Re: Adventures with ATI Rage 128 Pro and Debian Unstable

2002-04-05 Thread Crispin Wellington
On Fri, 2002-04-05 at 16:18, Scott Henson wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-04-05 at 01:15, Peter Whysall wrote:
> 
> > PS. Anyone have any clues as to why the disk performance on this box is
> > slow? This manifested itself on 2.2.19, 2.2.20, and 2.4.18. Very boggy
> > at times.
> I find all the debian kernel packages slow on my machine.  I think this
> is because of how modularized they are.  Having to load up so many
> modules may cause a slow down.  I always build my own kernel packages
> with the make-kpkg provided by kernel-package  I think the kernels I
> make on my own are much faster.  YMMV.

The kernel will only load the modules that are selected for loading with
modconf. It doesn't load every module. That would be silly. Its more
likely to be the removal of much of the unneeded statically compiled
stuff that is speeding up your boot, and optimisation for your
CPU/memory architecture/whatever that speeds up the running.

Building heavily modular kernels is a *good idea*. One day I gaurentee
you will wish you had.

Crispin



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Re: Adventures with ATI Rage 128 Pro and Debian Unstable

2002-04-05 Thread Scott Henson
On Fri, 2002-04-05 at 01:15, Peter Whysall wrote:

> PS. Anyone have any clues as to why the disk performance on this box is
> slow? This manifested itself on 2.2.19, 2.2.20, and 2.4.18. Very boggy
> at times.
I find all the debian kernel packages slow on my machine.  I think this
is because of how modularized they are.  Having to load up so many
modules may cause a slow down.  I always build my own kernel packages
with the make-kpkg provided by kernel-package  I think the kernels I
make on my own are much faster.  YMMV.


-- 
-Peace kid
  Scott Henson  [EMAIL PROTECTED]

"God's the ultimate playa, so naturally He's going to have some haters,"
rapper Ice Cube said. "But these haters need to realize that  if you
mess with the man upstairs, you will get your ass smote. True dat."





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Re: Adventures with ATI Rage 128 Pro and Debian Unstable

2002-04-05 Thread Peter Whysall
On Fri, 2002-04-05 at 07:46, Kent West wrote:
> Peter Whysall wrote:
> >What I /would/ appreciate is any clue on getting the Rage 128 to work
> >with XFree86 4.1 so I can stay Debianized?
> >
> If you're willing to try, I'd recommend copying your working 
> XF86Config-4 file to a safe place, then remove your 4.2 version of X, 
> reinstall Debian's X, and replace your working XF86Config-4. I'd 
> estimate an 85% chance of success, maybe higher.

Certainly worth a try - I'll have a bash at that. Easily done, too :)

Thanks

Peter.
-- 
Peter Whysall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The TLD in my email address is sdrawkcab.
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 sid -- kernel 2.4.18


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Re: Adventures with ATI Rage 128 Pro and Debian Unstable

2002-04-05 Thread Kent West

Peter Whysall wrote:




"No screens found."

Sigh.

I broke. I sinned.

I downloaded the Linux binary distribution of XFree86 4.2.0, renamed
/etc/X11 and /usr/X11R6 out of the way, ran Xinstall.sh, and it worked
first time, giving me glorious 1280x1024x32bpp loveliness.





What I /would/ appreciate is any clue on getting the Rage 128 to work
with XFree86 4.1 so I can stay Debianized?

If you're willing to try, I'd recommend copying your working 
XF86Config-4 file to a safe place, then remove your 4.2 version of X, 
reinstall Debian's X, and replace your working XF86Config-4. I'd 
estimate an 85% chance of success, maybe higher.


Kent




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Re: Adventures with ATI Rage 128 Pro and Debian Unstable

2002-04-05 Thread Crispin Wellington
On Fri, 2002-04-05 at 14:15, Peter Whysall wrote:
> PS. Anyone have any clues as to why the disk performance on this box is
> slow? This manifested itself on 2.2.19, 2.2.20, and 2.4.18. Very boggy
> at times.

DMA on IDE transfers not switched on?

When the disk is being hammered, is CPU usage going through the roof? If
so, then DMA is not on.

Kind Regards
Crispin Wellington



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Adventures with ATI Rage 128 Pro and Debian Unstable

2002-04-05 Thread Peter Whysall
I decided to partition my work W2K machine (Dell Optiplex GX240 - 1.7GHz
P4, 256MB, the aforementioned ATI Rage 128 thingy) and install Debian.
Thought, "Hmm, this is a nice modern machine. Should be a doddle." 

Ho ho. What a jape I was in for.

Installation went fine, a little dance around because I'd neglected to
install a kernel (was booting off Rescue) but I downloaded a
kernel-image deb file on another machine, plonked it on a CD and
installed it.

Firstly, LILO wouldn't install. This was a pain in the bum, but not
disastrous - once I'd made myself a boot floppy from my actually running
kernel (kernel-image-2.2.20-idepci) it was tolerable. After all, one
rarely has to reboot Linux during the installation process.

Did some basic package-installation tasks - aptutils, aptitude, etc.

Switched from stable to unstable, did a dist-upgrade (at which point I
decided to snarf a kernel source package and the kernel-package package
- mysteriously, when I installed  my custom kernel package, LILO decided
to work. Go figure.)

And there the fun stopped.

apt-get install x-window-system


Run xf86config (like I have literally hundreds of times before), pick my
card off the list, away we go.

No dice.

"No screens found".

Eh?

Cue much waffing about by me, twiddling various bits of
XF86Config/XF86Config-4 (Yes, I had both :0).

"No screens found".

Give up.

Find a useful-ish page on Linuxnewbie.org that mentions the fact that
although the ATI Rage 128 is supported, XFree86 4.1 doesn't detect it
right, and you need to munge your XF86Config(-4) to fix it by explicitly
specifying the "r128" driver, not the "ati" one.

"No screens found."

Sigh.

I broke. I sinned.

I downloaded the Linux binary distribution of XFree86 4.2.0, renamed
/etc/X11 and /usr/X11R6 out of the way, ran Xinstall.sh, and it worked
first time, giving me glorious 1280x1024x32bpp loveliness. A sort of
choppy install of GNOME followed (I really want an virtual package or a
task to do that for me, instead of my "damn, forgot gnome-session, damn,
forgot gnome-applets etc etc" approach) but I'm cooking on gas.

I'm not going to ask when 4.2 is going to be in unstable because the
answer to that is "when it is".

What I /would/ appreciate is any clue on getting the Rage 128 to work
with XFree86 4.1 so I can stay Debianized?

(If I wanted to dink around with tarballs I'd run Slackware)

PS. Anyone have any clues as to why the disk performance on this box is
slow? This manifested itself on 2.2.19, 2.2.20, and 2.4.18. Very boggy
at times.

Regards

Peter.

-- 
Peter Whysall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The TLD in my email address is sdrawkcab.
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 sid -- kernel 2.4.18


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