Hello developers,
Carolina 007 (and all releases in its history and all those of Saluki) would not boot from CD on my desktop rig.
Configuration:
* mobo: Gigabyte P55-UD3L
* proc: i5
* vid: Radeon 5770
* A/V: HDMI
The following explains my struggle to achieve a working system with this hardware. See the report below for system configuration details.
Problem 1: Booting from a CD faulted with Carolina not being able to read its own *.sfs files from the CD. Pete22 had a similar (?) issue on p44 earlier in this thread, but it was first reported by superchook in this thread:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=84381. It does not yet appear to be completely resolved. -- something to do with a HD access race condition or such. Taking that hint, I created a folder and extracted Carolina's *.sfs files to it. Rebooting from the CD was then completed through a frugal install.
Request: If there is some timing feature in the boot process that can be changed, please fix it so other noobs like me can ejoy the glorious experience of Carolina. I will be happy to test and report.
Problem 2: Video was ridiculously slow even though this rig has medium spec's. After updating the repositories I found no valid AMD-Catalyst (fglrx) driver for my Radeon Evergreen/Juniper/5770 video card. Trying all of the fglrx drivers I could find in ibiblio or nluug did not work either. Serendipidously, I found a driver that works from "Akita" Puppy blogs, but see Problem 3.
Request: Please place a vetted set of AMD drivers in the repository. "jpup" on p37 of this thread also had to find his own Catlyst driver work around.
Problem 3: No HDMI audio. -- no surprise here. The Akita driver lacked the prompt to drop to the CLI and reboot after entering "aticonfig --initial" (no quotes) but I knew this was needed from installing other puppies and derivatives. There is some fussiness with configuring Alsa and Retrovol and rebooting once or twice to get "PCM" selected in Retrovol so that volume control will behave.
Note: It may be important, for those with desktop rigs that are similarly equiped, to do a fresh install in the same order as the problems/solutions listed herein to avoid such nuisances as hyper-fast YouTube video and lost sound.
Problem 4: Full screen display is not persistent with HDMI. In the Catalyst window, "underscan" setting is ignored. The solution, also from puppy blogs, is to enter the following code in a terminal and then restart X from the session control menu: amdconfig --set-pcs-val=MCIL,DigitalHDTVDefaultUnderscan,0
Carolina is indeed worthy of all the praise that has been heaped upon it!
Developers: Please keep making this pup more and more excellent. No pressure, but with the departure of Saluki, You've got the ball!
ABBREVIATED "LIGHTHOUSE" REPORT:
=== sys-info 0.6 === Sat 25 May 2013 on Linux 3.2.13-ski ===
=== report-video ===
Chip description:
0.0 VGA compatible controller
ATI Technologies Inc Juniper [Radeon HD 5700 Series]
oem: ATI ATOMBIOS
product: JUNIPER 01.00
X.Org version: 1.11.0
dimensions: 1920x1080 pixels (507x285 millimeters)
depth of root window: 24 planes
Release Date: 2011-08-26
=== /etc/rc.d/PUPSTATE ===
PUPMODE=12
PDEV1=''
DEV1FS=''
PUPSFS='sda3,ext4,/Carolina_007/puppy_lina_007.sfs'
PUPSAVE='sda3,ext4,/Carolina_007/linasave.2fs'
PMEDIA='cd'
#ATADRIVES is all internal ide/pata/sata drives, excluding optical, excluding usb...
ATADRIVES='sda '
#ATAOPTICALDRIVES is list of non-usb optical drives...
ATAOPTICALDRIVES=''
#these directories are unionfs/aufs layers in /initrd...
SAVE_LAYER='/pup_rw'
PUP_LAYER='/pup_ro2'
#The partition that has the linasave file is mounted here...
PUP_HOME='/mnt/dev_save'
#(in /initrd) ...note, /mnt/home is a link to it.
#this file has extra kernel drivers and firmware...
ZDRV='sda3,ext4,/Carolina_007/zdrv_lina_007.sfs'
ADRV='sda3,ext4,/Carolina_007/adrv_lina_007.sfs'
#complete set of modules in the initrd (moved to main f.s.)...
ZDRVINIT='no'
#Partition no. override on boot drive to which session is (or will be) saved...
PSAVEMARK=''
=== probepart ===
/dev/sda1|ntfs|519639040
/dev/sda2|ext4|104052734
/dev/sda3|ext4|37482496
=== df -h ===
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 18G 12G 5.5G 68% /initrd/mnt/dev_save
/dev/loop1 1008M 217M 792M 22% /initrd/pup_rw
/dev/loop0 70M 70M 0 100% /initrd/pup_ro2
/dev/loop3 25M 25M 0 100% /initrd/pup_z
/dev/loop2 246M 246M 0 100% /initrd/pup_a
unionfs 1008M 217M 792M 22% /
tmpfs 1013M 248K 1013M 1% /tmp
shmfs 1006M 0 1006M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2 50G 18G 30G 37% /mnt/sda2
=== dmesg ===
[ 0.000000] Linux version 3.2.13-ski (root@puppypc23695) (gcc version 4.3.4 (GCC) ) #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Mar 27 22:26:10 EEST 2012
[ 0.000000] DMI 2.4 present.
[ 0.000000] DMI: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. P55-UD3L/P55-UD3L, BIOS F4b 01/18/2010
[ 0.000000] Using ACPI (MADT) for SMP configuration information
[ 0.000000] SMP: Allowing 8 CPUs, 4 hotplug CPUs
[ 0.000000] Kernel command line: video=640x480 initrd=initrd.gz pmedia=cd vga=0x311 BOOT_IMAGE=vmlinuz
[ 0.000000] PID hash table entries: 4096 (order: 2, 16384 bytes)
[ 0.000000] Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode...Ok.
[ 0.006666] Detected 2660.364 MHz processor.
[ 0.547284] Total of 4 processors activated (21287.52 BogoMIPS).
[ 0.549776] devtmpfs: initialized
[ 2.095873] sda: sda1 sda2 sda3
[ 2.374324] Fusion MPT base driver 3.04.20
[ 12.147328] r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver 2.3LK-NAPI loaded
[ 12.182697] HDMI status: Codec=0 Pin=3 Presence_Detect=0 ELD_Valid=0
[ 12.182763] input: HD-Audio Generic HDMI/DP,pcm=3 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.0/0000:01:00.1/sound/card0/input4
[ 12.492872] input: PC Speaker as /devices/platform/pcspkr/input/input5
[ 15.625751] HDMI hot plug event: Codec=0 Pin=3 Presence_Detect=1 ELD_Valid=0
[ 15.625766] HDMI status: Codec=0 Pin=3 Presence_Detect=1 ELD_Valid=1
[ 15.626193] HDMI hot plug event: Codec=0 Pin=3 Presence_Detect=0 ELD_Valid=1
[ 22.739316] hda-intel: IRQ timing workaround is activated for card #0. Suggest a bigger bdl_pos_adj.
[ 22.922854] vattery-acpitoo[3656]: segfault at 0 ip b6daa41c sp bfd7753c error 4 in libc-2.10.1.so[b6d7c000+13a000]
[ 27.330972] r8169 0000:03:00.0: eth0: link up
=== User Installed Pkgs (PPM) ===
Package Description
ati_fglrx-12.10-k2.6.25.16-akita Allows the configuration of the AMD graphics hardware settings.
=== xdriinfo ===
X Error of failed request: BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 138 (ATIFGLEXTENSION)
Minor opcode of failed request: 66 ()
Serial number of failed request: 10
Current serial number in output stream: 10
=== report-video ===
# This loads dri module (if present). 7.4 loads it by default, have to disable... change "Disable" to "Load" if reqd...
Load "dbe" # Double buffer extension
SubSection "extmod"
Option "omit xfree86-dga" # don't initialise the DGA extension
EndSubSection
Load "glx" #LOADGLX
Load "dri" #LOADDRI
EndSection
=== /var/log/Xorg.0.log ===
[ 14.213]
X.Org X Server 1.11.0
Release Date: 2011-08-26
sys-info 0.6 - LHP System Information by TazOC
lhpup.org or lighthouselinux.com License: GPL version 3 or any later version.
Lighthouse sys-info and report-video are based on the original report-video
by Barry Kauler - bkhome.org
=== End of Report === sys-info 0.6 Sat 25 May 2013 ===