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On Thursday 20 January 2005 23:25, Grant Sewell wrote:
Hi all. Since we've a semi-topic about laptops on at the moment, I thought I'd throw my small problem in the hat. I have inherited a reasonable laptop. It's a Mendocino Celly @ 300MHz, 256Mb RAM, 20Gb HDD. It functions perfectly, albeit it runs slightly slower than that to which I have become accustomed on my desktop machine. However, speed is not the issue here - afterall, I only really use it for classes at College... more on that later. First thing first, though. The system comes with an ESS1869 sound controller. Try as I might, I can't get this thing to work without it causing a complete kernel freeze at some point or other (usually if I try using mplayer with it). I can't get the ESS module(s) to work at all, and the SB module is the only things that works... but then causes the freeze. It's picked up nicely with *lspnp* but isn't listed with *pnpdump* (infact, nothing is listed with pnpdump). Anyone got any ideas? Secondly. College use a lot of "interactive whiteboards" (Promethean ActivBoard). Hence, I use them a fair bit. The room in which I take most of my classes (if not all) has the VGA splitter in the far corner of the room. This makes it really quite hard to have a smooth-running class... having to keep going back to the laptop in order to move something that's projected onto the board. It would be really nice if I got use the IWB as it should be used. Obviously the placement of the PC to which the IWB is normally connected isn't a problem... guess which system that runs on? Now, the IWB connects to the PC using a standard serial connection (9pin). I have tried connecting to both the serial port on the laptop and to a USB->Serial adaptor I bought (originally purchased to facilitate easy access to the routers in the labs), and I have tried all of the driver/protocol combinations that I could find for serial "mice" under X. All to no avail. Finally getting to my point: has anyone had any experience with these IWBs? Any thoughts on how I might be able to get it to work? I've been onto Promethean about it, and have a guess what the response I got was! Surprisingly it wasn't "sod off, we don't support Linux", but the guy thought that I might like to consider using VNC to project the Linux session but use Windows for interactivity. I don't.
Ok, I'm guessing a bit here. ESS audio chips normally work pretty well with Linux systems. I've found the oddest post wrt this http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/archive/25/2003/06/4/68666 The 1869 chip has been around for a long long time (in computing terms). I'm pretty certain they are pci audio chips. What I'm thinking is that possibly your laptop has an early APCI bios/motherboard. APCI can be used to implement IRQ allocations and other resources (at least that's how I understand it) and is used a lot in laptops. Older laptops will still work without ACPI enabled (some newer ones won't) in your kernel. I'd be tempted to check your kernel config and try turning off ACPI if it's set. You may be able to just boot with kernel option ACPI=off - you'll need to check the exact option. NOTE, when turning off ACPI be carefull to check that the cpu fan in the laptop still comes on when it should or you can trash your machine :) - I have an old laptop (P233 I think) where I had to set the fan to run continuously - I can't remember how I did it though. HTH Jon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.