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The 5680/8890 Gentoo Thread - Page 2

post #21 of 170
12/21/03 at 4:17am
Hey, I am in win now, but I can hit a few questions

1 I got a good tip from the linux forum the other day, anything you are looking for type 'emerge search <randomword> and it will search for matching packages; like my Q about telnet - the app was utils-telnet or some crap like that

4 Once you have the partition in /etc/fstab, the computer wil remember it's settings. Add it to the list of auto-mounted partitions, then chmod 777. you can also mount ntfs partitions that way, they are mostly read-only though.

3 I am not sure of what would cause your exact problem with alsa, but I also had the "crackle when forcing" problem, although I am pretty sure it is simply failing to buffer any audio, and attempting to run real-time. To ensure that the levels remain when you reboot, it is necessary to log out of KDE before you shut down. KMix controls the levels for you probbly, and will not save until you log out. I always do a logout - su - halt and it remembers the levels fine. two things you could see if they happen to you 1) xmms can never rember what desktop it is on and 2) KMIX decides to show itself when loading during random boots.

Keep us posted.
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post #22 of 170
12/21/03 at 12:09pm
I believe su requires the "wheel" group, so add the user account to wheel to get su working...
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post #23 of 170
12/21/03 at 12:58pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks guys.

I got lspci and the VFAT drive things sorted out. I can live with the sound as is and I am looking at a forum entry about how to add the user to wheel. Also, thanks for the emerge search thing; I found out about it myself but thanks for posting it. Finally, I've been fiddling with NDISWrapper and am up to the point where I have the interface configured with iwconfig. I just need to get the interface going and see if it gets an IP through DHCP. Too bad that ndiswrapper is at such an early stage in the development because it lacks many features that are nesessary for some. For example, it ignores explicitly set SSIDs when in Managed mode; I dont want that because I disable SSID broadcast on my router. However, for the time being, I have enabled the broadcasting. It doesnt really matter since I restrict WLAN access by MAC. Finally, I'll see if KDE does those things and post back.

Thanks again. Until next time

Mikhail
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post #24 of 170
12/21/03 at 3:23pm
Thread Starter 
Hey everyone. I'm back again.

I cant seem to be able to get ndiswrapper working with my Linksys WPC54G PCMCIA Card. Here is what I have right now.

I have compiled PCMCIA support into the kernel, as well as that wireless network thingy. I have compiled the ndiswrapper stuff. I have successfully inserted the module and loaded the driver into the module. I have also somewhat configured the adapter via iwconfig. As of right now, the settings are:

IEEE 802.11g ESSID:""
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437GHz Bit Rate=54Mb/s Tx-Power:10 dBm
RTS thr=2347 B Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption key:XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XX Security mode:restricted
Power Managementff
Link Quality:0 Signal level:246 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

As mentioned earlier, iwconfig ignores explicit SSID settings when in Managed mode. Thus I have turned on SSID broadcast in the router configurations.

This is about as far as I can "successfully" get. If I dhcpcd eth1, it simply times out without getting anywhere. Doing ifconfig eth1 up beforehand doesnt change anything. Adding parameters for eth1 in /etc/conf.d/net doesnt do anything either. Stripping down the wireless settings (no WEP, etc.) didnt do a thing either. Finally, I am sitting about two meters away from the router, so the quality of the connection shouldnt be an issue at all.

Has anyone had any luck with getting NDISWrapper to work with WPC54G or any card at all? I really want to get this working because I have go down to the basement whenever I need Internet access in Linux.

Thanks in advance.

Mikhail

P.S. I think I might post this as a separate thread in order to get more attention.
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post #25 of 170
12/21/03 at 6:09pm
Thread Starter 
Awesome news: I have managed to get the wireless working without WEP! When setting the iwconfig settings, apply the mode setting, then the key setting (in this case, 'iwconfig ethX key off') and then the essid.

Fiddling with WEP now... Will report later

Mikhail

EDIT: Wow. This thing is weird! I finally got the above to work systematically (EDIT: DAMN IT! It DOESNT work systematically!!). Here is a "script" I wrote to start the wireless (Note: it has to be ran from root; sudo doesnt work with insmod or iwconfig). The XP drivers are assumed to retain their original names; the kernel is 2.6.0 stable; the device and vendor Ids are for the chipset of Linksys WPC54G.

HTML Code:
EDIT: I removed this script since I posted the improved script later in this thread.
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post #26 of 170
12/25/03 at 9:59pm
Thread Starter 
Hello everyone. Its time for another update!

Everything is going great. I have finally managed to make the wireless activation more or less automated by modifying the above script to sleep & re-assign the SSID until it is successfuly set. This is done by looking in the kernel log for a specific message from ndiswrapper. If you are interested, please let me know and I will post the script. As for WEP, I still dont have that working an am thinking of just living with it until ndiswrapper improves (keep up the good work, developers!!!). EDIT: I got WEP working by simply making the script assign a WEP key before the SSID loop!

Talking of software, I have emerged (fully from source) Mozilla 1.5, XMMS, KMPlayer, etc. - all without a hitch.

A few things worth mentioning for the sake of helping others:

1) If you are bothered by your system forgetting the volume settings after reboots, emerge alsa-tools. Its weird because I didnt do anything after installing those and my machine just remembers the volume levels now. Also, a useful thing to have with alsa-tools is alsamixergui, which is the GUI clone of alsamixer, emerge-able separately.

2) In order to get access to my OS-independant FAT32 partition and read-only access to my NTFS data partition, I have added appropriate entries to /etc/fstab. I have found that in order to give normal users proper access to the drives, it is necessary to add 'umask=000' to the set of options in the device table of fstab.

3) When you initially use applications that use GTK (eg Mozilla, Gaim, etc.), you may notice that the font size of all the menus, buttons, etc. is incredibly small. To change this, create/edit /home/[Username]/.gtkrc-2.0 and add the line
HTML Code:
gtk-font-name = "Helvetica 12"
optionally changing the font face and font size in the quotes.

Well, thats it from what I can remember. Right now II'm fiddling with trying to get the Hotkeys above the keyboard to work. Has anyone had any success with those? It doesnt look like linEak can do it.

'Till next time. Marry Christmas to those who celebrate it today.

Mikhail
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post #27 of 170
12/29/03 at 3:22pm
Hey mmarkin, Any chance you can post your new and improved WEP script - I am having a problem with getting WEP to work (I kinda wanna protect my data).

Thanks

Bratag
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post #28 of 170
12/29/03 at 4:12pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bratag
Hey mmarkin, Any chance you can post your new and improved WEP script - I am having a problem with getting WEP to work (I kinda wanna protect my data).

Thanks

Bratag

Glad you asked, Bratag

First, a few notes regarding the script:

1) The script determines whether or not the SSID is set by checking the kernel log for the appearance of the line "NdisIndicateStatus 4001000b". If future versions of ndiswrapper change the debug messages, the script will obviously need to be updated (then again, future versions will probably have the whole SSID setting thing fixed up).

2) I run the 2.6.0 stable kernel so the module I insert is the .ko one.

3) I use a slightly updated version of the 0.3 release in which they changed the name of the driver loader from "loaddriver" to "loadndisdriver".

4) The script assumes that the ethernet device simulated by ndiswrapper is eth1; modify the script if you have a different set-up.

5) Other system-dependant things in the script that need to be customized are denoted by square brackets.

6) Finally, when running the script, the SSID is passed in as the first parameter and the WEP key is passed in, optionally, as the second. On my machine, everything works the same with or without WEP; it just takes a few more tries to set the SSID with WEP. (To make life easier, I create secondary scripts to initiate this script with different parameters for different places I use the wireless in.)

Well, here it is:

HTML Code:
if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
echo "No parameters set! You need to pass in the desired SSID."
exit 0
fi

insmod [PATH TO NDISWRAPPER DIR]/driver/ndiswrapper.ko
[PATH TO NDISWRAPPER DIR]/utils/loadndisdriver [VENDOR ID] [DEVICE ID] [PATH TO DIR W/ XP DRIVERS]/bcmw15.sys [PATH TO DIR W/ XP DRIVERS]/lsbcmnds.inf

echo
echo "Sleeping after driver initialization..."
sleep 3

ifconfig eth1 up
echo "Sleeping after ifconfig..."
sleep 3


if [ $# -eq 2 ]
then
iwconfig eth1 key $2
echo "Sleeping after setting WEP key..."
sleep 5
fi

echo
echo "Setting SSID & Sleeping... Repeatng until SSID is set..."
echo -n "["
while [ `dmesg | grep -c "NdisIndicateStatus 4001000b"` -ne 1 ]
do
iwconfig eth1 essid $1
echo -n "="
sleep 10
done
echo "]"
echo

echo "Activating DHCPcd..."
dhcpcd -d eth1 

echo
echo "Wireless Initialization Done!"
Enjoy!

Let me know how it works out.

Mikhail
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post #29 of 170
12/29/03 at 4:30pm
Thanks - I will give it a bash tonight and let you know
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post #30 of 170
12/29/03 at 4:44pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bratag
Thanks - I will give it a bash tonight and let you know
Great....


To bring up the subject of hotkeys again, I have managed to map the WWW and Mail buttons using xbindkeys. However, the third, "custom" button seems to be unique as the system can't catch the event and actually yells at it in the kernel log:
HTML Code:
atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0x176, data 0x1, on isa0060/serio0).
atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0x176, data 0x81, on isa0060/serio0).
. Well, at least I get both the press and release events from it... maybe the next release of the kernel will fix the issue. I mentioned the press and release events because there appears to be an issue with the special function keys (Fn + Something). I cant map those because they only generate a press event and basically hang the keyboard input as the system waits for the release event (I get the keyboard back by killing xbindkeys or any other similar program; I've tried a few). I created a thread about this both here on these forums and here on the Gentoo Forums. It would be really nice to find a work-around; something in the ballpark of faking the release event, etc.

Until next time.

Mikhail

P.S. Almost forgot: my WD Caviar in the external enclosure works fine via USB. I didnt even need to recompile the kernel because I included all the SCSI and USB support beforehand. Just like the USB mouse, plug it in and voila - the only thing left to do is mount the thing (I made an fstab entry for it so I dont have to type up all those little mount options everytime; plus, this way, I can mount/unmount it as a normal user ). I might try to get it to work with Firewire as it is a hassle to switch the cables everytime I need to use the drive in Windows or Linux.

P.P.S. I also "got" my Toshiba DVD/CD-RW drive to burn. All I did was emerge k3d (with ~x86 to get the latest .10.X release). Works great. It even has a GUI with dialogs and such very similar to Nero's, so its all familiar.
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post #31 of 170
1/1/04 at 3:20pm
Hey guys,
I'm running a 5670 and decided to put a Linux partition on it, for the old reason of "just learning it." I have a friend who runs Gentoo so he helped me to get it set up, but there's a few problems that have come up that I just have no clue how to fix.

1. The ATI Drivers don't seem to be enabled - or at least, they only seem to be enabled for 2d. I have X and KDE (even Gnome) but when I run glxinfo it says that there is no direct rendering. This is kind of odd, because I even went and got the ATI drivers for linux and configured them myself. Anyone got any ideas for how to get this working?

2. I've tried to emerge alsa-driver in order to get the sound working, but it keeps getting an error while compiling. It tries to compile hwdep.o and receives "error 1." Any ideas?
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post #32 of 170
1/1/04 at 4:12pm
1. Run fglrxconfig to update your XF86Config file to use the drivers

2. Make sure you are compiling only one driver. In your make.conf file place the line:

ALSA_CARDS="carddrivername"

where carddrivername is the name of the alsa driver for your hardware. In my desktop I have an SBLive, and my line looks like this:

ALSA_CARDS="emu10k1"

For my 8890 clone laptop, I have this:

ALSA_CARDS="intel8x0"

I'm not sure if you have the same hardware, so adjust accordingly. This will prevent alsa from compiling every driver for every card imaginable and only compile the driver for your card. This might not solve your problem, but the error might be in a driver for a soundcard you don't even have.
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post #33 of 170
1/1/04 at 4:37pm
Thread Starter 
What Dirtboy mentioned is the way I configured my ATI drivers. I've never tried running glxinfo but Quake 3 Arena runs fine. The only thing is that the frame rates are considerably lower than those under Windows (yes, I uncapped the fps); I get 60~80 fps in Linux while I get upwards of 300 on Windows. Maybe there is something misconfiged; oh well. Regarding direct rendering, I didnt compile it into the kernel nor a module as was told by an ATI driver how-to on Gentoo Forums. I'll look into this.

As for sound, I am using the 2.6.0 kernel so the ALSA driver is already compiled into the kernel. I just had to emerge alsa-utils and now my volume settings, etc., are kept no matter how I shutdown the machine (via console, via KDE's menu, etc.). I would recommend upgrading the kernel as the hardware support is much better (to my understanding, the 5670 hardware is more exotic than that of the 5680).

Although 5670 is different and slightly off-topic, let us know what happens, rk_cr. We'll be glad to help (Man, I can't believe how much I've learned in the two weeks since I started installing Gentoo.)

Happy New Years!

Mikhail

UPDATE with regards to the ATI driver info: I successfully ran both glxinfo and glxgears. The glxinfo report looks all fine and dandy stating that direct rendering is a 'yes', while glxgears reports upwards of 2403.8 FPS, which, I think, is a normal value for my system (is it? If it is, than the Q3A rates are normal as glxgears maximized at 1600x1200 produces similar frame rates as in the game.).
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post #34 of 170
1/3/04 at 5:29pm
at 1600x1200 I get like 105 FPS from glxgears. Thats pretty acceptable for me. Try running the flg_glxgears as well which is optimzed for the fglrx drivers, I get 122-125 fps at 1600x1200 from that.
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post #35 of 170
1/3/04 at 6:47pm
Thread Starter 
Good stuff; I guess its all good.

Bratag, you dont happen to have the console framebuffer working at 1600x1200, do you? Its not important for me since I have kdm start up automatically, but it would be a nice thing to have. I have it working at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 with "video=vesa:ywrapp,mtrr vga=[code]" at the end of the kernel execution line but cant get the 1600x1200 mode to work; it says it doesnt exist. Is there a unique ATI code for that? I know there is one for nVidia cards (838 or 0x346).

Thanks.

Mikhail
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post #36 of 170
1/4/04 at 2:27pm
Check this MM - about 2/3 down the page they give the codes for all FB devices (or so they say) they list 1600x1200 as 799 at 32 bit.

Not sure if thats what you tried and didnt work.

http://www.directfb.org/download/DirectFB/README

PS: Ditch KDM - looks nice but its bloated. Try out one of the smaller windowmanagers like Windowmaker or enlightenment.
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post #37 of 170
1/4/04 at 4:14pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bratag
Check this MM - about 2/3 down the page they give the codes for all FB devices (or so they say) they list 1600x1200 as 799 at 32 bit.

Not sure if thats what you tried and didnt work.

http://www.directfb.org/download/DirectFB/README
Thanks Bratag but that doesnt really help. Ive tried 799 (or its Hex equivalent) as it was and it simply told me to go... From what I read on the Gentoo forums, it looks like the 1600x1200 framebuffer resolution with vesafb only works with LILO for some reason.

Ive seen a few of these extra frame buffers out there but I guess I dont need the high resolution THAT much. On the note of framebuffer, though, I've been trying to get things working with the radeon framebuffer but no matter what I put after the "video=radeon:" string (resoultion, refresh rate), it simply gives me the old low-res screen; I dont even get any error messages. How to I check that radeonfb is actually available? If compiling radeonfb into the kernel means having the "ATI Radeon..." item checked on the framebuffer page in the menuconfig, I've done that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bratag
PS: Ditch KDM - looks nice but its bloated. Try out one of the smaller windowmanagers like Windowmaker or enlightenment.
Thanks for the suggestion; I might do it at a later time. I'm not at the point of going "simpler" right now, .

Thanks a bunch.

Mikhail

P.S. How do you guys get Gentoo to use the entire gig of your ram? At the end, mine only gives me 882M available as a user. I checked the kernel logs and here is what happens at the very beginning:
HTML Code:
REMOVED; Problem fixed, see two posts down...
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post #38 of 170
1/4/04 at 7:03pm
Thread Starter 
UPDATE to the posts regarding mapping of the multimedia keys:

I just tried getting getting the key IDs for the AudioDJ keys at the front of the case. While the four play control keys dont map at all (dont even produce kernel error messages like the third big button above the keyboard), the volume keys are even worse than the Fn+? keys!; they produce the release event BEFORE the press event!!!!! WTF?!?!?!
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post #39 of 170
1/5/04 at 10:24pm
Thread Starter 
Time for another update after today's tweaking.

1) Got the entire gig of RAM to be used by compiling high memory support into the kernel. Under "Processor type and features", I selected "High Memory Support" (chose 4GB) and "Allocate 3rd-level pagetables from highmem".

2) Found out (the hard way) that "Module unloading" does not mix with "Automatic kernel module loading" under "Loadable module support" in the kernel config. Ive had the automatic since the start but when I added the module unloading support, I epxerienced completely locks at the start of kdm/xdm, after the appearance of the mouse cursor. This seems to be related to my particular set-up or 5680s (and maybe even 8890s) in general, as my friend's ECS didnt suffer the same faith under the kernel configuration.

Have a good night everyone.

Mikhail
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post #40 of 170
1/7/04 at 5:53am
Some notes regarding radeonfb:

The line you pass to the kernel depends on what generation kernel you're using. If you're using 2.4, you use 'radeon' and 2.6, you use 'radeonfb.' So the line would look something like:

video=radeon:1600x1200-32

video=radeonfb:1600x1200-32@60

etc, depending on your choices, of course.

If you want to use radeonfb and you have 1 gig of ram (or more), you have to cap your memory at 840 megs, with the mem=840M option.

if you want to see whether your kernel is even initializing radeonfb at all, you'll want to check your dmesg. ("dmesg -s40000 | less" or something) After the CPU initialization lines and the APIC mapping irq's to pins, you _should_ see some lines from radeonfb, regardless of whether the framebuffer worked or not. They should look something like this:

radeonfb_pci_register BEGIN
radeonfb: ref_clk=2700, ref_div=12, xclk=18000 from BIOS
radeonfb: probed DDR SGRAM 131072k videoram
radeon_get_moninfo: bios 4 scratch = 1000004
radeonfb: panel ID string: 1600x1200
radeonfb: detected DFP panel size from BIOS: 1600x1200
radeonfb: cannot map FB

but possibly with a different error message. If you have this, then at least you know the kernel has radeonfb and it's recognizing your video card as a radeon, and it's probably just a configuration problem. If not, then it's a bit more trouble; you'll probably have to manually add the card's pci id into pci_ids.h in the kernel source before you compile it.

You only need to add 4GB memory support for 1 gig of ram. Allocating 3rd level pagetables in highmem is unnecessary, and actually probably a bad thing with only 1 gig of memory. With 1 gig, you have 800-some megs in lowmem, and only the rest (100-so megs) is highmem. If you allocate third level pagetables in highmem, you're forcing the page table into the highmem, which is slower than lowmem. This option is for computers with extremely large amounts of ram, where lowmem is tiny compared to highmem. (for example, a comp with 64 gigs of memory - you have 800some megs of faster lowmem, and a little over 63 gigs of slower highmem. You want to save as much fast and precious lowmem as possible for applications that really need it, so you force the pagetable into all that extra space you have sitting around in highmem.) But with only 100some megs of highmem, you're barely going to be touching it. Most of the time, everything is going to be sitting in lowmem just fine, so you're actually adding more overhead, since the kernel will be querying highmem anytime it needs to read the page table, when it really doesn't have to at all.

For the multimedia buttons... are you using lineakd? I have my front panel and multimedia buttons working fine with it. (never messed around with the function-button commands, though)
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