the issue started, but I first discovered it at about 10:15am EST today
*** Update *** 11:35am EST
I have tried from another computer at my current location and received the same errors, I have also tried accessing it from my cell phone using my cell carrier for the ISP (Sprint) instead of Comcast, and it is working fine, but when I put my phone on wifi and connect to my network, it is blocked from there also.
*** Update *** 12:39pm EST
still unable to connect from home, all other websites work fine. I’ve run some tests and even changed my DNS entries to remove comcast.
C:\Windows\system32>tracert zdnet.com
Tracing route to zdnet.com [216.239.116.157]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms *************************
2 43 ms 29 ms 29 ms *************************
3 9 ms 8 ms 9 ms *************************
4 11 ms 12 ms 8 ms *************************
5 13 ms 13 ms 13 ms te-1-3-ar02.savannah.ga.savannah.comcast.net [68.86.250.97]
6 17 ms 16 ms 15 ms te-8-8-ar01.westside.fl.jacksvil.comcast.net [68.86.168.209]
7 27 ms 27 ms 28 ms te-1-0-0-1-cr01.charlotte.nc.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.93.169]
8 33 ms 32 ms 30 ms pos-3-15-0-0-cr01.atlanta.ga.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.85.225]
9 35 ms 35 ms 35 ms pos-0-1-0-0-pe01.56marietta.ga.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.86.86]
10 31 ms 31 ms 41 ms 66.208.229.218
11 50 ms 52 ms 49 ms tge16-1.fr3.dal.llnw.net [68.142.125.17]
12 * * * Request timed out.
13 * * * Request timed out.
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 * * * Request timed out.
16 * * * Request timed out.
17 * * * Request timed out.
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 * * * Request timed out.
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
23 * * * Request timed out.
24 * * * Request timed out.
25 * * * Request timed out.
26 * * * Request timed out.
27 * * * Request timed out.
28 * * * Request timed out.
29 * * * Request timed out.
30 * * * Request timed out.
Trace complete.
C:\Windows\system32>nslookup zdnet.com
Server: cdns01.comcast.net
Address: 75.75.75.75
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: zdnet.com
Address: 216.239.116.157
C:\Windows\system32>nslookup zdnet.com
Server: google-public-dns-a.google.com
Address: 8.8.8.8
C:\Windows\system32>ping 216.239.116.157
Pinging 216.239.116.157 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 216.239.116.157:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: zdnet.com
Address: 216.239.116.157
C:\Windows\system32>
I then tried a traceroute from my Cell phone…
# /system/xbin/busybox traceroute 216.239.116.157 traceroute to 216.239.116.157 (216.239.116.157), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets 1 **************************** 394.470 ms 86.303 ms 125.550 ms 2 **************************** 91.034 ms 89.569 ms 106.568 ms 3 **************************** 139.923 ms 136.292 ms 270.050 ms 4 68.28.245.69 (68.28.245.69) 169.830 ms 244.751 ms 230.164 ms 5 144.223.135.121 (144.223.135.121) 304.443 ms 216.858 ms 227.814 ms 6 144.232.25.115 (144.232.25.115) 214.782 ms 144.232.4.45 (144.232.4.45) 211.884 ms 144.232.25.115 (144.232.25.115) 224.548 ms 7 144.232.25.55 (144.232.25.55) 158.600 ms 144.232.25.117 (144.232.25.117) 117.797 ms 144.232.2.189 (144.232.2.189) 205.444 ms 8 144.232.18.234 (144.232.18.234) 194.030 ms 184.754 ms 221.557 ms 9 4.69.138.126 (4.69.138.126) 266.510 ms 204.926 ms 286.407 ms 10 4.69.140.142 (4.69.140.142) 229.339 ms 225.311 ms 178.193 ms 11 4.69.148.253 (4.69.148.253) 190.643 ms 234.008 ms 194.855 ms 12 4.69.134.21 (4.69.134.21) 174.835 ms 289.795 ms 449.829 ms 13 4.69.132.77 (4.69.132.77) 251.526 ms 213.044 ms 288.421 ms 14 4.69.148.202 (4.69.148.202) 303.009 ms 354.676 ms 331.573 ms 15 4.69.148.142 (4.69.148.142) 413.544 ms 269.379 ms 263.153 ms 16 4.69.153.33 (4.69.153.33) 255.035 ms 361.939 ms 406.097 ms 17 4.69.140.153 (4.69.140.153) 335.083 ms 341.430 ms 222.839 ms 18 4.69.140.145 (4.69.140.145) 156.372 ms 348.267 ms 345.398 ms 19 4.69.133.149 (4.69.133.149) 319.336 ms 323.516 ms 297.790 ms 20 4.53.132.2 (4.53.132.2) 339.081 ms 313.660 ms 217.193 ms 21 216.239.127.38 (216.239.127.38) 181.030 ms 288.055 ms 341.584 ms 22 216.239.116.157 (216.239.116.157) 336.456 ms 334.961 ms 328.094 ms # Sent from my HTC Evo unrEVOked forever. Running MikG 2.4.1 rooted Gingerbread Rom with HTC Sense 2.1+ 3.0
*** Update *** 1:00pm EST
since I am sure someone will ask, yes I have cleared all browsing data, cache, and cookies
*** Update *** 5:20pm EST
all seems to be working now
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- cached copies from google are working
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- IE8 trying to reach zdnet
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- IE8 trying to reach zdnet
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- IE8 trying to reach zdnet
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- IE8 trying to reach zdnet
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- I clicked a link from the email newsletter and got this
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- zdnet.com failure
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- tried to go to the news part
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- downornot.com shows it is up
- New blog post... Diablo III closed Beta http://t.co/dKC2ChWm
- New blog post... resolving video problems with K-L-Ubuntu and XFX Radeon 6850 http://t.co/H6bXuMqi
- New blog post... Computer upgrades http://t.co/6PWVNy4m
- $7 for $15 Worth of Hand-Tossed Pizza, Calzones, and Drinks at Andolini's Pizza Charleston, SC http://t.co/QnKwPwB
- New blog post... is zdnet.com/news down http://t.co/DThuI4r
- New blog post... Netflix Down? http://bit.ly/q74Svu
