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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