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  • From: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [BL] screen blanker and IDE controllers (BL2)
  • Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2008 03:34:55 +0000 (UTC)

When I watch DVDs with mplayer the screen goes black about once every 5 minutes and I need to hit the space bar twice (stop, start) to get the video back. This happens only on one computer (with two video cards and monitors - I start mplayer from the VGA monitor, which goes blank, and might try starting from the TTL monitor instead).

setterm -blank 0
supposedly turns off the screen blanker.
It can be set from 0 to 60 and is presumably set in some file. Which file?

When I am copying between hard drives the screen blanks as soon as the copy process is finished.

I don't think I have BIOS set to blank it. I turned off APIC.

I compiled a kernel (bzimavps.431) with drivers for onboard VIA and SIS and add-in Promise PCI IDE controllers. Linux transfer speed using this kernel (the drivers don't work as modules), measured with hdparm -t /dev/hdb, is 28MB/sec instead of 3MB/sec without the driver. Three boards have VIA controller (via82cxxx - also the matching via82cxxx_audio, which did not work right for me), and two have SIS5513. These controllers are found starting about 1999. VIA controllers were on two boards given to us with PII cpus (233MHz-333MHz), one with 1.0GHz AMD, and one with 1.2GHz Intel P3. SIS controllers were on 1.4GHz and 2.4GHz computer.

We have several DELL computers, one Micron (all 450-550MHz) and one IBM (800MHz) which run hard disks in DOS as fast as does linux with the drivers, possibly only up to UDMA-33. 29MB/sec transfer. The fancy new computers run the same drives at 3MB/sec in DOS.

DOS runs REALLY slowly on them (it takes longer to boot and you hear clicking sounds). I could not find DOS drivers for them. They are UDMA-100 and UDMA-133 (two VIAs, one each speed, and the SIS are 133). BL standard kernel also runs the drivers at about 3MB/sec.

One way to get a faster DOS drive would be to use an add-in PCI IDE controller, which comes with built-in drivers in its BIOS to make it work properly in DOS. It slows down booting a bit while the BIOS loads. You need to boot with a linux kernel containing the driver or it won't find the drives at all.

I tried setting up DOS on a SCSI drive (SCSI-2, runs at 7MB/sec instead of 3.5MB/sec) but it would not boot (got stuck at verifying DMI pool). Is there a trick to this? A SCSO card also loads its own BIOS and slows down boot.

I am back to booting BL from DOS running slowly. When you copy disks on such a computer, do it with linux and the kernel with built-in controller driver, to get 10X the speed. This kernel ought to work with ramdisk BL3. I would like hdparm in any future BL. It was needed to get one hard disk to read properly.

This computer (AOpen 2.4GHz Intel P4 with everything onboard) also will not recognize anything but the first partition on hda if I have an extended partition on hdb. Nor will a 600Mhz (Intel Slot 1). I see why Steven warned us against extended partitions. On most computers they just make the files on D: seem to be not there, but on this one D: E: and F: are not even found as partitions (the CD-ROM drives are D: and E: instead).

This computer reboots if I hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.

The Phoenix BIOS offers no way to turn off NUMLOCK.
config.sys
numlock=off

I prefer the older computers but this one will compile kernels faster.

Sindi

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




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