40.43 Dell Optiplex GX270 (Athene)
Athene was first a desktop development machine with 1GB of memory, a 120GB SATA hard disk, and a Sound Blaster Live! (Dell) sound card. After three years of service, including supporting a web server and mail server, it was retired in November 2007, to become an Internet desktop running Ubuntu.
An install using the beta4 Debian Installer, booting from CD-ROM, was
performed (19 May 2004). Attempt to install a 2.6 kernel (linux26)
failed to find the SATA drives. So the standard 2.4 kernel was used.
This does support SATA but it identified the drive as an IDE, hence it
became /dev/hda. On upgrading to kernel 2.6.6, which the identifies it
as a SCSI, fails to boot since it can’t find the /dev/hda. This
required, after installing kernel-image-2.6.6-1-686-smp,
telling grub that for this kernel the root file system is now
root=/dev/sda by editting /boot/grub/menu.lst. Also,
edit /etc/fstab to mount /dev/sda as /.
Alternatively, the Dell oriented Debian Installer can be used (from {http://wiki.osuosl.org/display/LNX/Debian+on+Dell+Servers}) to install a 2.4 kernel which identifies the SATA as SCSI. This was then the installation that remained with Athene.
A further problem was that the BIOS (A03) did not report the right amount of VideoRam (even after setting it to 8MB in the BIOS setup). Consequently X11 could not get a decent resolution. A service call to Dell resulted in a gx270sea.exe BIOS update which fixed the problem. An alternative fix was the 865patch Debian package which provides a software fix to the problem without having to fiddle with the BIOS.
An official BIOS A04 was released and installed, and video memory fix
was apparent as was DRI now working. It is also worth noting that Dell
have released a project called biosdisk:
$ wget http://linux.dell.com/biosdisk/biosdisk-0.4.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf biosdisk-0.4.tar.gz
$ cd biosdisk-0.4
$ sudo sh install.sh
$ cd ../
Place a floppy disk in the drive
$ sudo biosdisk GX270A04.EXE
Then reboot your system from the floppyYou can also add a Grub menu item to boot from hard disk, loading the BIOS update!
On upgrading to Kernel 2.6.6 the DVD/CD was not being recognised. The
old ide-scsi is now deprecated for cd burning. Needed to
add ide-generic and ide-cd to
/etc/modules, which can also be done manually with
modprobe:
The DVD/CD is then identified as /dev/hdc. To allow general
CDROM access the group of this device was changed to cdrom
(from disk):
The CD can then be mounted, perhaps by an appropriate link:
Use cdrecord to check for the SCSI view of the device:
Tools like gnomebaker should also find the appropriate device. Using the common cdrecord the device is specified as in:
After 18 months of usage the hard drive started failing.
From /var/log/syslog the following messages were regularly
being reported, and whilst these were being reported the computer froze:
...: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
...: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
...: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
...: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
...: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
...: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
...: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
...: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
...: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
...: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
...: sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x8000002
...: sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
...: Additional sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed
...: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 193611904 Luckily, the original order included 3 years gold service. After making contact with Dell they immediately couriered a replacement hard drive, a Western Digital WD1600JS. No SATA cable though so had to buy one while I had both drives in the machine. The old drive was duplicated on the new drive as described in Section ??.
In January 2006 the mouse died. Could still move it about but button clicks seemed to send extra stuff? Replacing with an older USB mouse and all was okay after a reboot, but replace with hte broken mouse and it failed. Once again, Dell were very quick to courier a replacement mouse.
In December 2007 Ubuntu was installed and the machine became an internet desktop.
In December 2009 after an upgrade in Ubuntu (to 9.10) the user account lost access to sound and no auto started applications auto started. It turned out that through gdm the failsafe GNOME option had been triggered and resetting this to GNOME instead restored a fully operational login.
40.43.1 Athene Specifications
From the lspci and lshw commands and
/proc/cpuinfo:
| Key | Value |
|---|---|
| Machine: | OptiPlex GX270 |
| CPU: | Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz |
| Bogomips: | 5980 |
| Memory: | 1GB |
| Network: | 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (e1000) |
| Disk: | ATA Maxtor 6Y120M0 120GB /dev/sda (15G/92G/5G) |
| Video: | Intel 82865G Integrated Graphics Device (i810) |
| Audio: | Creative Labs [SB Live! Value] (snd_emu10k1x) |
| CD/DVD: | NEC DVD+RW ND-2100AD 103D |
Hostname: | athens Domainname: | togaware.com
Boot: | Grub Kernel: | 2.6.7-1-686-smp, 2.4.25
40.43.3 Troubleshooting
40.43.3.1 Dell SBLive Sound Card
The sound card turns out not to be a real SB Live! soundcard, and was not originally supported by GNU/Linux. The onboard sound card which worked just fine, although it does not have the features of the SB Live! This means that you can’t listen to Audio CD music directly, since the drive is plugged into the broken sound card.
Newer versions of the kernel do support the sound card (at least from 2.6.11). The two soundcards are identified:
$ lspci | grep audio
0000:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp.
82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
0000:01:07.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs
[SB Live! Value] EMU10k1XSee Section ?? for details on setting up the sound cards.
Some applications play badly on the SB Live! sound card. It is very choppy (e.g., with realplay for example, but not xmms). This is fixed, it seems, by sending output to the OSS driver rather than the ALSA driver.
Since there are two soundcards in the machine, the simplest approach
to making the SB Live! the default is to add both soundcards to
/etc/modprobe.d/sound:
alias snd-card-0 snd-emu10k1x
options snd-emu10k1x index=0
alias snd-card-1 snd-intel8x0
options snd-intel8x0 index=1This seemed to only work randomly. So add snd_intel8x0 to
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to see if that helps.
40.43.3.2 Unsupported DVD+RWs
With the NEC DVD+RW ND-2100AD, Imation branded DVD+RWs can not be written. TDK and Verbatim work just fine. The Imation disks are identified as below:
$ dvd+rw-mediainfo /dev/dvd
INQUIRY: [_NEC ][DVD+RW ND-2100AD][103D]
GET [CURRENT] CONFIGURATION:
Mounted Media: 1Ah, DVD+RW
GET [CURRENT] PERFORMANCE:
Write Performance: 3.9x1385=5408KB/s@[0 -> 1]
Speed Descriptor#0: 03/1 R@3.9x1385=5408KB/s W@3.9x1385=5408KB/s
Speed Descriptor#1: 03/1 R@2.3x1385=3245KB/s W@2.3x1385=3245KB/s
READ DISC INFORMATION:
Disc status: blank
Number of Sessions: 1
State of Last Session: empty
Number of Tracks: 1
READ TRACK INFORMATION[#1]:
Track State: blank
Track Start Address: 0*2KB
Next Writable Address: 0*2KB
Free Blocks: 2295104*2KB
Track Size: 2295104*2KB
READ CAPACITY: 1*2048=2048A Verbatim DVD+RW delivers the same output except:
$ dvd+rw-mediainfo /dev/dvd
...
GET [CURRENT] PERFORMANCE:
Write Performance: 3.9x1385=5408KB/s@[0 -> 2288576]
Speed Descriptor#0: 03/2288576 R@3.9x1385=5408KB/s W@3.9x1385=5408KB/s
Speed Descriptor#1: 03/2288576 R@2.3x1385=3245KB/s W@2.3x1385=3245KB/s
READ DVD STRUCTURE[#0h]:
Media Book Type: 92h, DVD+RW book [revision 2]
Media ID: MKM/A02
Legacy lead-out at: 2288576*2KB=4687003648
...
Track Size: 2288576*2KB
...
READ CAPACITY: 2295104*2048=4700372992Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
