Baslinux mailing list

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

On Sat, 25 Jun 2005, David Moberg wrote:

> sindi keesan wrote:
>
> > Is a52 video?  The WM audio I tried to listen to came with a small
> > colored rectangle that changed frequently, vaguely stained-glass
> > looking.
>
> a52 is an audio codec. I usually associate a52 with DVDs, since
> many of them use it for their audio. I've never seen streaming a52
> before.

I think this was from a .ram link.

The video was likely one of the Windows Media codecs (MPEG4
> based) and someone probably didn't realize that video isn't very
> useful over a 56K modem if you're trying to stream high-quality
> audio at the same time.

This link claimed to be 28K realaudio but ended in .asx.

Most of the other 'realaudio 28K' links I tried to listen to at a 
'classical Realaudio' site did not work - 404K not found, or loud noises, 
or text flashing by.  These were my two successes.


> > I will look for a way to make mplayer play only the audio portions
> > of WM - with video, even with a 56K modem, a 28K broadcast is full
> > of skips (and the video part of it is not edifying or even
> > interesting).

> The problem is probably on their end, not yours. Even so, you will
> (most likely) not be able to tell their server to only broadcast
> audio if both audio and video are combined into one multiplexed
> file. If it is a playlist, and both an audio and video stream are
> listed, you may be able to play just the audio stream. To stop
> MPlayer from decoding video after a download, use -novideo.

But it will still download the video, right?  In which case I will forget 
about that station.

If given a choice, I will choose to listen to anything but WM/asx

> > I hit Ctr-C to get out of the WM broadcast and was rewarded with
> > the loss of my two VGA vts, which went and stayed blank.  TTL kept
> > working. Next time I will experiment with running mplayer on a WM
> > file in VGA (rather than TTL).
>
> If you don't display the video (with -vo null) the VGA screens should
> still work on exit.
I will try that, or -novideo.

> > > I hope this will be the last version until 'they' release a stable
> > > 1.0 version of MPlayer.
> >
> > Is that likely to be before or after a 'stable' FreeDOS?

> Likely before. 1.0pre7 is almost there, it just needs a couple of
> tweaks and fixes (like ffmpeg crashes and to reduce bloat a little).
> Then there would be testing of that release, and eventually a 1.0
> release which works. BusyBox already has their 1.00 release. uClibc
> is stuck on 0.9.27, it seems.

Will you wait for 1.0 uClibc to compile against uClibc again?
My partner would still like the most recent dosemu for BL2 or BL3.

> > mp3, rm, and wm, are working - what more should I check, the DVD playing?
>
> No need to. I can guarantee that it works.

> > Speaking of DVDs, we were given a 500MHz Compaq Armada laptop with
> > no power supply or hard drive (or hard drive enclosure), for which
> > we found an HP power supply.  It has some ROM problem which might
> > be brought on by a combination of a dead battery (three of which
> > came with it - the least dead one worked for two boots only, from
> > floppy or CD-ROM) and a BIOS which is too old for the Pentium III
> > Coppermine cpu.  The solution is to flash with a BIOS upgrade.  The
> > Compaq/HP sites only offers BIOS upgrades for a particular hard
> > drive (which we have not got).
>
> Highly unusual. BIOSes are supposed to work with many different IDE
> hard drives.

Speaking of BIOSes and hard drives, we just determined that my 533MHz 
computer works with hda hdc and hdd but only once in a while with hdb.  I 
never had a BIOS go bad on JUST master slave before.  Luckily this 
computer works without an hdb.  On a Compaq we could not skip it or 
/dev/hdc would not work (it was the CD-ROM drive, and to mount it you had 
to first attempt to mount it as /dev/hdb and then mount it as /dev/hdc, so 
we moved it).


> > I found a set of BIOS upgrades (Award Bios 2.5 6 7 8 9 and A)
> > that are supposed to work on another computer with the same CPU.
> > Are BIOS upgrades specific to the cpu or the computer?
>
> Both. More to the motherboard (computer) than CPU. One for the
> same model (with a slower clocked CPU) should still work. A
> different manufacturer/model series is probably out of the
> question. But I would be careful with a BIOS update. Make sure
> that the software knows that the update will work.

I will try the upgrade for the Armada with a specific brand of hard 
drive.  We don't have a lot to lose here anyway.  The thing has only 
booted twice out of many tries and we have no hard drive case for it.

I tried to update some BIOS once and was told it was the wrong one. 
Similarly for modem upgrades.


> > Someone else managed to use a ROM burner but we don't have
> > one of those.
>
> Fairly simple devices. Everyone seems to charge an arm and a leg
> for them.
>
> > Then we could attempt to make a large RAMdisk with linux and load
> > linux to it from CD-ROM drive.  I presume we would need to use a
> > kernel that produces larger than 4MB RAMdisks.
>
> I am hopelessly confused about this. I see two options:
>
> 1) Use a CD-based distribution. This will require two DVD drives,
> OR a distribution which lets you eject the CD.

We have two DVD drives but only one can be used at a time, or the floppy 
drive.  One slot, three drives.  I suspect the other DVD-ROM drive may not 
work and they replaced it.  We also got 3 batteries, two of them dead, one 
nearly so.

How will a CD-based linux let us flash the BIOS with a 2MB .exe file?
(Which I hope does not require Windows, like modem upgrades often do).

Are there linux-based BIOS upgrade programs for Award BIOS (2A or 
earlier)?  It has to be later than about April 2000.

> 2) Use loadlin, in which case you can install everything to the
> hard drive. Or am I missing something?

_WE_ are missing something - a hard drive and an enclosure for it.  The 
problem is how to run a 2MB .exe file with no hard drive, from DOS.  I was 
hoping we could set up a RAM disk in DOS and transfer the file to it and 
run it from RAMdisk (assuming we get the correct update program)

> > Would a DVD-ROM drive from this computer work in a slower Gateway
> > laptop which lets you plug in either a floppy drive or a CD-ROM
> > drive?  If so, is linux likely to identify it as a plain IDE drive?
>
> The pinout is likely completely different. Laptops are proprietary
> to the extreme. If you can plug it in, it should be IDE.

If you can plug in the floppy drive or the DVD drive into the same slot, I 
doubt it is IDE, so there goes that idea.  Maybe someone else has a 
working Compaq Armada without a DVD drive and not much RAM.

> > This is all theory unless we get the thing to boot consistently.
> > We have left the best of the dead batteries charging for two days
> > and don't want to try booting again until we are ready to flash the
> > ROM.
>
> Why do you run it on battery power? Don't you have a power adapter?

It was given to us with no power adaptor or hard drive or hard drive 
enclosure, third hand, by a friend who got it from a coworker with a ROM 
errror.  It came with two dead and one nearly dead battery.

We managed to find a power adaptor, an HP (they seem to own Compaq now) 
but according to a website I found, someone else determined that the ROM 
error on boot has something to do with voltage.  So we put in the least 
dead battery and tried to run it from power supply AND battery.  My theory 
is that it only boots with a charged battery, but a small charge is 
enough, and we used that up with two boots.  It did not boot at all 
without the battery.

> (Sorry, list, for drifting off-topic)

No, this is supposed to be related to using BL and mplayer on this 
computer, if we can get the dratted BIOS updated so we can at least burn 
BL3 to a bootable CD, and run it off that to use it as a DVD player which 
would generate less heat than a desktop computer.  It is in the 90s this 
week again here.  I should get BL put onto the other pentiums to use in 
the basement.

Other people have used CD-ROM linux because they did not have a floppy 
drive - has anyone used it instead of a hard drive?

I read that you can buy a new ROM and burn the BIOS to that.  Could we 
move the BIOS ROM to some other computer and upgrade it from hard drive 
there?  Or would it have to be the same motherboard to run that program?


It is a nice computer apart from its glaring problems - builtin 56K modem 
(I hope not a winmodem) and 100Mbit ethernet, and two PCMCIA slots, and 
speakers.

> David
>
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org