jd:/dev/blog - Tag - hardware

ATL1E support in 2.6.26-1

jd — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:59:00 +0200

Ben Armstrong opened an ITP for the ATL1E NIC driver, which is found on some Asus EeePC laptops. So, as suggested by Maximilian Attems, I provided a clean patch for this driver, made from a cherry-pick from the linux-netdev 2.6.27 tree. It has been commited into the 2.6.26-1 Debian kernel, which will be furnished with Lenny.

What's fun, is that in the mean time, I got a new computer at work. Wait, it's not fun yet. Because what I did not know is that it's made of an Asus P5Q motherboard which runs a NIC needing the ATL1E driver (and now you see it's fun).

So I've just upgraded to 2.6.26-1-amd64 and I'm glad that my own work is useful to me (and will be probably be to others as well).

We've been almost down

jd — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:02:00 +0100

I had a big fright this afternoon. My friend ludo asked me to shut down my main server (delmak.naquadah.org) for racking one of my new equipement.

Delmak is my oldest server, hosting almost everything since 5 years. I knew I will have to shut it down some days, but after 280 days of uptime I was pretty confident everything will be allright.

But obviously, it refused to boot again. Fortunately, only the power was burned, and after changing it with a new one, we manage to get delmak booting again.

Now I'm really thinking about some better solution to not having everything on a server that can explose any day now.

abydos's dead

jd — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 13:55:00 +0200

My workstation is dead yesterday at 22:01. It did not suffer, the screens simply turned off, and now it does not boot anymore. It seems that the processor is dead.

Four years of good services. Now have to buy a new workstation, sic.

Main consequence for now is that I cannot read my mails anymore for now. Anyway, I'm on holidays for a week.

New keyboard

jd — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 13:35:00 +0200

I finally buy a new keyboard. After long research over the Web, I decided to buy a Logitech UltraX Media Desktop. I used it for a couple day of now, and I just like it.

It's like a laptop keyboard, since it uses a scissor-switch technology. Finally I think it's a good compromise between fucking dome membrane keyboards and mechanical ones.

J'veux un clavier

jd — Sun, 13 May 2007 19:33:00 +0200

Comme je le disais récemment, j'ai explosé mon clavier avec une bière. Bref, l'accident bête.

Alors cet après-midi, me voilà sur le Web à rechercher un clavier. Le clavier. Je navigue de site en site, de forum en forum, de test en test.

Au début, je me suis dis que j'allais retrouver un Keytronic KT2001 Pro, comme j'avais avant (enfin c'était déjà mon deuxième, le premier avait passer les touches à gauche après trop de whisky-coca). Certes, c'est un clavier à membrane, mais il est de très bonne facture (bien que non-étanche) et a un toucher agréable. Pas de chance, on en trouve plus.

J'ai tout fait. J'ai lu le comparatif de claviers 2007 de Clubic, j'ai lu des dizaines de pages de forum. J'ai même fini par trouvé un topic de gens aussi désesperés que moi de trouver un bon vieux clavier mécanique avec un vrai toucher, dans la lignée des modèles M d'IBM, comme le Cherry G80-3000 . Introuvable. A part que quelques sites allemands pour une bonne centaine d'euros. Pour un clavier que je vais tuer dans un an, je vais éviter.

Ce que j'ai particulièrement adoré lors de mon épopée extraordinaire sur la toile, c'est la qualité des commentaires et des arguments présentants les claviers.

J'ai tout vu. Celui là est en aluminium brossé ! Mais non, celui là a 43 touches de fonction dont une qui permet de lancer-Outlook-Express-avec-le-petit-doigt. Ou alors, peut-être celui avec un écran LCD integré qui donne l'heure et compte le nombre de touche pressée. Cela ne reste pas aussi séduisant que le clavier qui à des ports USB. Le problème c'est qu'il est blanc. Mais cependant j'ai trouvé des claviers étanches, ca pourrait être pas mal vu mon cas. Ah et il y a ausis le clavier à frappe intuitive. Je ne sais pas trop ce que c'est, j'imagine que c'est un clavier ou la touche suivante se met bien en évidence pour ne pas la rater.

Je vais mixer comme un ouf avec ca !

Mais comble du comble, l'ultime critique la voici:

[…] non sans remarquer que les touches Windows du clavier n'arborent la nouvelle esthétique Windows Vista.

Putain, et dire que j'aurais pu l'acheter et me faire avoir comme un bleu ! Ah, merci Internet !

Et le pire, c'est que j'utilise une keymap qwerty mais que je vais devoir acheter un azerty à tous les coups. A la limite, quitte à être chiant, je vais peut-être me mettre au dvorak pour gueuler encore plus fort.

Ah si j'ai trouvé un bon clavier pour über-geek finalement. Si j'avais 100 euros à claquer dans un clavier, peut-être que je le prendrais.

Another one!

jd — Sat, 12 May 2007 11:44:36 +0000

I beat my last record: the last time I killed my keyboard was 2 year and 1 month ago.

Yesterday, some beer decided to go between keys... Argh, another Keytronic dead.

Now I'm looking for a good keyboard for typing every day (please don't recommend me IBM model M or Keytronic, or tell me where to order them ).

The man who did not know he had an amd64

jd — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 21:13:50 +0000

On sunday, I was looking around at the /proc/cpuinfo on one of my last server. I saw that this Pentium 4 had a lot more of cpu flags that the one on my workstation. I discovered the nx flags and its purpose some days before, but I did not know what the lm flags was for...

Oh my god, that's the 64 bits support. This box is an amd64 and it was installed as an i386. That's like using a knife to kill a kitten when you have an axe!

So, even if the box was 800 km away from me, I decided to reinstall it from scratch, with the help of a serial cable connected on it.

That was so easy. I just love Debian for such things.

Step one: recompile linux-2.6-2.6.18 with support for 64 bits processors, that was easy, Goswin Brederlow made a patch I used and adapted in #379090.
Step two: scratch your swap and debootstrap an amd64 sarge in it. Copy blindly your /lib/modules/2.6.18-1-amd64 inside.
Step three: reboot with your 64 bits kernel on your brand new 64 bits Debian system and launch sshd.
Step four: ask everyone on IRC WHY THE HELL you get sshd killed with a fucking kernel backtrace on your serial console each time you try to ssh to your box
Step five: listen everyone advices and dist-upgrade to etch
Step six: backup all the old data and scratch all your partitions, because you want LVM now. And migrating to 64 bits and LVM at the same time is more dangerous, so more exciting, so more fun.
Step seven: move your brand new amd64 etch into your old root partition. Believe in you and that you did not forget anything to backup.
Step eight: create your logical volumes and move your stuff in here, like /var, /usr and then blindly reboot. Thanks god you have a serial console.
Step nine: apt-get install everything back and upgrade your old sarge conffiles to etch.
Step ten: wonder why slapd is segfaulting again and again, and then yell after this fucking Berkeley DB files that are not architecture independant. Flame yourself because you don't have a LDIF backup of your LDAP tree.
Step eleven: install a i386 sarge with LDAP to slapcat your old LDAP tree and restore it.
Step twelve: Take a break. Have a Kit^Wbeer.

In the end, I'm happy, even if everyone is wondering why I killed a server during 10 hours just because it's better.

installgui rulez

jd — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 15:24:23 +0000

I just reinstalled my workstation on two new SATA disks with a recent etch d-i snapshot . That worked really fine, and it was so funny to create RAID 1 + LVM partitions by clicking with a mouse in a GTK interface.

Etch will rocks.

Thinkpad rocks

jd — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 22:25:52 +0000

Thermal 1: ok, 91.0 degrees C

Caused by the fucking Flash plugin sucking 100% CPU for hours (I forgot to close a webpage....)

D-Link DWL G520+

jd — Sun, 22 Jan 2006 15:48:54 +0000

For the record: this card has a ACX111 chip, supported by the ACX100/111 driver. I managed to make it work under Debian yesterday.

As today, this card works pretty well but there is still a lot of bugs in the driver. So it is usable, but be aware that once day you may have to do an rmmod && modprobe.

Furthermore, it seems that this card is very sensible about the PCI slot you put it in. At least, putting it in another PCI slot than the last one of my Asus P4P800, makes it act weirdly: PCI id not the same, error writing the firmware, and so on.

And now...

jd — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 11:46:40 +0000

My laptop hard drive just died. I just hate hardware.

Merry xmas.

Kheb is not anymore

jd — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 15:23:27 +0000

Kheb, my old Pentium machine hosted in my parents' house, just died.
I think the CPU is dead. I will replace it with another Pentium II box I have in my flat. Because they are going to get a DSL access in the next days (yeah, we finally got DSL connection in this 700 inhabitans village).

I just updated my history page, just for fun!

Keyboard

jd — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 14:41:25 +0000

Again, my keyboard is dead. Why can't I keep a keyboard more than one year ?

One year ago, my Keytronic was killed by a friend with a whisky-coke...

New laptop

jd — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 17:31:08 +0000

Yesterday I received my new laptop, it's a Dell Inspiron 510m.

Hardware:

Intel Centrino M 1.3 GHz
Intel 855GM graphic card
256 MB RAM
15" display XGA (1024x768)
Intel PRO/100 Ethernet controller
Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 controller
CD-RW/DVD
40 GB hard drive
Windows XP Home Edition (ahahaha !)

I installed a Debian Sid on it (of course), and everythings works fine.

Its name is shifu.

NB: A good point to Dell: they have not removed the serial port ! I see too many laptop today with no more serial port, and that really suck.

Ashrak won

jd — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 13:42:09 +0000

Ok... You know, sometimes, you wake up and you feel it inside: it's a bad day.

So I was playing supertux on my laptop jolinar when... it powered itself off. Pfioouuu. Nothing more. And I cannot power it on again, the power button seems to do nothing.

Fortunately, my home is managed by Subversion and I made a svn commit 10 minutes before the crash. And I have a 10 days old backup on another machine, so I won't be bothered if I can't get my data back.

But I don't have a laptop anymore.

Ashrak are killers from Goa'uld, aiming at killing Tok'Ra rebels. Jolinar of Malkshur was one of them.

Laptop problem

jd — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 12:45:40 +0000

Since several month, I have a problem with my laptop. When I use the integrated network card, my computer freezes. Let me explain.

If I play a sound file with xmms while I'm surfing, it's ok. But if I stop typing at keyboard, 20-60s after the computer stops. The clock is blocked and the sound does not play anymore. I can't ssh to my laptop neither. When I come back I have to run ntpdate to set the clock back to the good time...

If I use my PCMCIA wifi card or if I unplug my network cable, I do not have any problem anymore.

I tried several driver and several 2.6 kernel for my Intel network card (e100 and eepro100) but it does not change anything. I use alsa for my sound card (snd-es1968).

I think it's an hardware issue, but I am not sure and I don't know why.

New hard disk for my laptop

jd — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 18:18:39 +0000

Hey, it's Christmas time ! I bought a new hard drive for my laptop (the old was a slow Toshiba 10 GB). It's a Hitachi 40 GB 5400 RPM 8 MB !

I ran a quick-and-dirty installation of Sarge in order to restore a full / backup.

Restore requested to host jolinar, backup #46, by acid from 192.168.2.13

Wait & see.

Wifi

jd — Thu, 24 Jun 2004 23:16:44 +0000

I just got my wifi devices (a PCMCIA card and an access point). Everything works perfectly !

The card I bought (NetGear WG511T) has not a prism54 chip like I thought, but an Athos one which works perfectly with madwifi drivers.

However, from one meter of my AP, the signal is quiet low I think:

Link Quality=55/94  Signal level=-40 dBm  Noise level=-95 dBm

I wonder if my workstation (Pentium 2.4 GHz) and other machines running around can be so noisy.

Laptop and roaming

jd — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 13:32:23 +0000

Since last Thursday I got a new laptop. My last one was dead one year ago. I wonder what software I could use to change network configuration when I move from home to anywhere (where there is no DHCP)

apt-cache search did not help me because there is a lot of choices, and I would not like to test them all.

So, what do you use ?

Linux et revendeur de matos info !

jd — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 15:50:39 +0000

Samedi soir, alors que j'étais affalé dans mon canapé avec sur mes genoux mon tout nouveau laptop (Compaq Armada M700), je me décide à acheter du matos Wifi. Je fais rapidement un tour de Google et me rend compte que la plus part des cartes sont equipées d'un foutu chipset Realtek 8180L très mal supporté sous Linux (j'avais testé il y a 4 mois, c'était en effet catastrophique: kernel panic au chargement des modules binaires et proprietaires).

Je fais le tour des revendeurs VPC pour voir si ils ont encore le modèle Linksys qui m'interesse et qui serait équipé jusqu'en révision 3 du chipset Prism, qui lui fonctionne parfaitement sous Linux. Je vais donc faire un tour sur un site sur lequel j'ai fait plusieurs achats depuis plus de 2 ans, à savoir Materiel.net. Evidemment la révision de la carte n'est pas precisé, alors je prend ma plus belle plume pour leur demander quel est la révision de la carte qu'ils ont en stock. Evidemment, je ne m'attend pas du tout à une réponse de leur part, mais qui ne tente rien n'a rien.

Mais quel ne fût pas ma surprise cet après-midi en recevant un e-mail de leur part, m'indiquant que cette carte était malheuresent en révision 4 chez eux, et me précisant en revanche qu'ils avaient un autre modèle NetGear qui fonctionnaient parfaitement sous Linux. Mon Dieu ! Un revendeur de matériel informatique qui ne me crache pas à la figure quand j'écris je parle de Linux ! Incroyable ! Mais ce n'est pas tout, je jette un coup d'oeil comme à mon habitude au mailler:

X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.4.6-1mdk

Alors là, il faut que je m'assois. Chapeau bas messieurs. Je sais où acheter mon matériel dorénavant.

Je me rappele d'il y a 6 ans, lorsque j'étais aller acheter du matériel chez un revendeur info à Alençon (vous savez, celui qui est rue Jullien) et dont le vendeur avait sorti à l'un des clients "Quoi ? Vous utilisez Linux ? Mais vous retournez 10 ans en arrière !", alors que j'étais dans la boutique.

Je n'y suis retourné une seul fois depuis, mais c'était juste pour les faire chier et les mettre devant leur ignorance. Je vous raconterais peut-être un jour.