[NBLUG/talk] The Upgrade

[Scott Doty]

Hi, thought I'd share my experiences upgrading my Linux workstation at home.

Was:  Pentium 3 450 MHz w/128MB RAM, SB AWE64
Now:  Pentium 4 2.4 GHz w/1GB RAM, SB Audigy

I dropped my system off at Pine Tree Computers to do the core upgrade.  Since
my sound card was ISA (SB AWE64), I had to get a new sound card.  After some
research, I selected a SB Audigy -- not the Audigy 2, but just the plain ol'
Audigy.  (The original Audigy has better driver support than the A2.)  You
can get these off of pricewatch.com.

I was planning on still using my Voodoo 3 for a while on the new system, but
it turns out it isn't compatible with the motherboard.  (The motherboard had
a 2x/4x AGP slot, but the V3 was original AGP.)  So after more research, I
got a video card off of pricewatch:  Albatron Geforce 4 ti4600.  That went
in a few days later -- for a few days, I was stuck with the onboard video.

I'm running RedHat 9, which uses "kudzu", their hardware configuration tool. 
Kudzu did its job, selecting the proper X driver in /etc/X11/XF86Config. 
It didn't give me an option to select a resolution, so I had to edit the
file manually.  Problem:  it wouldn't do my favorite resolution for my
monitor, 1152x864.  So, I had to settle with 1024x768.

Then I had to get the Audigy up and running.  I tried various drivers that
came with the kernel, but none worked (including the emu10k1 driver in the
kernel).  So I had to use the module available at

   http://sourceforge.net/projects/emu10k1

...which is linked to from the http://opensource.creative.com page.

That works great, and even supports up to 32 opens to /dev/dsp for writing. 
(In other words: 32 "voices"...you can be playing an mp3 and have an alert
sound pop up, for instance.)  However, I am concerned that such a popular
sound card would require a driver off the net -- I'm not sure if RedHat
wouldn't have detected it and just made it work.  But, I run my own kernels,
so I have to install such modules by hand.

(I was concerned about enabling module support in my kernel, but felt better
when I discovered that autoloading could be disabled.  So I just load the
modules in /etc/rc.d/rc.local -- works fine.)

So things were spiffy, then my new Geforce 4 ti4600 arrived.  Physical
installation worked just fine.  However, kudzu died with an "illegal
instruction" error when it went to do its updates.  Thus, I had to configure
/etc/X11/XF86Config by hand.  This wasn't _too_ challenging -- first I went
to http://www.xfree.org and looked up the driver for the card.

The Nvidia driver is called "nv".  Set that up in XF86Config, and X came up.
Things seemed fine -- until I saw a visual bell light off in an xterm.  The
"visual bell" effect is supposed to blink the terminal -- but it took about
a second to inverse the text and then bring it back to normal.

I also discovered that when I minimized windows (which invokes a twirly
effect using the Animate module of AfterStep), it would take a full 10
seconds to complete the operation.

Conclusion:  the "nv" driver that comes with xfree86 is sub-optimal.  I was
concerned until a buddy in irc suggested getting the driver from Nvidia. 
(Yes, Nvidia has an X driver! -- driver name: "nvidia".) This is a kernel
module and the X driver itself, which I installed without a hitch.  I had
just one problem: the 1152x864 mode that came up was 60Hz refresh.

Ugh!  Flicker city!

Some investigation revealed that the modeline for the 70Hz refresh 1152x864
mode had numbers that weren't evenly divisible by 8 (which the card
and the driver expect).  Changed the one number, and the 70Hz mode came up.
Whew!

And that is where I am now.  Only other stuff to do was fiddling mop-up
things, like recompiling mplayer to support the new processor.  All-in-all,
this went _much_ smoother than my subsequent update/upgrade of Windows. 

(W98 was locking up while telling me about all the drivers it needed --
things like "PCI to PCI Bridge" -- in other words, the mobo swap blew it's
beady little brain to flinders.  A blow-by-blow of what I went through to
get W2K pro installed on the thing would be much longer than this note, and
outside the scope of the mailing list.)

Finally, I'd like to mention that the tool set, DSP assembler, and existing
DSP patches that come with the sourceforge emu10k1 driver (for the SB
Audigy) could be a tremendous timesink for folks interested in designing
their own audio effects.  (Or playing with what already exists.) I intend to
play with them, just as soon as I've all played otu Battlefield 1942 -- the
very game that was the reason for upgrading the system in the first place.

Take care,

 -Scott