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Never say never

Years ago I had Gigabyte mainboard in computer at work. One day cpu fan died — it did not shut down but tried to operate with 85°C at CPU… That day I decided to not buy Gigabyte mainboards anymore (my home machine had in BIOS limit of working temperatures with 70°C set as temp to shut down).

Few days ago I upgraded my home machine. And it is Gigabyte powered :) To be exact: EP35C-DS3R is what I bought.

There are few annoyances:

• Intel AHCI SATA BIOS adds few seconds on each boot for checking 6 Serial-ATA ports
• Gigabyte AHCI SATA/ATA BIOS adds few more and ask for pressing key (with few seconds timeout)

But also nice stuff:

• profiles in BIOS — so I am able to configure everything and store settings for later use
• flashing BIOS from USB stick, hard drive or floppy (does someone still use floppies?)

I also added few other components: Core2Quad Q6600 CPU, 4GB RAM and new hard drive but that is other story.

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CPU cooler upgrade

As you probably noticed I upgraded CPU in my desktop machine. But cpu cooler was same as before — stock Athlon64 BOX one which was included with previous A64 3200+ processor.

During idle cpu was running on 1GHz speed (thanks to cpufreq governor “ondemand”) and had 37-39°C temperature. Under load (such as OE/Poky builds) it was up to 65°C and after some time overheating check switched frequency to 1GHz…

Now with Akasa AK-876 heatsink this machine has 30-32°C when idle and 46-50°C under load. And fan speed is much lower — keeps under 2000 RPM under load (previous one goes up to 4000 RPM) so machine is usable without listening music.

There was some problems with fitting such big heatsink into case but it sits properly in place and air flow is in proper way — from CPU fan -> CPU heatsink -> case fan -> out. It also shows that my next machine will get new case — Codegen 9002 which I use now starts to be too small to keep all drives, fans and cables in good order.

Tags: amd64 bios 2 Comments »

CPU upgrade

I usually did big computer upgrades (AMD Duron with SDRAM -> AMD Athlon with DDR, then to AMD Athlon64 with DDR) but this time it was only CPU. From Athlon64 3200+ (2GHz) I switched to Athlon64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHz). Operation was quite simple — take one CPU, insert another but old one glued to radiator so I had to use some force :(

Then first boot and question… will BIOS recognize new CPU or not. It properly displayed information and then Linux started — just to show me 1 CPU. Quick installation of already prepared SMP kernel and /proc/cpuinfo had more informations.

Machine is quite loud when operating on full speed but most of time CPUFreq is able to lower frequency (1.0/1.8/2.0/2.2GHz steps are available) so it is noiseless. It is nice to see how CPU usage is split into two cores — now I do not have to wait when two builds are progressing and I want to run some applications.

Now doing builds will be more comfortable :)

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Partition Signature !=55AA

Due to fact that some of embedded devices require using vendor tools I decided to install Microsoft Windows XP Professional on my Dell D400. As this machine lack CD-ROM drive I had to find other way. “Unattended” project provides boot discs which allow to make installation over PXE (netboot).

I followed DOS way and gave my tweaked copy of installation CD for it. The first problem was that I got “Partition Signature !=55AA” message after reboot and machine was unbootable. Hopefully I can boot grub4dos over PXE so I was able to go back to the Debian.

How to fix it? In my situation marking FAT32 partition as bootable solved problem.

The message is messy because there was 0×55aa signature at the end of MBR…

Tags: bios computers windows 2 Comments »

Dell D400 - installation report

OK, system (Debian ‘etch’) was installed and then upgraded to ’sid’. Everything is working with Linux (kernel 2.6.18 from Etch):

• ACPI reports battery status, battery is charging without problems.
• Dell Wireless 1450 card works — I only had to install bcm43xx firmware (which I took from Cafuego’s Sarge Backports repository). There is also other way — Debian contain package bcm43xx-fwcutter which extracts firmware from Windows drivers.
• Gigabit Ethernet works with tg3 kernel module (tested with 100Mbps Ethernet only).
• CPU Frequency scaling works with speedstep-centrino module and provides wide range: 1600MHz, 1400MHz, 1200MHz, 1000MHz, 800MHz, 600MHz so it is possible to extend battery life with it.
• Backlight control (via Fn+Up/Down buttons) works — it is handled by hardware/BIOS probably.
• Touchpad was wrongly recognized — it is not Synaptic but ALPS so edit of /etc/X11/xorg.conf was needed. All informations what to change are described in README.alps (part of xserver-xorg-input-synaptic package). Idea found on Ubuntu blog.
• Suspend to disk works, suspend to RAM also works.

In other words — no problems yet — everything works like it should.

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Flashing Progear BIOS

Today I checked how to flash BIOS on Progear HX1050 webpad. Basically there are two ways:

• using psplash.exe under DOS
• using fpFlashBIOS under GNU/Linux

I do not know does they were provided with default installations — I got both from this page (you will find flashers and bios images there).

Flashing under GNU/Linux (Debian ‘testing’ in my case) is simple:

sync
./fpFlashBIOS -w:pb_10404.rom

Application will write some flash block (and verify). Then reboot to check does everything is OK — due to fact, that flashing clear BIOS settings external USB keyboard is recommended. Pressing F2 during bootup (when white screen is shown) will enter Setup.

Beware: unbricking can be hard — flash chips are soldered…

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