Fiddling with the setup of my development box. Got the sound working, for real this time
it seems. I don't know which change did it; I changed the sound from 'auto' to 'enabled'
in the BIOS for one. But then I remembered you have to leave the 'capture monitor' muted
in alsamixer. After muting that, I could aplay tada.wav and it worked.
Also got my hard drive running almost an order-of-magnitude faster, from less than 3
to almost 20 Mbytes/sec. I had tried hdparm -tT /dev/hda and got
the low numbers, then attempted to turn on DMA with hdparm -d1 -c3 /dev/hda
and the -c3 (32-bit transfers) worked but -d1 didn't. Turns out you have to config the IDE PCI driver
for your particular chipset into the kernel (module won't cut it). In my case this was the sis5513
for the K7S41 mobo that comes with the cheapo Walmart boxen. Maybe this will help speed up the
system when running updatedb; it got so bad the icecast streaming stopped.
I'm not learning how hotplugging works, but I'm picking up a little what doesn't... I added a line for the James Bond JB1 camera to /etc/hotplug/usb.distmap and it did nothing. Adding debug code to usb.agent showed it coming up with the wrong numbers! Moved the same line out of there and into usb.usermap and now it at least recognizes it should load the driver. It still doesn't load it yet though. And even if I modprobe the driver it doesn't recognize the camera, even though I put the vendor and product codes into the stv680 driver.
So anyway, sound is working, HD is a helluvalot faster, and I've only got a billion other things to learn before morning comes. I've decided to go back to daysleeping for now; if I go too late to the beach I can't find as many mussels as I do when I'm one of the earlybirds. I like free food a lot, especially something healthy like seafood. So I'll go gather my brunch, bring it back and then get my shuteye.
last updated 2013-01-10 20:27:21. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com