Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT lycos.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
 
> I found a howto on AWE32 in linux, which says that if you boot 
> linux with loadlin from DOS you don't need isapnp initialization, 
> if you initialize in DOS.  I have lines in autoexec.bat about awe, 
> generated by the SB16 'diagnose' program.  I also have a message on 
> one of the three AWE computers 'awe initialization failed' so it 
> must be working on the other two.  (The one that failed is the 
> awe64).
> 
> What does initialization do?

It tells the PnP card what IO address and IRQ to live at. It's
like setting the jumpers on a non-PnP card.

> Forgetting initialization, what I need to do is insmod all the 
> modules, but add to the insmod sb line:  mpu_io=0x300 (for some 
> reason 330 is busy on my newer computers, or maybe won't work for 
> these cards).
> There was no mention of mpu_irq here, which was needed by the opti 931 card.

Does it demand mpu_io? MPU is for sending MIDI commands to a synthesizer.
My plain Vibra16 doesn't need it. cat /proc/ioports to see what's using
what.

> I presume I need v_midi too.

I don't think so. I haven't checked modules.dep from Slackware yet, but
I believe v_midi is for something else.

> Then /usr/local/bin/sfxload /usr/local/lib/synthgm.sbk
> (using the files from the awe32 tools package, I presume).
> 
> They set the volume with a 'volume 30' (maybe that comes with the 
> awe packages?) but I could try aumix or leave it at the default if 
> that works.

The OSS mixer might not allow you to change these settings. This is
one of the advantages ALSA has over OSS: the mixer isn't as limited.

> I will try this tomorrow after we put back together one or more of 
> these computers with awe cards.  The drives and cards are playing 
> musical slots this week as we discover dead or failing drives.  You 
> can apparently kill a 250MB drive by plugging the signal cable in 
> backwards.

Tell me about it. I've lost several drives this way.
IDE cables are supposed to be keyed so that they insert only one way.

> The drive that had Ontrack Overlay on it and failed and 
> had Ontrack removed and was working again just failed again (it is 
> recognized during boot but programs cannot access it).
> 
> Our largest free replacement drive (4G) had EZ-DRIVE (which means 
> it was not possible to partition it with fdisk or PQMagic), which I 
> removed with a PowerMax low-level format.  I can't format it 
> because e2fsck can't find the superblock or it is bad.

Why do you need e2fsck to format the hard drive?

> PowerMax 
> tells me the drive is failing but we might use it for a while until 
> it dies.  The 8G drive is also failing, which you can tell by very 
> slow measured speeds.  The 4G took about 10 minutes for the 
> 90-second test, but perhaps 90-sec is for 200MB drives.
> 
> Is there some way to find the number for a secondary superblock so 
> I can point e2fsck at it?  I tried 8193 as suggested and double 
> than and quadruple (it went out of range).  I can now partition 
> with fdisk (which used to complain about a bad flag), but cannot 
> format.  The drive has over 8000 cylinders, 16, 63 (sectors and 
> tracks) so DOS sees it as 1GB but we only want it for linux. Does a 
> low-level format remove all copies of the superblock?  If so, where 
> do I get replacements?  You would think Maxtor's low-level format 
> would produce a usable drive.

mke2fs is supposed to create the superblock (which is an ext2
thing) Why in the world does mke2fs demand an e2fsck?

> The 600MHz computer that had an onboard parport whcih produced 
> garbage in DOS and nothing in linux is working fine now that I 
> changed from 3f8 to 3bc.  ????  IRQ5 is STILL taken by something, 
> no idea what.  I put in a parport card set to IRQ 5 and it printed 
> even though a sound card won't work as IRQ 5.  ???   It also 
> printed if set to IRQ7.  The onboard parport was disabled.  I can't 
> boot if I set an ISA card to the same address as an onboard port, 
> but they don't seem to mind sharing IRQs.  Why are sound cards 
> fussier?

Sound cards are complicated beasts. They're designed so that nothing
can pre-empt them if data is sent to them. If they didn't do this,
sound quality would suffer badly.

David

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