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8890 and Linux

post #1 of 10
9/3/03 at 4:14pm
Thread Starter 
Hello everyone,
I just recieved my 8890 yesterday, and I'm trying to put linux on it right now. I'm using the Gentoo 1.4 P4 cd's with GRP (yes, i'm lazy). I seem to have a problem with framebuffer. When I try booting the LiveCD with framebuffer, all I get is a pitch black screen, no words or anything. I know everything else is working because I can see the cd being accessed. So any reason why the framebuffer wouldn't work? Did this every happen with the 8887's?

BTW, I also tried Knoppix from the beginning just to test another problem. Knoppix booted without framebuffer (all the boot messages were black). However, when it got into X, everything worked again, so that I could see what I was doing in KDE. So I know something's wrong with the framebuffer. Any reasons why?
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post #2 of 10
9/3/03 at 4:17pm
Thread Starter 
I just remembered reading somewhere that having more than 840mb of RAM in linux could screw with the framebuffer. Could that be the reason why framebuffer doesn't work? Do I have to pass a mem=840M tag to the kernel?

I also remember hearing somewhere on the gentoo forums that the gentoo 2.4.20 sources had a patch that would fix framebuffer when you have more than 840mb of ram. Could any confirm that it works? I'd really like to get linux working on this machine...
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post #3 of 10
9/3/03 at 6:14pm
Try booting with nofb nohotplug nofirewire
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post #4 of 10
9/3/03 at 7:10pm
Thread Starter 
Actually, firewire and hotplug work on the 8890. However, passing the nofb option doesn't seem to work... I have to pass a vga=ask to get it to disable framebuffer.... I'll try setting the mem tag tonight when I get to play with it some more.
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post #5 of 10
9/3/03 at 9:36pm
Thread Starter 
Bingo! Setting mem=840M makes framebuffer work beautifully! Guess it was the RAM problem after all... I'll be installing Gentoo tonight... I'll see if their patched sources fix the problem....

Also, anyone ever try running linux without swap? 1 gb of ram is FAR more than I need right now (I could barely max out 500mb in windows, imagine how much more I can do with fluxbox!) so I figure I'll skip the swap. How would I do it from the gentoo install?
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post #6 of 10
9/3/03 at 10:23pm
you could do it without swap. however, if you ever do eat up all that ram somehow (i dunno, rogue background threads, whatever) and it hits max and tries to swap, you'll get all sorts of memory errors. i know right now i'm using 400 megs of ram and about 200 megs of swap. i'd keep swap around just as a safety net, but it doesn't have to be all that big. maybe about the size of your ram or less.

i also know that sticky executables are told to stay in memory and/or swap to load faster, if i recall correctly. try it if you want, but it could be disasterous for any of your open work if you do happen to run out of swap....
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post #7 of 10
9/4/03 at 6:43am

No swap

I wouldn't do no swap. Like xiphus mentionned, you will get lots of errors, and if you use things like VMware, 1 Gig of Ram is Nothing.
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post #8 of 10
9/4/03 at 11:17pm
Thread Starter 
Naw, no vmware for me... No money for software right now, blew it all on the machine I bet that the most intensive thing that I'll do in it is wine w/ UT2k3. I doubt that will wipe out ALL my ram. I already turned of HD page in windows, and I haven't seen a single problem. *crosses finges* I guess I'll do some more experimentation...

BTW here's the linux situation on the 8890: firewire and hotplug is currently working natively in linux. No need for the nofirewire tag... Booting into knoppix, everything looks really good. However, my goal is Gentoo. I'm having problems with the RAID, I really don't know how to do it. So far, the gentoo forums just shout to use LSR, which I don't want to do. I'll RTFM more and see where it leads...
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post #9 of 10
9/5/03 at 7:21am

wine ut2k3 ?

Do you mean running ut2k3 with wine ? It runs native thanks to the linux installer found on the third disk.



Hope that helps.
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post #10 of 10
9/5/03 at 11:09pm
Thread Starter 
OH YEAH!!! I totally forgot about that! Well, that's about the most memory intensive thing I'll be doing, so I doubt i'll need the swap. Perhaps I well keep a spare 200mb around... just in case... So what happens when you run out of ram and swap? will I still get those memory errors?
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