Joel Perry Productions

Right, my Sheeva Plug showed up, I got it setup pretty quick and was using it to remote in from work, and access an HP Pavillion ZV6015us laptop I was trying to get up and running with any version of linux.  I tried many, FreeBSD 7.0, 7.2, 7.3?, DesktopBSD 1.7 1.6?(which unfortunately is based on FreeBSD 7.1 6.2, then Kubuntu 7.10 and 8.04, Slax 6.x, Puppy Linux, might have missed one… all were x64 when available.

ok, so ALL of the Linux versions listed above installed just fine (some took a couple of tries to get the drive partitioning correct, but eventually I got them working…)  the laptop was mostly stock, I had to replace the LCD inverter in it a few years ago to get the display to light up again after it stopped working, I also switched out the stock 5400 rpm 100Gig drive with (at the time the largest) 80 Gig 7200 rpm 2.5″ drive.  The main problem I was having, was getting the audio to work on some, and the wireless to work on all of them.

(the listed attempts below are not necessarily the order I tried them in)

Fedora I tried both the KDE and the Gnome desktop install versions.  I prefer KDE; however in Gnome the wireless and sound was working, but in KDE the wireless would not work.  I tried NDISWrapper, some manually created drivers (someone else’s I’m not THAT good…), and the default drivers.  Fedora Gnome worked fine, but KDE would not.

I tried Ubuntu 7.x, it worked with proprietary drivers installed with no issues, 8.x would not allow me to install the proprietary drivers for the wireless or the ATI onboard video.  Kubuntu did not even detect that I had a wireless adapter. and manually installing the ATI Linux drivers caused so many system problems I reformatted 3 times trying to get them to work.

Puppy Linux worked out of the box with no problems as far as hardware was concerned (it took some finagling to get the audio working), as long as I loaded it into ram, if I did not use the boot parameter “pfix=ram” the system would not display correctly and I would have to manually power off the laptop and restart.  The problem was, I could not get it to install on the Hard Drive, even when following the directions I found online.  The problem I was having was that I could not connect to any wireless network.  Mine and all of my neighbors wireless networks showed up, but I could not get the system to connect to any of them.

Slax also would not install to the HDD, although I managed to get it to install to a VHD.  But I could not get the wireless to work at all, and the video drivers would not install, so any 3D apps would not work either and could crash the system.

FreeBSD – could not get any GUI/WM to load other than XWindows, I spent almost 3 months trying to get this one working.

Desktop BSD – loaded great, but the linux kernel that it uses does not have support for the wireless card chipset.  everything worked great, but I could not get the wireless to work.  This I learned after many google searches was was because the FreeBSD base was older, and the reason this was older, was because FreeBSD made some major changes from 6.2 – 7.x and DesktopBSD had not yet moved on, which they have now, so I may try it again if FreeBSD 8.0 doesn’t suit my fancy!!

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• bringing the past to the future….
• Lets start with March 2009

going back any farther would be trying at best…

Ok, the second Monday of the month I started my new job (still there at the time I am writting this) the last week of the month I ordered a Sheeva Wall Computing Plug Developers kit (wikipedia page, Marvell page, where to buy the developers kit) estimated shipping 6 – 8 weeks, was hoping it would arrive on my B-day…

I already added the tags for this page (and there are a lot) so I’m just going to jump down to May 2009…

I decided it was time to upgrade my computer, I had an HP Pavillion A730n with a Pentium4 530 3.0GHz HT and 2.5 GB of 184 pin DDR1 PC3200 RAM, I did have a GeForce 8800GT in it at least.  So, I bought some new hardware to build my own computer (much cheaper, and you really can pay as you go…) 

 Total spent (including shipping) $514

I missed out on all the mail in rebates, because you only get 21 days to get them sent in AND you cannot return or exchange something if you clip the UPC out.  well it actually is a good thing I didn’t do it, as I had to return the RAM I bought for a replacement (accidently got the DDR2 the first time)

Added the HDD’s I already own, a Rosewill 450W powersupply I already had (almost 2 years old) and used an HDMI cable to connect it to my 42″ Sony TV, had a heck of a time setting everything up, first there was a BIOS update so that my CPU and RAM would be recognized by the MB.  Then they were correctly identified in all ways but one… the MHz rating on the CPU was showing as 800MHz per core, and the ram was coming up as 7-7-7-24 (and still does, but this does not bother me, after what I was using before)

Everything was starting to work ok, I had my system running stable and had started installing my apps again (was using Windows Vista Ulitmate x64) and a new BIOS update was available, I gave it a shot and it fixed some of the “automatically detected” settings in the BIOS so I was happy.  Well then I tried going dual monitor with a 19″ HDTV I have, that way I did not have to remote in when my wife was watching tv in order to do anything.  That is when all the problems started happening.  The computer would just turn off randomly after 4-30 minutes of use.  So I submitted a help ticket with ECS as when I dug into it, co-workers started to tell me it sounded like a “bad pipeline in the video card” which just happens to be the on-board video (AIT Radeon 3300HD).

After I was given that information, I started testing it, and sure enough, if I ran SETI at home GPU edition, the computer would crash, if I loaded the ATI Catalyst Control Center and went to the 3D settings screen, as soon as the demo animated the PC would crash, if I loaded World of Warcraft, the PC would crash before it even finished loading the login screen (note here, I was playing WoW on this computer before; however it would crash faster and faster.  It started after 2 hours of play, then each time after that was quicker and quicker and at first I thought it was the game), so I quit playing WoW as I could not get it to work, not even after new video drivers came out.  I Tried DDO Unlimited when it went free, the Game would crash as soon as it tried to load the characters on character select.  After a few hundred attempts to get something to work, I finally got a pop-up message from windows, telling me the Video Card Driver had recovered from an unexpected crash.

 ok, so I covered part of July in there too, new post and I’ll pickup some June stuff then move on…

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• Fedora 12, VirtualBox, and Shared folders – a How To
• bringing the past to the future….