banjo

Yeah. If I read this story online I wouldn't believe it. It seems far fetched. I have seen a Windows system slow down because of a failing disk drive. It was a similar effect, caused by the disk doing retries and swapping sectors as the sectors failed. That disk finally failed, and we swapped it out. I wonder if a low power condition could cause the disk to reread sectors many times, which would be activity internal to the disk controller and would not be reported on the disk access readings. I'm just guessing at this point. I don't know enough about how these modern disks work to be sure. Banjo (_)=='=~

Greetings. I have resurrected this old thread because I think that I have found the cause of the mysterious busy disk and I felt a need to report the solution. This was a strange one for sure. To reprise the problem, the disk access light goes on steady or blinking, there is no indication of CPU activity or disk access activity or paging or excessive network activity, and the computer runs very slowly. This problem has not gone away since I first reported it back in 2009, but has been getting worse. (I have been busy building a house and moving everything we own twice, so I have lived with this problem until now. No time to fix it). The problem was intermittent and unpredictable. When the disk went busy, the computer became essentially unusable. Rebooting did not help. Shutting down the apps did not help. I ran rkhunter and it found no root kits on the system. The breakthrough occurred last weekend when I was trying to do a backup that normally takes 10 minutes. I was an hour and a half into it and still not finished, and the disk light was on steady. I tried to push the USB connector into socket to seat it better, and as soon as I touched it, the computer crashed hard. I had to power down using the power button. This is another problem that has appeared just recently, the computer crashing when I touch the case. It seemed really stupid that this computer would crash from a static spark that I could not even feel even though it is totally grounded to our brand new up-to-code electric system in our new house. At that time I realized that the system actually was not connected to ground directly to the electric system but through my UPS. The UPS is old, and I wondered if that fact was causing a flaky AC supply and if that could be causing the problems. I unplugged the system from the UPS and plugged it directly into a surge protector and the problem went away. I have been running now for a week with no problems. I suspect that the UPS was running everything through its ancient battery, and that was somehow wrecking the quality of the AC power, and the system was being starved for voltage or amperage or both. I don't know the details because I do not know the internals of the UPS. I looks like the bad power was showing up at the disk drive. I would never have guessed that the symptoms of a dead UPS would be a busy disk drive, so I did not make the connection. I have never heard of this happening before, and Mr. Google did not help at all in finding a solution. Perhaps someone else has seen this before and can explain it to me. Anyway, it seems to be fixed, and I have my snappy Mandy system back again. Now I need to upgrade to something newer than Mandy 2008.1 and get back on track. Banjo (_)=='=~

I really don't have anything I could swap right now. After looking online and reading the reviews for these devices I think that, since my use would be very limited, I might just put the MP3 on my eeepc and listen to it on that. Thanks for the offer. Banjo (_)=='=~

I am looking for a simple MP3 player that will mount as a USB drive on my Mandy system so that I can drop music files on it and then play them. I would prefer that it have a replaceable (AAA) battery so that I won't have to toss out the device when the battery quits working. I have searched linux-usb and Googled the question, but every device I find appears to be out of production. I just want to store a few songs to listen to as an aid to learning how to play them. I am not looking to create a huge library of material or buy things from tune stores. The Creative Technology, Ltd MuVo V100 is the sort of thing that I am looking for, but they appear to be no longer available. Does anybody know of any USB players that are simple, relatively cheap, capable of playing standard format files, and work with Linux? Thanks, Banjo

Does the monitor have its own timeout?

That's a great idea. But I have some questions, like what do I do when the new tools reconfigure all of my configuration files? Or do they not do that? I have some seriously old apps. I also, I didn't partition this disk to leave room for a second OS installation. :blush: Here is my system Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 7.7G 2.1G 5.3G 29% / /dev/sda7 191G 67G 124G 35% /home /dev/sda5 30G 6.4G 22G 23% /usr Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the offer. I think I want to upgrade the rest of it as well. My apps are getting a bit long in the tooth. Every time I upgrade I worry that the new apps won't work with my old data. I have a lot of legacy data with some of them, most importantly Kmail and Quanta+. KDE has changed a lot since I started using those tools. I guess the only way to find out is to try it. Banjo (_)=='=~

That is good to know. I am getting very close to needing an upgrade, but have not figured out what to do. My old 2008 Spring is not working well with this replacement MOBO. We fried the original MOBO and had to replace it, and ever since then a lot of stuff doesn't work. I suspect outdated drivers are to blame. I have been told by someone more knowledgeable than I that I could probably fix it by reinstalling what I have, but if I am going to go through a re-install, I think I want something newer anyway. I looked at Mandy 2010.1 on a live CD a few months ago and sort of liked what I saw. But I have dallied so long that 2010 is almost an old distro now too. Maybe I will wait for 2011 and see what happens. Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the update. I am currently running Mandy 2008 Spring so I need to upgrade. I tend to keep my OS around for a while for stability, so I don't want to jump into a distro that is a dead-end. I am used to the Red Hat model, so jumping into Debian (ubuntu) would require more learning curve than I would like to do... but.... if Mandy is gonzo.... Banjo (_)=='=~

I have noticed a dropoff in activity on the forum since Mandriva was sold. I seems that this used to be a much more active forum. Did everybody run off to Mageia? The Mandriva forum? Another distro? I have been running Mandriva (Mandrake) since 2003 and have had good luck with it. But that was partly because of the support supplied by this forum. If the community has dried up, I might look elsewhere for my next upgrade. I have been reading up on Ubuntu. All of the ubuntu forums seem to be quite active. I'm not trying to start an argument, I just am wondering what is going on with all the fine folks that used to populate this forum. Suggestions? Ideas? Dopeslaps? :o Thanks, Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the update. Looks like the boxed sets are available for pre-order and will be shipped in August. I currently do not have the bandwidth for a download. But that is OK. We are moving in July so August it a good time frame to do the upgrade. If my new residence has better internet I might do the subscription then anyway. I haven't decided yet. Banjo (_)=='=~

OK. Thanks for the pointer. No hurry. I will wait a while and see what comes out. Banjo (_)=='=~

Please excuse me if this question is too obvious. I have been planning to buy a PowerPack of 2010.1 to upgrade my system this Summer. But then I realized that I don't know if they issue a new PowerPack for the Spring edition, or if they just keep selling the 2010.0 and expect you to upgrade over the net. It does not say on the web site which edition of 2010 is on the disk. If I buy a PowerPack, will I be getting 2010.1 on the disk? Thanks, Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the quick answer. I don't want to put you to any trouble or expense. I will probably buy the PowerPack to get it all together in one place. I have had very good luck with Mandriva so far (my first was in 2003), and it is pretty short money compared to you-know-who which puts out an inferior product. The computer is the family computer, so I have to be a bit circumspect about planning a major upgrade. I don't know exactly when I will get around to doing this. I would upgrade our internet service from DSL to FIOS and then do the downloads, but we are planning on demolishing the house soon to rebuild. I don't want to add anything expensive to the walls that will come crashing down. Life is complicated. Banjo (_)=='=~

Most of my problems in my previous install using 2008.1 One were caused by my flaky connection rather than anything wrong with the Mandriva system. The installer was not happy when my DSL modem spontaneously rebooted itself (again) in the middle of a download. I am not sure that my internet will stay up long enough to download a Free or a PWP. Any idea how big those are? I did manage to grab a 2010.0 One CD to give it a try. It seems to run OK on my system and looked pretty stable compared to the 2009.0 that I tried last time. Thanks for the information. Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the info. Banjo (_)=='=~

Yes, I have seen the marketing hype on the Mandriva web site. I am fully aware of what the PowerPack is since I have installed two of them. What I am looking for is the actual package list. They used to have that on the web site, but it appears that only the other two versions of the distro have such a list. I basically want to know what I have to download and what is on the DVD because my internet connection is very flakey, and installations are ruined when it goes down in the middle of a download. So my motivation is to avoid the long downloads. Thanks anyway Banjo (_)=='=~

Greetings. I am considering an upgrade from my 2008.1 to 2010 and need to figure out whether buying the PowerPack is worth it. I installed 2008.1 from the One CD and it took me a month to get everything downloaded and set up. Using the PowerPack might expidite that setup. I went out to the web site which claims to have the package lists: Package Lists but the links to the PowerPack lists are not live links. Does anybody know where I can get an actual list of the packages contained on the DVD instead of just the hype about how great it is? Thanks, Banjo (_)=='=~ [moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman]

Happy New Year, everybody. This is just an update on fixing my no-sound problem on the Foxconn board. It will be a while before I can get around to an upgrade for my OS, so I bought a short term hardware solution that has worked out. I bought a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro, which is a USB sound card with 5.1 surround card. I got it from newegg for 30 bucks. It is the size of a jump drive. To install it, I plugged it into a USB port and then plugged in my powered speakers and I had sound. Linux hot-swapped the snd_usb_audio driver to run it. The control software for the device is fnWindows only, so I don't have access to any of the fancy features. Kmix shows only volume control. That is OK since this is an interim solution anyway, and I have it plugged into some ancient powered speakers and then into some ancient headphones. :o The point is that I have sound again, so I can take my time to plan an upgrade. I am thinking of waiting for 2010.1, but not sure yet. My concern is ending up with a stable system. This is a multi-user, primary family computer, and taking it down for upgrades takes a bit of planning. Thanks to all for the help on this issue. Banjo (_)=='=~

The really beautiful thing about my theories is how easy it is to blow them to smithereens. I found my original Mandy 2008.1 Live CD and booted it. It did not find the onboard ethernet, and there was no sound. It does basically what the installed version does. I am back to the upgrade-to-just-fix-it theory. Banjo (_)=='=~

LOL Okfine. Merry Christmas. Not being one to leave any dead horse unbeaten, I have continued to delve into this puzzle. I want to understand what is going on so I found and downloaded the datasheets for the chipsets in question. I found them here: Intel Chipsets My new Foxconn board has the G41 chipset, which is documented here: G41 Express My old MSI board had the G33 chipset, which is documented here: G33 Express The chipset consists of two major glue chips, the Graphics and Memory Controller Hub (GMCH) and the I/O Controller Hub (ICH). Each mother board is constructed with different versions of these chips. The GMCH has the onboard graphics controller and memory bus controller. The ICH contains all the I/O controllers including the SATA, ISA, PCI, Gigabyte Ethernet, and sound card. Here is the summary of what is on each board: MSI - purchased in September 2008 has the G33 GMCH and Rev 9 of the ICH, ICH9. Foxconn - purchased December 2009 has the G41 GMCH and Rev 7 of the ICH, ICH7. This is weird. The newer board (Foxconn) has ICH7, for which the datasheet has the date August 2007, and the older board (MSI) has ICH9, for which its datasheet has the date August 2008. However.... The MSI board has the GMCH G33 chip, which is dated August 2007, and the Foxconn board has the newer G41 GMCH, which is dated October 2009. The newer board has an older version of the I/O controller chip. So there are parts of the ICH7 that my Mandy 2008.1 cannot see, whereas it can see the ICH9 just fine. I am wicked confused about why my OS cannot see the older ICH hardware but it can see the newer stuff just fine. Adding to the weirdness, the newer Mandy 2010.0 can see the older hardware just fine. Did the installation process install a newer driver for the ICH9 components, and that driver is not backward compatible? Do I need to take my Mandy drivers backward instead of forward? The Mandy 2010.0, being a live CD will not have any bias about what hardware it is running on, and hence it will probe the hardware and load an appropriate driver. My old Mandy 2008.1 has been installed permanently, so perhaps it does not probe any more? When I get some time, I might try to test this by booting my Mandy 2008.1 Live CD and see if it works. If it does work, then I just need to find out how to put this OS into the wayback machine and have it reconfigure the drivers. Now I have to go find that old CD. Stay tuned. Banjo (_)=='=~

Greetings. I am taking a short break from the Holiday festivities and thought I would check in. I downloaded a Mandriva Live One 2010.0 image and booted this computer from it. Everything seems to work right out of the box. The onboard ethernet came up as eth0, and the Rosewill card came up as eth1. Using the onboard ethernet connection I went out to youtube with Firefox 3 and had sound and pictures with no additional setup. So here I am with egg all over my face. I guess the problem with the MOBO is that the G41 chipset really is too new to be supported by my old OS. Who knew? :blush: Well...my son told me that on day 1, but I needed to figure it out for myself. :blush: I still do not understand why a Linux kernel can be unable to deal with a MOBO chipset. I thought that the BIOS took care of that. Are there drivers that talk to the BIOS that need to be refreshed? Are those drivers compiled into the kernel? So many questions. The Mandy 2010 still could not see a CPU temp down in /proc/acpi. I should retract some of the nasty things I said about Foxconn, but it is still a bit early in this game to eat crow. The holes on the board for the standard click-in heat sink were definitely too small, and it broke one leg of my heat sink. I suppose this means that an upgrade to my Mandy is in order. While I had the 2010.0 booted I poked around with some of the widgets. They do not seem to crash like they did in the 2009 that I tried last time. Kinda cute. Mostly looks like fluff. It also appears that the desktop with shortcuts on it is back. In the 2009 there were no shortcuts on a desktop (unless I am mis-remembering). They had to be put onto a "plasma" or some such other nonsense. So I will boot my 2010 CD again some time in the New Year and check out all the stuff I use, such as shortcuts and USB backup disks etc. Then, if all works out I will probably upgrade. I have not decided about KDE4. Starting over with my settings in all the KDE apps is a daunting chore. If I cannot import my address books and my Quanta+ projects etc. I might have to bail out of KDE. Recreating all of that would take way too much time. I will also consider buying a Powerpack this time. Last time I installed from the Mandy 2008.1 Live One CD and it took me a month to straighten out all the problems. I currently have 5 different kernels installed trying to get one that could see all my RAM, and my HP printer and my Nvidia graphics card etc. :lol: I did not have that problem on the two previous installations, which were done from powerpacks. We shall see what happens. Maybe I should wait for 2010.1? Suggestions are welcome. Happy politically appropriate festivities greetings to all. Banjo (_)=='=~

The Mandy 2008.1 lspci command shows the sound card OK, even though my system apparently does not have the drivers for it, because it does not work either. The sound driver comes up and says that it does not see the device, even though lspci does see the device. Edit: I have the "correct" sound driver installed, but it apparently is out of date. lspci does not show the onboard ethernet. So I assumed a hardware failure. We booted the Knoppix and did the lspci, and it showed the sound card and two ethernet adapters on two different PCI buses. I forget the details, and the Knoppix was so disjoint that I could not figure out how to capture the information, but one must be my little Rosewill card and the other must be the onboard card. I also thought that the BIOS configures the PCI, so I am confused. I will see if I can download a Mandy 2010 and boot that. I have been too busy recently with work and Christmas etc. to mess with this. Thanks for the help. I will be back when I know more. Banjo (_)=='=~

A quick update on this issue in case anybody is watching it. My son downloaded a recent Knoppix (6.2) to see if it could see the MOBO hardware. Knoppix on a CD is so primitive now that we couldn't do much, but we managed to get connected to Google using the onboard MOBO RJ45 connector, so I guess the ethernet hardware works with the right drivers. We were stuck in a Curses browser because the graphical one froze. We also managed to get a croaky synthesized voice to come out of the sound card, so that was working at a primitive level. We had no real sound files to play, and the primitive browser would not play any online stuff like youtube. I guess that means that the hardware works and the problem is some kind of chipset drivers. I don't know where those drivers come from, but assume that they are built into the kernel or the distro? I suppose a Mandy upgrade is in order, but I will have to think about that since the last time I did it I was down on a lot of the tools for a month. The setup work on this thing takes a lot of time. The search goes on. Advice on upgrade paths is welcome. Banjo (_)=='=~

I have started digging really deep now, even studying how the PCI system works and how Linux Device Drivers work. There is a lot of material to cover. I dumped out /var/log/messages to see if there are any errors WRT the audio device. Then I copied out all of the messages from today to analyze them. Before I get to that, the lspci command returns the following: 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2e30 (rev 03) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Unknown device 2e31 (rev 03) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 01) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01) 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01) 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01) 00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 01) 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev e1) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GB/GR (ICH7 Family) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01) 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 01) 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (rev 01) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 01) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Unknown device 0622 (rev a1) 03:01.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10) There is still no eth0 listed. The Ethernet controller at the bottom is our little Rosewill NIC. The audio device is at 00:1b.0. I opened today's snippet from /var/log/messages and searched for that device number and came across this: Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.3[b] -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 18 Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: 8139too Fast Ethernet driver 0.9.28 Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:03:01.0[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: eth0: RealTek RTL8139 at 0xf8e04c00, 00:0a:cd:19:23:b6, IRQ 19 Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: ACPI: Thermal Zone [THRM] (40 C) Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1b.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: udev: renamed network interface eth0 to eth2 Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout, switching to polling mode: last cmd=0x100f0000 Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: hda_intel: azx_get_response timeout, switching to single_cmd mode: last cmd=0x100f0000 Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: hda-intel: no codecs initialized Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:00:1b.0 disabled It seems to have picked up our NIC initially as eth0. Then it got renamed to eth2 for some reason. The PCI handling for device 00:1b.0 seems to get into some trouble and has its interrupt disabled. I don't know what any of this really means, but it doesn't look too healthy to me. Are there any device driver gurus or kernel gurus out there who can interpret this stuff? I am seriously over my head here. BTW, there are lots and lots of other errors in the file, but I don't know how serious they are or whether they are just normal chatter or whatever. Here is one that I don't quite understand: Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: PCI: Using ACPI for IRQ routing Dec 17 08:58:14 localhost kernel: PCI: If a device doesn't work, try "pci=routeirq". If it helps, post a report The advice given in the suggestion is lost on me. "try pci=routeirq" where? Thanks Banjo (_)=='=~