Yeah, I only have five working days left until I take a bunch of months off to take care of Rex full-time. It may of course prevent be from being as active online as I sometimes have been. We’ll see.
Monthly Archives: September 2007
Sound on Linux has some quirks left
I’m a stupid person.
When I bought a new PC the last time, I went for a ASUS M2NPV-MX motherboard with built-in
sound and nvidia graphics. I had been told that the nvidia open source driver is fine enough for 2D graphics, and since I never game or anything I’m perfectly fine with 2D-only.
Ok, it didn’t take me long to realize two things about my motherboard:
- The built-in audio “nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio” is not supported by Linux/ALSA. It seems to detect it fine and it can show what it is and everything but it can’t produce any sound.
- The open source nVidia driver does not support DVI in resolutions beyond 1280×1024, and it made me wanna cry. I switched to VGA instead, only to realize that the analog output on this board is really noticeably worse than my previous and much older trustworthy Matrox card. (New
PCI-Express board in the pipe.)
There’s nobody to blame but myself. Lessons for next time: check the audio support better and do not go with nVidia graphics (at all) until they have a good open source driver – and really really check this. (No need to tell me there’s a binary-only nvidia driver, I know about it but I hate it and I hate the inconveniences dealing with binary drivers cause when you upgrade your system etc.)
Funnily, the motherboard has built-in Ethernet (of course) but I don’t normally use that, as I’m on 802.11g only. My work computer is on the upper floor and my (24 mbit) ADSL connection is downstairs and I like not having to connect all my computers with cables running all over.
So, back to the story, to get sound for my box I got an old SoundBlaster PCI card from a friend (hej Kjell) and inserted it in the last available PCI slot (the other slot has the wifi card).
Now, when I upgrade to a fresh new kernel version with Debian unstable the system boots up and defaults to the (detected but not working built-in) hda_intel stuff, and I must run alsaconf to select my ens1371-equipped SoundBlaster instead. But this is not enough. After I’ve ran alsaconf I can’t get any sound out still, but I have to reboot and when it comes up again I must run aumixer and pull up the master volume and wham, now I have sound…
I’m quite sure this can be fixed in another way, but trying to learn this and figure how I can repair my situation to always work fine in the future is a mighty task that I haven’t yet been able to overcome. I really should get involved in the ALSA project one day…
Paper-weight electronics stationed here!
Bring your stuff here, and they brick it for you? Or should we take our already bricked stuff there?
Another lovely sign. This one is from Kista C and this actually means “tray station” here as where you bring your tray after you’re done with your meal. Technology-damaged as I am, I can only think of… brick.
Rockbox on Gigabeat S
I thought that I’d just complete my recent series of talking about (possible) upcoming Rockbox ports, even though the guys working on this already have been in progress for a while.
This target is quite different than the (already supported) Gigabeat F and X series, and is in fact more like a Zune (claimed to be based on this hardware).
Anyway, Gigabeat S has a 530MHz CPU with FPU, 2.4″ 320×240 LCD, 30 or 60GB disk and it runs a Windows(!) edition.
As all Gigabeat players, this is notoriously hard to get your hands on, especially in Europe.
Rockbox coming to Olympus m:robe 500?
A couple of Rockbox devs now work on getting a port up and running on the Olympus m:robe 500 player.
This beast has 640×480 resolution, touch screen and a camera! It is powered by the dreaded TI DM320 chipset, has 64 MB ram, 8MB flash and 20GB hard drive.
Anyway, the first code snippets have been committed to SVN so if you own one of these toys, now is the time to join in and make things happen!
Gathered hardware info, Cowon A2 and Neuros OSD both run Linux on basically the same main microcontroller.
Rockbox on c200
Since Rockbox runs fine on the SanDisk Sansa C200 there are now C200 builds provided for download since a few minutes back. This being early C200 days, please have patience and don’t feel shy to step forward and help us smooth out the remaining quirks…
Sansapatcher is being remade to be able to install the bootloader on either e200 or c200 models, so until there’s an updated one available you’ll of course have a slightly harder time to actually install this on your c200.
Rockbox on marc.info
mi4code 1.0.2
I fetched all Sansa c200 and e200 firmwares I could find and wrote a script that scanned all of them for new mi4 keys, and it only lead me to a single new key (for the Sansa C200 A1.00.03 firmware version).
Another key added, and mi4code 1.0.2 is up on the mi4code page.
This was easily done thanks to Zefies’s firmware collection!
X.org and the AMD ATI specs
phoronix.com featured a nice first collected comments on the data sheets that AMD has released to the public covering some of the ATI graphic chips, and I especially liked this quote: “in less than ten hours of the specifications being available, GPU specifications were downloaded from the X.Org server over 70,000 times and ate up more than 1.3 terabytes of bandwidth!”
The data sheets are here: www.x.org/wiki/DataSheets
fscons curl talk, part II
Ok, it seems the pricing for the entire conference (7-8 dec 2007) is going to be:
Student: 60 euro
Private: 120 euro
Company: 240 euro
The blurb for my particular talk (that is going to be held in English, mind you) that is scheduled for 13.00 on dec 8 is draf
ted like below:
curl and libcurl is a free software project for data transfers with well known Internet protocols. It’s about to turn 10 years, is downloaded more than 1 million times per year and is the answer to all questions and problems
Daniel Stenberg is the founder and leader of the curl project and will talk about exactly everything that curl is good for, what it does for you, who uses it, who should use it and something about the background, the license, people, development and the culture within the project. Some words about the future and who’s paying for the development will also be dealt with.
And no, the official site still hasn’t gone live so this is still not possible to read elsewhere!