Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, David Moberg wrote:

> > I would like to hide Windows most of the time.  In
> > order to boot it, the partition it is on (first partition on the
> > second drive) needs to also be made 'active' - can parted do this?
>
> Yes. Or DOS fdisk can do this.
> > DOS is still better for use with a TTL monito,r but the
> > maintainer of mdacon promised (a long time ago) to try to add a
> > scroll buffer, and underlines would be nice too - does anyone want
> > to help me try to modify mdacon.c to do this?
>
> Have you tried a newer kernel? For instance, does DamnSmallLinux do
> mdacon?

I just reread what I wrote to the linux kernel list and did some more 
poking around the web.  The maintainer asked me if I had Hercules or some 
other brand of card (I have other brands, about 10 of them).   mdacon was 
written in 1997, rewritten by the current maintainer in 1998, and patched 
in 2000 (I think this was so it would work with non-Hercules cards).

The patch may have come later than Slackware 7.1.

I looked at the 33 pages of mdacon.c (don't know from which year) and 
discovered that it does intensity, underline, reverse and blink but cannot 
do reverse and underline at the same time, and reverse is used for cursors 
sometimes and takes precedence.

I also ran across my discussion with David about the mdacon.o included 
with his framebuffer package, which is different from the one that comes 
with Slackware 7.1.  Was the framebuffer version compiled with the same 
source code (SW7.1)?  The SW71 version did not work properly when I booted 
with the framebuffer kernel, but the framebuffer one worked well in both 
cases, so I will check it out for underlines.  Where I miss them is in 
dosemu trying to use Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS.

But recent dosemu (last year) had a bug that I could not figure out how to 
use the patch for (no ^ A or S appeared when you typed them in CLI) so I 
was using it in BL3 after installing bash so that dosemu would install. 
I will try the earliest version for glibc2 unless they fixed the bug in 
the latest version.  Perhaps someone could help figure out the 
patch since other people have also expressed an interest in dosemu with 
BL.  The other problem with WP is Alt-F keys, which mean something to WP 
but in linux shift consoles, so I would need to change linux somehow so 
that Alt-F2 did not do anything in linux itself.  chvt 2 I think changes 
consoles too.


> > After already initializing the card in DOS ( io 220 mpu 330  irq 5
> > dma 1 dma16 5) I used pnpdump -rc to produce an isapnp.conf file
> > and it told me
> > 'uart401:  bad devc' -
>
> > what does a uart401 do?  Do I actually have one?
>
> UARTs are also found in serial ports, where they split data into
> individual bits. You should have one on an SB16.

What would a bad one do?  Is this why I get clicking noises when not 
playing something?  I will check the same radio (speakers) on a different 
card.

> > In DOS, I was able to use ctcm to choose from 6 different
> > configurations, two of which had no second DMA.  Do you think your
> > error message means that the channel you chose was unavailable, or
> > the card was not set up to have a second DMA channel?  It looks
> > from pnpdump like it should be dma16=3 but the rules seem to be
> > that DMA16 is 5, 6, or 7.
>
> Perhaps it would work if I changed the second DMA to one of these.

Try ctcu/ctcm and test whether it finds conflicts with 5 6 or 7 in DOS and 
whether the native setting of the card includes a high DMA. I will try it 
on my card that has no high DMA to see if I can reset it to have a high 
DMA.  diagnose appears to be telling me that 5, 6 and 7 are all taken.
I might need to disable the onboard parport (I have an MGP card in here) 
to get 7 free.

> David

Sindi