Archive for the ‘hardware’ Category
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 |
One of the more annoying things about new motherboards and Linux is that they sometimes does not work – that is they actually work, but then something does not work.
The most annoying thing for me is always the network card…..
In this case with the Asus P5QL Pro, the network card was not recognized by the Linux distribution I normally use for my server (CentOS), and after having spend a reasonable time using Google trying to find out what was going on – I successfully figured out:
- the driver is skge (skge.ko)
- the driver is not working (depends… on the version)
- the best way is to compile the driver from source
Steps required:
- install kernel-headers
- install development tools (gcc and make)
- get the source for the linux drivers here
- compile the driver
# unzip LinuxDrivers.zip
# cd LinuxDrivers/Lan/linux-v<version>/src
# make
- and if no errors
# make install
This will install ‘atl1e.ko’ which is the name of the driver Asus provides – see it’s kind of different to the one which is in the kernel already (crap!)
Now the problem is that next time you update your kernel you need to compile the kernel module again to get networking running.
Until the driver in the kernel is updated, I can only see one solution – have two network cards.
The buildin (which is the primary), and then another one which will give access to the box so that it’s possible to enable the driver again (crap! again!).
technorati tags: motherboards, Linux
Posted in computers, hardware, linux | 3 Comments »
Thursday, January 10th, 2008 |
Wireless networks have been around for sometime, and I have had it for years as it makes it easier to take my notebook with me around the house.
I have the first generation of the Apple Macbook Pro’s which does not come with a 802.11n card, which have been annoying me for a while, so last saturday I finally got around to get the ‘MacPro 802.11n upgrade kit’ which one can get from any Apple Service Center for around €50. Then the next thing to get was a Wireless Access Point which could do 802.11n, I decided to get an Apple Airport Extreme which have both 3(4) Gigabit ports, and one can attache a USB disk which can be shared on the network.
Well so far so good, only problem was that the only shop in town who had one of these was MediaMarkt (for Americans, MediaMarkt is an European version of BestBuy), and to my surprise it was a restock which they where selling for the full price, but a hardware reset, and a bit of playing around with the Airport Tool it was working…. now it where the fun starts.
First the wireless range both with 2.4GhZ and 5GhZ is nothing to write home about, as a fact it incredible bad, but with a bit of fiddling (2.4GhZ, 130mbit/s..) helped a bit, but still it cannot compete with my homebuild AP which is running Leaf Linux on a PCengines WRAP board.
There are a few not so positive discussions on the Apple Discussion Board, which points out that connections are lost, the AP resets it self, and so on. So I did the following test; start a copy of a 1GB files with finder, and in terminal start another copy of a 600MB file with scp, and bingo lockup, and no matter what I did could bring it back to life. Needless to say I returned the Airport, and got my money back.
Then I thought, someone must have produced a Wireless AP supporting 802.11n which is working and have a decent wireless range. So after I got my money back, I had a look around and decided to pick up a Netgear WNR834B, got it setup, and did my test, with the wireless range, and yes better than the Apple Airport Express, but still nothing really to write home about (especially not when one reads the marketing material Netgear puts up about the 802.11n range). So next point was to do my copy again, well I never got further than using Finder to copy before I lost my connection.
So my conclusion about 802.11n is that;
- It’s fast – when it works one get around 7.7MB/s which is about 3 times faster than with 802.11g
- It’s not stable, most vendors have based their AP/Routers on 802.11n Draft 2, which means that it’s still not a standard.
- Having a 802.11n wireless card in your notebook, could be a good thing as it could look like the range is better than having 802.11g (only), but that is for other people to look into.
Well I’m back using 802.11g which ‘only’ gives me 2.4MB/s which is actually quite reasonable, but it would be nice to get something which is close to 100Mb/s….
technorati tags: 802.11n, Airport Extreme
Posted in apple, hardware | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 |
There have been some writing the last couple of days after a data recovery company have said that all 2.5″ Seagate harddrives made in China used in Apple Macbook and Macbook Pro’s can crash due to a hardware failure.
The thing is that a manufacture can be unlucky and release a batch of “faulty” drives into the wild, and people using them can (will) loose data. The good thing is that if this happens Apple will replace the harddrive (that is why we have warrenty), and probably with one which does not have any faults. In the mean time, remember to backup you data.
Now the funny thing is this (not the loosing data part) is that at work I’ve had 4 computers from Dell which all of them came with 2 Maxtor harddrives. And of these 8 harddrives I’ve had 6 of them replaced due the a crash, and the amount of data lost on this is more than I want to think about. But Dell knew about this issues, and everyone who got a computer from Dell would have a catastrophic failure and data loss at some point. But there was no recall or no big writing on the wall for that reason.
technorati tags: Seagate, Apple Macbook, Apple Macbook Pro
Posted in apple, computers, hardware | 1 Comment »
Friday, November 2nd, 2007 |
For years the harddrive vendors have had a small notice on their harddrive stating that they think 1GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes and not 1,073,741,824 bytes, it does not really look as much but it is approximately 7% in difference, and for a 100GB disk it’s 7GB. Now do the calculation on a 500GB disk, and it comes to about 35GB…..
Some time ago, Michael Lazar and Sarah Cho filed a lawsuit against Seagate (read more here) , and they won.
Seagate is going to give customers money back, or they some backup software if they can prove purchase of a harddisk between March 22, 2001, and Dec. 31, 2006.
I do not live in the US, and therefor I cannot get anything, but at least we might get lucky and get the real numbers on the harddrives. That is 1 byte is 8 bit and not 10 bit.
There are 10 kinds of people how know binary……
technorati tags: harddrive, Seagate
Posted in computers, hardware, technology | No Comments »
Friday, September 14th, 2007 |
Well kind of, but still. I’ve had my MacBook Pro for 19months and is still quite happy about it, I’ve applied all the patches for OSX they’ve asked me to apply, and it still works (there was an issue with wireless and battery, but there was a workaround for that).
As for the hardware, I got the first battery replaced as there was something wrong with the one which it came with, and now the last couple of weeks I’ve seen that the battery charge went from 45% to 0% in a matter of minutes. So I found this technical document on their support site saying that if this and that is the case; call support….
Which I did, and now I’m getting a new battery again – for free!! how cool is that?
Update; well it turns out that the replacement battery is free, only if the new if returned within 10 days – got an email with stated that it was €102 for the battery, and after calling Apple Support again, I was told that they will only bill me if I don’t return the old battery with in 10 days, pew…..
technorati tags: MacBook Pro, battery
Posted in apple, hardware | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 |
I wrote “The end of the Mac roadâ€???, as a response to Ian Betteridge, now it seams that things have happened in “choose your OS” world….
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes from ZDnet have written a comment to “why does people still use Windows” discussion.
First installment: Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user, second installment and follow up: Three more things that the Linux community doesn’t get.
The sad thing is that he is mostly right, how do you convince anyone to change to something they do not know anything, and btw. cannot promise that it will work.
Over the years I’ve have many and quite intense discussions with both sides of the fence so to say (I can be quite good at playing the devil advocate).
And what I have found is that, for the common user it is most of the time it’s ease of use which is the main thing, and there after applications, most people do not mind OpenOffice>, FireFox, and Thunderbird, but they want their OS to work – that is with all the weird hardware addons they can buy in the local hardware store.
For the corporate user; it a different story all together, companies mostly rely on applications which are not available for any other OS than the one they use. Sometimes they can get around it and move the applications to a web based solution, but that is not always the case, and in some cases that does not even help, as some web applications require Microsoft Internet Explorer (version x.xx, and not y.yy, with Microsoft JVM, and not Sun JVM, and specifically not IBM JVM).
As Adrian points out, there is a huge thing which most advocates for OpenSource sometime forget; Support (not only the free variant), no one is willing to pay for support, that is the end user, corporations know that they need it, I know that for RedHat and Novell SuSE (SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) provide pay for support, and if one buys a box distribution for specifically for consumers there might be 90 days phone installation support, but it is not always the case (correct me if I’m wrong). And in most cases the support is based on installation only, not support for X usb device, or Y harddisk controler.
Then we are back at “what does Microsoft provide”, not much I’m afraid, but most hardware works with Microsoft (they probably sponsor hardware vendors), and “everyone knows Windows“, which means that if you buy into the Microsoft family you know that the next door neighbor probably will have a 15 year old kid who can help you for a small amount of money, or just for the kick of helping you out.
So what do we have left; we don’t want Microsoft Windows, and we cannot really get people to use GNU/Linux as it not ready for consumer use (I’m playing the devils advocate here), well there is Apple, they have a nifty thing called OSX (pronounced: OS 10), which is Unix, with a (in my eyes) cool graphical interface, it works, and in many cases it’s very stable. Yes there might be some issues with hardware addon’s and other things, but in general terms it works. As Adrian points out you pay for it, it’s not being sold separately so you’ll have to by the hardware from Apple for a fairly high price – read: you buy in to Apple, and stay there, well that is a truth with modifications, these days you can run Microsoft Windows on your Mac (and also Linux), so do as the Apple PC looks cool – a very expensive way to look cool, but we all have our faults.
Back to the question of GNU/Linux, well it have come a long way, someone pointed out to me the other week that Microsoft Windows 1.x wasn’t that workable either, and that it have come a long way – yes it have, and yes it does work in an environment where everyone plays by the rules, that is follow the standards, do not use any extensions which a specific to one OS only, then GNU/Linux will work just fine, and when ever the Graphic Card vendors get around to write drivers which are working, then things would be even better. But we do not live in a perfect world (wouldn’t that be nice), so we have to adapt. I use GNU/Linux on one desktop as I have applications which only run on that, and I use Microsoft Windows when I need Microsoft Internet Explorer, and mostly I use OSX as that is the common nominator where most of everything works (in some way, with a bit help), and because I still have a terminal which can do what I need.
I wrote this on my Macbook Pro, using Firefox, sitting on my balcony – how cool is that:-)
As I was reading Slashdot I saw a link to this article on LinuxWorld AU about driver support on GNU/Linux, and it seams that things a moving forward on that issue.
And I did not even get around to moan about stability, viruses, and what ever other nasty things are out there, and why it’s “GNU/Linux” and not “Linux”.
technorati tags: Ian Betteridge, OpenSource, OSX, Apple, GNU/Linux, Linux
Posted in apple, hardware, linux, os, osx, software | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 |
What can one say, there is never enough space on a Harddrive (especially in a Notebook), luckily WesternDigital have come up with a solution for that. Yesterday they started shipping a 250GB 2.5″ (WD Scorpio WD2500BEVS) drive.
And at a suggested retailprice of $199, it’s a bargain.
technorati tags: Harddrive
Posted in hardware | No Comments »