Landfill of Wisdom

The built-in SD card reader on my Thinkpad x60 has been always giving me headaches. It works reliably well, but when copying files my system becomes very unresponsive. The mouse is jerky and the CPU usage jumps through the roof. Obviously, DMA is not being used. I couldn't find much about it for a while but just today, when I included the chip id R5C822 of the reader in the search I found this thread . However, instead of patching the source itself, it is quite easy to force the quirk when loading the sdhci module. Put the following in modprobe.conf or /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf and everything will be fine after you reboot. options sdhci debug_quirks=2 You can also reload the module to check if it is fine even now. umount any SD cards that you have mounted modprobe -r sdhci-pci modprobe -r sdhci modprobe sdhci-pci That's all folks. Enjoy a true multitasking Linux.

I just got a brand new Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 . The keyboard is great, but its left Alt key is a bit too small a bit too much to the side and very hard to reach with my thumb. Japanese keyboards have three extra keys around the space bar, keys that I never use, but keys that eat the width of other keys (just look at the English and Japanese variants and you'll see what I mean ). I thus wanted to assign that never-used-key to behave the same as an ALT. It turned out to be easier than expected. Detailed information about the process can be found in an article from Microsoft . It tells you that you need to add a binary key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout\Scancode Map . Its first eight bytes are all zeros, the next four bytes are the number of mappings (little-endian, so "02 00 00 00" for 2), and then four bytes for each mapping plus a mapping of all zeros ("00 00 00 00") as a terminator. The number of mapping...

The modules needed for properly setting up lm-sensors on my Tyan motherboard are: i2c-nforce2 lm85 k8temp And the lowest version of lm-sensors with support for k8temp is 2.10.1. I am still at a loss about reading the output, though. # sensors lm85-i2c-0-2d Adapter: SMBus nForce2 adapter at 2d00 V1.5: +1.81 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +3.32 V) VCore: +1.25 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +2.99 V) V3.3: +3.25 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.38 V) V5: +4.97 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +6.64 V) V12: +12.06 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +15.94 V) CPU_Fan: 0 RPM (min = 0 RPM) fan2: 1626 RPM (min = 0 RPM) fan3: 0 RPM (min = 0 RPM) fan4: 0 RPM (min = 0 RPM) CPU Temp: +40°C (low = -128°C, high = +127°C) Board Temp: +36°C (low = -127°C, high = +127°C) Remote Temp: +46°C (low = -127°C, high = +...

There is no such thing as coolers for a Socket F. There isn't enough information on the internet for me to actually say anything that I can vote for, but here is my experience. On my Tyan Thunder n3600B there are two couples of retention brackets. These brackets are screwed around the socket and it is thus possible to use any cooler that is compatible with Socket AM2. Since I was stupid enough to buy a couple of coolers that are too big to fit when placed close to each other (the sockets are a bit too close, but that's what I get for getting an ATX motherboard) I also learned that coolers for Socket AM2 are compatible with Socket 754, and possibly all other recent AMD sockets. After all, it is just a clip and luckily the dimensions of that clip haven't changed much.

The server that this blog is running on has served me well. It is running e-mail with SPAM and anti-virus filtering, officially mirroring several OSS projects and it is also serving several web pages. It is doing its job well, but it has been pushed too hard and it is time for a replacement. When putting it together (actually upgrading it from a Slot A Athlon) I had bought an ASUS P4S533-X motherboard which allowed my to go with a cheap Celeron running at 2.4GHz and reuse two of several PC133 512MB DIMMs (buying DDR would have been too much for me at that time). And it has run like that for quite a while. When I decided to upgrade the machine, I decided that I'll buy something that is going to run for a while. So I decided to go with a couple of the new dual core Opteron processors (the HE type) a reasonable TYAN motherboard and four pieces of 512MB DDR2 DIMMs (registered memory is still too expensive). So, it was hard enough to find a retailer carrying all these items in Japan.....

I got a new Intel Pro/1000 XT server adapter, a so-so switching hub ( NetGear GS105 ) and I immediately upgraded my network. Since both the Intel adapter and the switch were jumbo frame compatible, I decided to try that feature out. Ran the following commands on the server (with the Intel adapter): ip link set mtu 9000 dev lan and after a small delay everything seemed to be OK. Ran the same command on my workstation -- an Asus K8V SE Deluxe motherboard with an onboard Marvell Gigabit adapter. The screen froze and after a few seconds the computer rebooted. That's with a vanilla 2.6.18.5 kernel. Gotta be more careful.