kfoss

I quickly tried this on my experimental PC which uses XFCe. It does run, but there seems to be some layering conflicts leaving behind "artifacts". I recognize the KoolDock is for KDE not XFCe, so I guess I should have expected some issues.

It's obviously been a while since this thread started but I thought I'd add some notes based on my experient. Firstly, you can now buy the Artigo Pico-ITX kit that Via puts out for about $300. If comes with everything except the HDD and RAM. You get a 1 GHz PC that has an up-to-date chipset and features and can run Windows XP and multiple versions of Linux. It is really small. I tried one out earlier in the year but returned it since Via doesn't have "proper" Linux support for the graphics chipset. I had to use the VESA driver which meant that doing anything graphical was really slow. As well, with a limit of 1GB RAM options were limited for MS Windoze. This system did have a built in fan that cooled the CPU and case, which was a little annoying. I've also found and am still using a small embedded PC I built using using an Alix 3c3 embedded device. The board has video, audio, LAN, built-in 256MB RAM, CF-slot, Mini-PCI slot all powered by a 500MHz Geode LX processor. Now this PC isn't a power house, but it's silent. I put in a Mini-PCI Wifi card I cannibalized from an Airlink 101 AWLL3025 PCI card. I had it running XFce on MDV 2008.1 and it was able to play DivX movies without any problems. The only storage options you have are CF or USB. I'm using an 8GB Micro-drive so I'm safe for lots of writing. But this could be a great silent PC with the OS booting of a Read-only CF and using the USB as storage.

MiB-s, Did you ever solve this problem?

I've had spotty success with Mandriva mounting USB sticks. Sometimes it works perfectly allowing me the insert and see the contents and allowing me to "Safely Remove" the sticks afterwards. I've noticed that from time to time I get an error when trying to access these sticks that KMediaManager is not running. I've seen no indication of a crashed or hung up application. To fix this I reboot and it works for a while again.

I did remember that there was a special distro just for Epia boards not that long ago called EPIOS. There aren't many live links available but it is still possible to find the ISO for the OS around. You could use this as a starting point and reduce it to the size you need. I recognize that you are looking for CLE266 support and you should be able to find it in EPIOS. The problem with special distros like this are that once hardware advances past the point at which the distro was designed for, the distro will get bigger due to adding support for new devices.

I agree with daniewicz that you should experiment with the ACPI settings. As your PC is relatively old, you may actually cause more issues that you are solving. I would recommend experimenting with ACPI by using the kernel boot options than making them in MCC as they are more easy to recover from this way.

{BBI}Nexus{BBI}, So you used Kooldock on the bottom. I believe that the top bar is KDE, right? Do you need to hide the KDE bottom bar to use Kooldock?

Arctic, It this an Xfce based desktop? And the bottom panel...?

I like this one!

Well Elotouch has come out with their newest version of drivers and they support kernel versions <= 2.6.24 as well as Xorg server <= 1.4. This should be wonderful news. Partially, though. Firstly, the elousb.ko driver is compiled without errors, and depmod'd into the module realm. Secondly, the precompile Xorg input module for Xorg server 1.4, elo_drv.so, is installed and is called properly during X initialization without errors. However, the installation instructions state that we need to modify the modprobe.conf file to make sure that the elousb module is modprobe'd before the usbhid module. I've made the correct additions by adding: install usbhid { /sbin/modprobe elousb; } ; /sbin/modprobe --first-time --ignore-install usbhid && { /sbin/modprobe/ keybdev; /sbin/modprobe mousedev; /bin/true;} to /etc/modprobe.conf However, the elousb module is never called upon reboot. I know the process should work as I've seen it work on a quick test using iMediaLinux. Is there something about Mandriva 2008.1 that would prevent elousb from being loaded before usbhid?

Hi, I've tried a number of small distros and found that although they try to be small, being small makes it more difficult to have a broad range of support. Epia boards (I've owned about 50 in my life) do have some quirky aspects and normally need to have specially compiled drivers such as openchrome, 3D, XvMC, etc. You could try iMediaLinux from mini-box.com. They do have some free versions as well as a more capable version that they allow access to if you've bought something from them. They have a number of 256MB CF images that can be used exactly like you are wanting. I personally have had this distro working on an Alix 3c3 embedded PC that has a Geode LX 500MHz CPU and 256MB RAM. I've installed it on the 256MB CF as well as an 8GB CF Micro-drive. Works great and have enough applications and support to be useful.

Hi, I agree that network-manager should be the best solution to getting this problem solved so long as you can the packages installed properly. I personally have 2008.1 install on my little Alix 3c3 that has an Atheros-based Mini-PCI. The network manager only works if I set up the wireless before hand. I've added the appropriate iwconfig and route commands to my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file. If I need to make a change for some reason after boot up, I can use the network-manager to make them. It may be an idea to check to see if you can connect using a manual setup before spending a lot of time compiling a down-grade.

I would hesitate to put a distro on an SD card or CF card unless you make it read only. As mentionned before about USB flash drives, flash devices have limited write capacities. You'll need to mount the SD card read-only if you want the card to last.

I currently don't have my Mandriva machine accessible, but if I remember correctly you should be able to look into the /proc directory to find which device is using which /dev/videoX. It is either in /proc/devices/... or in /proc/video/devices. I'll check when I get home and post a more clear link.

Yves, Thanks for the reply. If I try to apply these mouse inversions to the touchscreen "usbhid" device, the real mouse stops working altogether. Obviously if I apply the mouse inversions to all mouse devices "/dev/mice", the real mouse is inverted which is pretty useless. It did prove that allowing the touchscreen to operate off the mouse device driver isn't going to work. The mouse driver is based on relative movement so the mouse needs not know where it is before it moves the cursor, just how far to move the cursor from the last position. The touchscreen on the other hand needs to know absolute position. I guess for now I either have to downgrade to an earlier kernel + xorg distro, which will not give good video driver, or wait for Elotouch to develop new XOrg 7.3 drivers.

I assume that the CDRW is the "main" drive in the OmniBook? My experience is that the main drive is the one that the OS will link the mountable directories to. What I mean is that the CDRW is likely found at /dev/hda or /dev/hdc whereas the DVD drives follows as /dev/hdd or /dev/hde. Most automount utilities or applications will mount the "premier" drive to the /dev/dvd or /dev/cdrom devices. This means that everytime you want to access these devices the PC will almost always go directly to your CDRW. You can modify your /etc/fstab file to point the mount point to your desired optical drive, or you can point the "generic" device name to the device you want. This can be done by something like: umount /dev/dvd (unmounts old device) ln -sf /dev/hdd /dev/dvd (links your desired dvd device to the generic dvd device link) Hope this helps.

Have you by chance done a memory check on your RAM? Depending on which memory stick is in which memory slot, if one of them has physical errors, then the PC would be spending most of it's time rearranging items in memory to keep them out of bad spots. There are free utilities out there such as: MemTest86 Give this a try before you go any further to make sure that it is not a physical problem.

I would recommend trying a different kernel version as well. I have major problems with the sound on my Jetway J7F2WE Mini-ITX m/b on Mandriva 2007.0. It got so bad I bought a Turtle Beach USB sound "card" to give me useful audio. When I upgraded to 2008.0, the sound was perfect. You could use numerous NEW Live distros as tests to find which one works best with all of your devices.

Good Day, I've recently built a small PC that based on an Alix (PC Engines) 3c3 embedded PC. The plan is to have it mounted to the back of a touchcsreen display. The PC will display news, weather, play simple DivX video clips, etc. There are a number of distributions that appeal to this type of system. I tried the iMediaLinux designed by Mini-Box.com as it was provided free with my purchase. It is somewhat closed as I cannot get into the guts of the system, unless I pay them $500 for a SDK. I've tried everything from Zenwalk, Xubuntu, Slax, PCLinuxOS... The most recent editions of XFCE based editions are good on this PC with it's limited performance. They include the Geode LX video driver present in more recent versions of Xorg. So what I've done is gone back to my favourite distro and installed a custom version based XFCE and 2008.1. The problem is that in order to have the up-to-date video drivers, I get recent kernels. Normally this is good, but the drivers for the touchscreen made by Elotouch (Model 1545L USB) are good for kernel versions <= 2.6.17. The xorg module provided by Elo (elo_drv.so) is compiled against version 4.3.99 of xorg, so it can't be loaded. If I want to use the Elotouch drivers, I'll have to downgrade my distro to something like MDK2006 or 2007. Then I'll need to get new xorg drivers, that include the Geode LX video driver. Can anyone confirm if this is possible and if so, how to upgrade Xorg against installed RPMs? Another option is to continue to use 2008.1 and wait until Elotouch comes out with new drivers. Or, I could use the current system and find a way around the problems. I mention this because I have found that the touchscreen responds with basic install without any touchscreen drivers installed or configured. I have found that the touchscreen responds to the "usbhid" driver and comes up as /dev/input/mouse1. The problem is that the xy coordinates are swapped. Is there a way to swap a "mouse" coordinates and calibrate it? My questions are in the text above, in bold and red. Any help would be appreciated.

Hi, I have been working with PyQT 3 for the past year or so and I want to use some of the advancements that are found in the newer PyQT 4. I uninstalled PyQT 3 and installed the PyQT 4 packages from Mandriva sources. However, the PyQT 4 packages don't seem to get me a working installation like PyQT 3. Even with PyQT4-designer installed there is no pyuic4 executable nor is there a Qt-Designer executeable. I have even gone so far as to try to install PyQT4 from source and it fails to compile. Nothing seems to work. Does anyone have experience getting PyQT 4 working on Mandriva 2008.0? Kevin

adamw, Thanks. I wasn't implying that there needed to be a change to 2007.1, just that the developers consider moving to at least 2.6.21 for the next version. I normally see that there are always some people that end up on the short end of the stick on a new version, this time it ended up being me. I was happy to have found the 2.6.21 kernel to solve my problems, without introducing new one. Kevin

Xine does employ code that uses the embedded H/W accelerator. Have a look for "xxmc" and "xine". Should be able to get this working fairly easily. Kevin

Yves, Yes actually, I saw a great benefit from this upgrade. I ran 2006.0 for a long time on my old PC (AMD64 3700+) which provided lots of power for applications and things. I recently got rid of this loud, hot and power hungry PC for the Via 2GHz board from Jetway. When building the Via system, I tried using 2006.0 and 2007.0 but I ran into problems getting the XvMC (MPEG-2 H/W Acceleration) working. There always seems to be bug that prevented me from getting XvMC to work. XvMC is great when doing things like watching a DVD since it unloads most of the decoding off the processor. I can run a DVD at 10-15% CPU usage! So I ended up installing Fedora Core 6 since I was able to get XvMC working with a little work. However, I quickly move from KDE to Gnome to IceWM in order to make the system more responsive. It was sluggish to say the least. I had all the normal applications I needed, but I'm diehard Mandriva. I just bought a new 500GB SATA harddrive a week ago and decided to take the chance to see if there were any updates to Mandriva. Since "Spring" was out I just back onto the Mandriva boat and installed it. I was concerned right from the beginning about the temperatures, always being high. After a lot of research on CPU speed modules and apps I happened to find an article that said that the 2.6.21 kernel has CPU frequency and throttling built in as default. I found a Mandriva 2.6.21 kernel for 2007.1 and upon reboot found the temperature dropped to normal. So to summarize, I think that you could benefit from the upgrade. 2007.1 is smoother and at least for me added XvMC. You may not need the2.6.21 upgrade with the 1GHz Via, but it wouldn't hurt. As well, I know that the user forum is not affiliated with Mandriva, but I am pretty sure that the developers look here for ideas, problems, etc. Lastly, on your "off-topic" note, I also have an M10000 Via 1 GHz PC for the TV and media. It's connected to our main TV and we use it to record our favourite shows. I personally still have 2006.0 running with Myth. It have 1GB of RAM and only a 60GB notebook drive. I think that the key factor is that I have a Hauppauge PVR150 which has a hardware encoder on it. The PC is stable and has been running for about 9 months straight (one power outage during that time), without any intervention. In this case the media player is MPlayer-based, and MEncoder does the encoding. I don't actually use the Jetway system as a PVR, just as a PC. I do watch TV using TVTime and watch DVDs/videos with MPlayer. Hope this helps. Kevin

I've just finished upgrading my Spring PP+ to the 2.6.21 kernel to save my system. With the basic 2.6.17 kernel my processor and system as a whole was burning up. I have a Jetway J7F2WE-2GHz board. With the default kernel I was unable to get the CPU to operate below 54-60C. This is pretty hot for a Mini-ITX system. Only when I somehow forced the CPU to 800MHz did the temperature drop below 50C. Now I heard that the 2.6.21 kernel has built in CPU speed and throttling capabilities. Well it does and they work perfectly. No setup, they just work. My temps not range from 35 to 45C. I'd like to plead with the developers to move the default kernel to 2.6.21 soon. I know that there are more criteria but this can contribute to the decision. Thanks.

Hi, I'm turning to the wealth of information and experience I always go to in those times when I am out of options. Here's the situation. I'm running 2006.0 on a small Epia-clone. I have the system working well touchscreen, sound, XVMC, and all. During the process, I had to upgrade the kernel from the default 2.6.12 to 2.6.17 to get over a bug in the kernel related to USB. I've gotten wireless working up to a point, though. I've been using an Airlink 101 AWLL3026 USB adapter that uses the ZD1211 drivers that are widely used. The device works for a while then I get a Kernel Oops. The output is pretty benign without giving any clear direction to the source of the problem. I've recompiled the kernel, used the last 5 versions of the zd1211 driver and I still get the same result, Oops. Now I also have DWL-G122 dongle from DLink. This device has similar problems to others found on the forum where the device seems to work but doesn't actually transmit or receive. I have tried a couple of versions of these drivers and followed multiple HOWTOs and gotten nothing. Now I've even tried using NDISWRAPPER with the G122. The problem is now that I have the drivers for the G122 and the ZD1211 installed, the system always loads the kernel module. How do I get the zd1211 or rt2570 module to not load upon startup so the ndiswrapper can work? Thanks.