hoffies blog

I already planned to upgrade my main PC some time ago and last week I finally ordered the necessary parts. I replaced the mainboard (MSI K7N2G-ILSR -> GigaByte G33-DS3), the CPU (AMD Athlon XP 2600+ -> Intel Core 2 Duo E6750) and RAM (2×256MB + 1×512MB Kingston HyperX DDR333 -> 2×1GB Corsair PC2-6400). Of course, this also meant switching from a 32bit system to a 64bit.

The hardware changes took me approximately two hours (since I cleaned the whole tower and had to help my sister with building her own PC with my old hardware ;)), then I started re-partitioning one of my two main harddisks (which were part of a RAID-1 array) and installed Gentoo on it (this time using xfs as a file system and running a full unstable system, ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~amd64”). Then, the first reboot—while the kernel config looked to be OK, the damn thing didn’t boot as XFS wasn’t able to mount the root fs. When I was about to blame XFS and switch back to ext3 I realized it wasn’t a file system problem but rather a hard disk problem. And indeed, booting from the livecd again revealed a lot of ‘Medium errors’ when trying to work with the disk, and the `badblocks` tool showed 45 bad blocks… Great. :) I guess the bad blocks didn’t just come from one day to the other but had been there for some time and I didn’t see them because of the RAID setup or something. “Luckily” this drive was pretty new (Oct 2006) and I think I’ve got pretty good chances for getting a replacement because I should still have warranty on it.

Anyway, as replacement usually takes time and I don’t want to risk data loss I ordered two 500GB drives yesterday… hopefully they are a bit faster (they should be—they’re both SATA-II and said to be pretty fast and with the new board I can finally profit from SATA-II). Hopefully they’ll arrive on Monday or Tuesday so I can complete my upgrade hardware-wise.

So, after the second Gentoo install on the second harddisk (with some quirks to not destroy any data while still preparing for a nice partitioning scheme) I’m almost back.

Yesterday I solved the two outstanding software problems: My board has a nice intel graphics chip which should have worked out-of-the-box. Indeed, 2d graphics worked well, 3d not at all. While I was able to enable DRI etc. in xorg.conf, any tool which used OpenGL made X segfault, even glxinfo caused that. It turned out mesa-7.0.1 did not support the chip on the g33-based boards yet, but luckily the patches are already in upstream git and they will be part of mesa-7.0.2, so I just patched mesa locally and filed bug 197273 and hope for the best. :)

There was one last remaining issue, the TV card. I own a Pinnacle PCTV Stereo card which always needed some strange hacks. When building the first kernel for this machine I chose to include support for bt87x (this card has a bt878 chip, so this is the right driver)—which was the wrong choice. :) While I got a picture in tvtime and was even able to switch channels, I did not get any audio output. Instead, there was only a short noise when starting tvtime or switching channels. Then I remembered the hack I used on the old install—I had to build bttv as a module, unload it after boot when udev autoloaded it and load it again, then audio suddenly worked. Sadly this didn’t work on this install. I did not get any TV picture at all when using bttv as a module. After some hours of debugging it turned out that the bttv module no longer loaded the proper tuner and audio modules and after the discovery of this issue it was pretty “easy” to get the commands for getting working TV with audio together:

modprobe -r bttv tuner tvaudio
modprobe msp3400 # the audio decoder I need on this card
modprobe tuner
modprobe bttv

The important thing is that msp3400 needs to be loaded first as this is the driver which works for this card. If bttv is loaded first (which seems to happen when using in-kernel bttv) bttv (or some of its submodules, maybe tvaudio) captures the audio “port” and msp3400 is unable to get access to it…

Oh yes, and today I discovered another issue related to a 64bit system—proprietary crap again :) I wanted to use flash… and well, the standard procedure seems to be to use a 32bit browser (as there is no 64bit flash plugin). I tried that but it sucks. There is no easy way (yes I know, there are ways) to make firefox use a decent GTK+ theme and additionaly it was rather slow. Luckily someone (hello impulze!) reminded me of nspluginwrapper—I think it’s still considered an ugly hack, but it works. I just emerged it and now I’m able to use flash, whee!