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Topic: some problems here starting with DSL

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chpnp

Group: Members
Posts: 7
Joined: Aug. 2006

Posted: Mar. 24 2008,13:48

Hi,

I tried yesterday to play with a DSL CD (after running it embedded) on 4 different machines and I must say it has been a frustrating experience :-(

Machine 1: Desktop pentium 4 2,8 GHZ with a sapphire Radeon 9600 Atlantis.

The boot process starts normally it seems to configure properly then I can see it finding 2 ethernet board with the message "backgrounding" and then suddenly a number of messages show saying

I/O error: dev 08:10 sector XX

(I get probably like 2 screens of that with different values, I cannot ctrl+S but I can ctrl+C and end up in a DSL console, I can type some commands. Startx crashes the machine, (as does letting it go with no ctrl+c). By crash I mean empty (non graphical) screen and i need to power off/on.

Does that look like a cdrom (or reader) problem ? I can use the cdrom on the other machines.

Machine 2 is a Dell C400 laptop, it boots (with some issues) and i cannot get anything else than a horrible 1024x768 screen (crazy colors) of it and going to VESA, it offers me only a 640x480 resolution (with normal colors however this time, at least). I understand from doing some research that this is tied to the Intel I830 chipset, and apparently there are some solutions in terms of drivers for this, would it be complicated to add that ? I understand there are probably a very limiter number of users affected :-( and have no idea of the complexity it would involve. :-(

Machine 3 is a Sotec laptop.
The autoconfiguring devices phase is interrupted with a message saying:

modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-2
modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module block-major-2
Done

I say interrupted because is does not "last" as long as it did on the other machines
Then the boot continues. I do not seem to have any major problems later - except, it does not seem to recognize my NETGEAR WG511 wifi card at all. I have not been able to make it work using ndiswrapper (but I am not sure I am using it properly either).

Thanks for any hint on this.

curaga

Group: Members
Posts: 2163
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: Mar. 24 2008,15:07

1) dev 08:10 means SCSI disk in the first channel, partition 10. This machine most likely has sata dvd drive, so try booting with "dsl sata"

2) there's nothing wrong with the i830 chipset, I have it in a HP laptop and it works fine. It's a hardware thing still. Did you try booting with "fb1024x768"? Or try 16-bit colors with Xvesa?

3) that means you don't have a floppy drive. harmless.

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lucky13

Group: Members
Posts: 1478
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: Mar. 24 2008,15:20

Starting backwards...

Is your card Prism-based? DSL has a separate prism configuration tool.

You can probably safely ignore the block-major-2 errors. That's a floppy module; I've had the errrors on a couple computers but it didn't limit my use of any block device (including floppy). (Side note: I don't know if that's from a broken alias in modules.conf or if it's actually a hardware issue.)

The issue with video requires you to run xsetup.sh (exit to console and run it). You need to know your resolution and depth. If you over-estimate those variables, you'll get oversaturated video like that. If you have an odd resolution you can either back down to a lower resolution or use one of the extensions from MyDSL and configure it manually. BTW, you can't run startx unless you have a valid config to run from -- try running xsetup.sh before starting X manually (especially if you break the boot by escaping with ctrl-c). I don't know if you can run DSL's limited X under that video chipset without using an xorg extension.

Finally, the CD error can be due to bad media or having burned the CD too fast (or both). Less likely and pretty rare, it could be an issue with your drive (such as being out of alignment more than its tolerances allow). Edit: Or SATA -- boot with "sata" cheatcode.

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^thehatsrule^ Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 3275
Joined: July 2006

Posted: Mar. 24 2008,15:37

Looks like a newer prism chip: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla....ist_m-n
which may be supported natively (prism54?)

chpnp

Group: Members
Posts: 7
Joined: Aug. 2006

Posted: Mar. 25 2008,00:56

Quote (curaga @ Mar. 24 2008,10:07)

1- was a mystery. I had a USB memory card reader and external drive. After disconnecting them that error disappeared. I do not need that for now, might have been some weak contact issue.

2- As i understand it the problem is both i830 and Dell related. The Dell C400 bios (and some others) will steal only 1mb of memory at boot (cant be change throug the Dell bios !) and hence the only Xvesa option is 640x480x16. Which works fine but who wants that ?
Playing around I could improve the whole thing by booting with option

dsl vga=773

(I believe 773) which is 1024x768 8 bits mode.
Works fine and improves image a bit but still not as satisfactory as it could be of course.

Ubuntu, (and XP for that matter) are smart enough to allocate enough memory for the graphical card. EG Ubuntu says 503 Mb of ram are available, which I understand that it reserved 8Mb of RAM for graphics (1Mb is stolen by the bios).
This is only assumption on my side of course.

To answer your questions, fb1024x768 does not help and 16bit colors with Xvesa is 640x480x16 which is the ONLY option proposed. :-(

3- thanks...

8 replies since Mar. 24 2008,13:48

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