Text 6615, 155 rader
Skriven 2006-07-20 22:29:14 av Maurice Kinal (1:140/13.1)
   Kommentar till text 6612 av James Bradley (1:134/77.0)
Ärende: Newbie
==============
Hey James!

Jul 20 14:40 06, James Bradley wrote to Maurice Kinal:

 JB> You instigator, you! An hour ago, I looked at the unplugged, 
 JB> dual-boot Dell. Now, I just *have*
 JB> to plug it in to see. <ARRR |->

And?

 JB> I dug into it today, and both CPUs were represented in the setup, 
 JB> inside the DOS program.

Sounds good so far ... other then the 'DOS program' part that is.


 JB> <scratching head... Maybe a special code DOS?> I just might try to 
 JB> diagnose the system yet, but
 JB> the BIOS still stacks everything under IRQ 11.

Is there an option to turn on PnP BIOS or something simular?  On both Gateway
and Tyan p3 based boards that proved to be the best with 2.6 kernels, as well
as the few 2.4 kernels I had going on the Tyan.  That should solve your IRQ
issues methinks if you also turn that on in the kernel (heck turn all PnP stuff
on in there while you're at it).

 JB> Then, every setting seems tossed out.

See above.

 JB> and there it was! They were at least refined enough to *not* bust the 
 JB> bejeabers out-a it. 

Cool.  The only way it could have worked out better is if they returned it
where they got it from or not taken it in the first place.

 JB> I just about plugged it into the Dell, but I thought against rolling 
 JB> in with the new-old overhead
 JB> projector. Maybe the panel will belong in the G-house yet. <L> 
 JB> Pictures at eleven, I hope. <G>

Sounds like you know how to have fun.

 JB> And I thought they had to let all their high priced legal staff go. 
 JB> Maybe that's the only staff that
 JB> didn't suffer from restructuring?

I guess they must trust MS to look after their legal issues.

 JB> Any way you slice it, Nortel is likely to be sliced American Style, 
 JB> and they'll be lucky to see any
 JB> lubrication.

Right.  It has heppened before and usually results in death.

 JB> For whatever reason, Slack never did stick to them. Mandrake, yes... 
 JB> Slack on the Compaq, yes...

I think the PnP BIOS might straighten that out.

 JB> That's why I originally shelved the Dell project, to concentrate on 
 JB> the Compaq. Then the
 JB> Sportster started playing stupid... 

Always something.  Is that an external serial one?

 JB> The usual, with an onboard NIC, and sound, AGP slot, maybe two PCI 
 JB> busses... Still, I think I
 JB> looked at everything in the Setup today. I dropped the 
 JB> advert/splash-screen, but still haven't been
 JB> able to assign any upper IRQs there.

PnP BIOS methinks.

 JB> Right-o... This is the first I have *seen* a "VRM". May I ask what 
 JB> visually distinguishes a Xeon,
 JB> over any other Slot 1 CPU?

I forget offhand but if I recall correctly p3 xeons are slot 2.  In other
words, exactly the same but totally different.  :-)

 JB> Of course I'll research before I start the 
 JB> ozone on fire, but I just want
 JB> to get the most "Bang for the buck." [-|{

Me too but at the time a quad xeon was perhaps too much bang for my needs no
matter how great of a deal.

 JB> I may be thick here, but what *is* the appeal for a hot-plug PCI bus?

I'd have to actually play with it before I knew for sure why it would appeal to
me personally.  Beats me why at the moment.

 MK>> bit cpu.  Supposedly it's onboard graphics gpu is covered.

 JB> "Covered" by what? <G+D> 

A working xorg driver or so I am led to believe.  The dri stuff supposedly
works as well.  We'll see.

 JB> Ta'hell if I know. NVIDA bla-bla-bla, or an ATI does everything but 
 JB> the dishes... ... ... I'll worry
 JB> about those cards, when I can buy aem for ten bucks. <EG>

Me too, or better yet nothing.  The nvidia one here is attached to the
motherboard so it didn't really cost anything given it doesn't matter to me. 
What bothers me is the other stuff, such as the two pci slots, seem out of
touch with what is plugged into them, such as a matrox g200 pci card. 
Something is goofey there.  Also am running into a usb cardreader problem wrt
hotswapping flashdisks but if I make usb_storage modular then that fixes that
issue up ... I think.  Haven't tried read/writing yet and that might still be
an issue.  At the moment I am not too concerned about it as it might get left
behind (cardreader) in favour of a external one just wired directly into a usb
hub instead.  I think that is better for my purposes for such a thing in the
first place.

 JB> There's PLENTY of IBMs where I shop. <L> Are they "restructuring" 
 JB> too? Maybe they didn't
 JB> learn their lesson with OS/2.

They sold PC production off to the Chinese, just like everyone else these days.

 JB> A "friend" dropped off a Sony laptop, for me to load up. Knowing 
 JB> nothing about them, I
 JB> *upgraded* it to 3.11, installed a couple of PCMCIA cards, bigger HD, 
 JB> bla-bla-bla, and then he
 JB> didn't want it anymore.

I've had simular things happen.  I loaded Slackware onto an older Acer laptop
once just to win a bet.  He had problems getting a serial based gps reciever to
work with installed windows (either 98 or 95) and I managed to use 'cat' and
'setserial' to output all the proper data from it with no problems whatsoever. 
He wasn't at all happy about that.  :-)

 JB> Ungrateful, so and so...

Yep.  I know the type.

 JB> L!!! Well, it's a good thing monitors are so cheep these days. Maybe, 
 JB> my friend needed a
 JB> solitaire/minesweeper system. <ROTF> 

:-)

 JB> With such a diminishing interest... Sysop snooping, I never get to 
 JB> where I would be embarrassed
 JB> about what I've written, even as boggled as my brain can get.

Yeah.

Life is good,
Maurice

--- Msged/LNX 6.2.0
 * Origin: The Pointy Stick Society XX - Simplified symmetry man! (1:140/13.1)