Arch on a Via Nerimiah MB

TheDoctor · 2005-07-21 14:39:02

I've decided to change my freevo machine over to Arch, and I am having a little bit of trouble getting arch 0.7 base to run properly on it. The machine is a Via Nerimiah m-1000. It seems to boot the kernel fine (so it's not an i686 problem), but hangs at the hotplug section. The issues appear to be around hotplug, but I have not found anything in the logs that shows exactly where the error is. I didn't have much time to play with it last night, so maybe I'll get a little more time to play with it this weekend.

Before I go and disable hotplug to see what is goofing on it, does anyone have any experience with arch on these boards?

I think that the best course of action here is to disable hotplug, manually bring up the network, and do a pacman -Syu, then re-enable hotplug to see if I get the same errors. Any other suggestions?

phrakture · 2005-07-21 15:24:05

no, but you don't have to run hotplug on boot for your system to work - all hotplug on boot will do is handle loading of modules - you can list your modules in rc.conf and disable hotplug forever (I have 4 arch boxes and have never ever run hotplug on any of them, so it's safe)

cactus · 2005-07-21 15:40:20

I was under the impression that even the nehamia chips were missing a few i686 instructions, so they didn't 'quite' work. You might just try the arch i586 and see it you have better luck.

TheDoctor · 2005-07-21 15:40:57

phrakture wrote:

no, but you don't have to run hotplug on boot for your system to work - all hotplug on boot will do is handle loading of modules - you can list your modules in rc.conf and disable hotplug forever (I have 4 arch boxes and have never ever run hotplug on any of them, so it's safe)

Perfect. I'll give that a try this weekend. That will also cut down on my boot time, as hotplug seems to linger for a bit, but I wasn't too worried about that, because I was going to tackle bootsplash/fbslash next. There's not much sense in having a textual boot screen on a PVR, and eyecandy is great to show off.

And to finish my torturous weekend, I'll get my DWL-520 up and running too. (I hate hardware designed for windows. How hard would it have been to add a firmware to the card?)

TheDoctor · 2005-07-21 15:44:51

cactus wrote:

I was under the impression that even the nehamia chips were missing a few i686 instructions, so they didn't 'quite' work. You might just try the arch i586 and see it you have better luck.

Well, the kernel boots fine, but I haven't gotten to any window managers or X yet. Maybe I'll just slap debian or Ubuntu on it. I got all the gear for free, so I don't want to go swapping it out for a real processor, and it works for what I need it to.

I guess I could go back to slack on it. That worked fine too, but it's getting a bit dated, and it didn't like the wireless card when I compiled my own kernel.

solskogen · 2005-07-22 17:42:08

Try to remove hotplug and use hwd instead. Probably hotplug tries to load a module your hardware dont want it to do. hwd is faster, but I dont know if its "better" (in the term if it detects hardware better)

I have a problem with hotplug loading a sound-module that my lapdog does not have, so I`ve just blacklisted that module.

Try using hwd (it`s in extra), and remove hotplug. It will probably help you. If not, remove hwd to and load the modules manualy.

Michel · 2005-07-22 17:43:08

Heya,

have you tried using the framebuffer device? I don't have tried it myself, but the enlightenment-libraries can use the framebuffer-device instead of X ... There are also X11-emulation-libraries for the framebuffer-defive I believe. Maybe worth a shot?

greetings,

Michel

TheDoctor · 2005-07-25 17:31:37

Michel wrote:

Heya,
have you tried using the framebuffer device? I don't have tried it myself, but the enlightenment-libraries can use the framebuffer-device instead of X ... There are also X11-emulation-libraries for the framebuffer-defive I believe. Maybe worth a shot?
greetings,
Michel

I haven't tried using the framebuffer device yet. From some of the reading that I did, you have to use via-specific framebuffer stuff, which I haven't had a chance to play with yet. I got the rest of it running. The hotplug issue was a strange one, I am using a usb-keyboard remote and had usb keyboard turned on in the bios. For some reason it was causing the lockup. I changed the setting in the bios, and magically, it worked.

The only issue that I have left is choppy playback of DVDs and some movies. I think that it's partially an hdparm issue, ( I did an hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc, but not a whole lot of change, I'm afraid every other distro set up hdparm for me) and an mplayer/codec issue. I have an e-mail into the freevo guys to help me out, and I think that I can just pass a -freamedrop command to mplayer to get it working, but disk playback was smooth before, but the audio was severely lagged. The audio works great now, but the video gets choppy, so I have a little bit of tweaking to do, and I have to set up my wireless network to use WEP/WPA , as someone in my neighbourhood just moved in and has their own wireless network (secured, but they provide the wep keys automatically, so on a good day I can connect to their network, but not listen in on their conversation )

Once I have that done, then I've got a great little media box going, without DRM, with internet radio feeds (The wife loves Red Dragon UK), and I've learned more about linux than I thought was possible.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-07-21 14:39:02

Arch on a Via Nerimiah MB

#2 2005-07-21 15:24:05

Re: Arch on a Via Nerimiah MB

#3 2005-07-21 15:40:20

Re: Arch on a Via Nerimiah MB

#4 2005-07-21 15:40:57

Re: Arch on a Via Nerimiah MB

#5 2005-07-21 15:44:51

Re: Arch on a Via Nerimiah MB

#6 2005-07-22 17:42:08

Re: Arch on a Via Nerimiah MB

#7 2005-07-22 17:43:08

Re: Arch on a Via Nerimiah MB

#8 2005-07-25 17:31:37

Re: Arch on a Via Nerimiah MB

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