Best hardware probing live-distro?
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From: tim.izod on 6 Nov 2009 08:44 On 5 Nov, 12:08, Dave Farrance <DaveFarra...(a)OMiTTHiSyahooANDTHiS.co.uk> wrote: > I've just bought an Acer Aspire Revo R3610 "net-top" computer (at only > £160!) with Linpus Linux preinstalled. Unfortunately, it's only driving > my 1920x1080 Asus VH242H monitor at a resolution of 1024x768, and offers > no higher resolution, despite being connected by HDMI. I'll replace > Linpus with another distro, but I'd like to do some hardware probing > first. > > I downloaded the latest Knoppix (v6.01) and saved it to a flash and booted > from that. Unfortunately, it's not the Knoppix that I remember from years > gone by. It seems OK for office apps and simple browsing, but not for > probing the hardware, peripherals and network. Which live-distro would do > that these days? > > -- > Dave Farrance lspci/ lsusb (or cat /proc/pci etc.) from any boot disk should give you a good idea of what's in the machine. A small install of distro-of- choice to a USB stick or bus powered USB drive seems to be the most useful way to test whether a given machine will work. FWIW I've got one of these Revos too and having installed Debian Sid (booted from USB disk and debootstrapped) everything (disk/ USB/ wireless/ bluetooth/ sound/ wired ethernet) apart from graphics works fine. The xorg nv in Sid doesn't work with the chipset in these. There are bugs in Debian bug tracking system and reported upstream. The low res is because it'll be using xorg vesa - by default it's only offering me 1280x1024 and 1024x768. A small xorg.conf was needed to specify vesa instead of (not working) nv. Nouveau is, if I've understood what I've read, able to drive these but haven't got round to building yet to try it. If it works a sucess story will get posted some time next week..... Tim
From: Dave Farrance on 6 Nov 2009 09:00 "Geoffrey Clements" <geoffrey.clementsNO(a)SPAMbaesystems.com> wrote: >I'm not sure, by the time I've checked tonight you'll have probably d/l'd it >anyway but it's good to have something like this lurking around for when >things get really borked, it's useful for (*spit*) Windows PCs as well. Yes. This "System Rescue CD" 1.3.1 has all the usual command-line stuff, so I can use it to fix partitions etc. The graphical stuff is very limited, with hardly any apps, but at least it does have gtk-lshw (the graphical version of the hardware probe that Glyn Millington mentioned). And at least it is possible to boot it into a desktop, on this new machine of mine with its nVidia ION graphics processor, if Xvesa rather than Xorg is selected from the X start wizard. A distro I've found that *would* have been excellent if I'd been able to start it is Puppy Linux 4.3.1. This is a small (105Mb) distro that loads itself entirely into RAM from the CD or flash, and yet manages to have a whole bunch of X apps including hardware probing and network exploring. I've tested it on another PC but it crashes on my new machine whether I choose Xorg or Xvesa. I guess that the ION GPU is still too new. I've managed to fix the original issue with Linpus Linux not showing the full display resolution by modding xorg.conf manually, but I suspect that the graphics will fight back when I try installing one of the main Linux distros. -- Dave Farrance
From: Dave Farrance on 6 Nov 2009 11:36 "tim.izod(a)googlemail.com" <tim.izod(a)googlemail.com> wrote: >FWIW I've got one of these Revos too and having installed Debian Sid >(booted from USB disk and debootstrapped) everything (disk/ USB/ >wireless/ bluetooth/ sound/ wired ethernet) apart from graphics works >fine. > >The xorg nv in Sid doesn't work with the chipset in these. There are >bugs in Debian bug tracking system and reported upstream. The low res >is because it'll be using xorg vesa - by default it's only offering me >1280x1024 and 1024x768. A small xorg.conf was needed to specify vesa >instead of (not working) nv. > >Nouveau is, if I've understood what I've read, able to drive these but >haven't got round to building yet to try it. If it works a sucess >story will get posted some time next week..... I've just installed Mandriva 2010.0 in a separate partition, and set it up for dual boot. I picked Mandriva simply because that's what I've used before, and since I suspected that I'd be dropped to text mode for a while then it would be useful to have a distro for which I was familiar with its command-line package-management and text-console configuration center. Anyway, Mandriva's install selected the "nv" or "GeForce 6100 and later" driver and did indeed drop back to text. I found that "Geforce nouveau driver experimental" was an option, so I tried that and it locked up. I found that the vesa driver allowed me to start X, but the 1920x1080 was rescaled down to a smaller size box, which looked bad. I switched back to "nv", thinking to try altering some of the options, and then it offered me the option of downloading the proprietary version (I was using Mandriva Free), so I accepted that. It downloaded, compiled (evidently not a binary for some reason) and when I restarted X, all was fine. I don't know if the h.264 video codec hardware acceleration is working. I'm having a hard time finding freely downloadable h.264 videos, being diverted by attack sites and sites scamming payments for royalty-free videos. -- Dave Farrance
From: jasee on 4 Dec 2009 11:57
Geoffrey Clements wrote: > "Dave Farrance" <DaveFarrance(a)OMiTTHiSyahooANDTHiS.co.uk> wrote in > message news:2g46f5h4gtu90hfl3eg669pbh5dhr6k2rr(a)4ax.com... >> Dave Farrance <DaveFarrance(a)OMiTTHiSyahooANDTHiS.co.uk> wrote: >> >>> I downloaded the latest Knoppix (v6.01) and saved it to a flash and >>> booted from that. Unfortunately, it's not the Knoppix that I >>> remember from years gone by. It seems OK for office apps and >>> simple browsing, but not for probing the hardware, peripherals and >>> network. Which live-distro would do that these days? >> >> Just to make it clear, I mean a swiss-knife type distro with apps for >> probing the hardware, peripherals and network and reporting useful >> information rather than the boot-up probing. Not the distro that >> I'll eventually install. >> > > http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page > > Although I'm not sure if it's got everything you want. This is pretty good: contains dd, ddrescue AND dd_rescue! Seems to be pretty fast as well and does not contain a lot of unnecessary programs or fancy graphical features: the latest Knoppix is terrible in that way. Windows that bend as you move them, commands that explode in puffs of smoke and all windows are transparent (of course). |