Hi All,

Just currious about a couple things in my new Slack installation. Searched threads and don't find any similar answers.

1. I have two CD/DVD drives, one DVD R/W, the other DVD/CD R/W. Only one is recognized in Slack which can only be mounted by root.

2. I have 1.5GB of physical memory. Slack only recognizes 896MB.

3. I have onboard ethernet and a PCI ehternet card. Only the PCI card is recognized.

4. cdrecord -scanbus returns information about my SATA hard drives. No mention of the CD drive.

5. The system fonts under X are terrible. I have not found a setting to change or improve them. When I installed, I was given a choice of fonts, but they ALL appeared exactly the same, so I just chose the first one on the list.

None of these things are an issue in Fedora, but I really want to get to know Slack and learn from it. Any ideas why these things are not recognized in Slack?

Any help very much appreciated.

Bob

1. Look through the output of dmesg to see what device names are given to the drives, you may need to mount the other dvd drive by using /dev/hdc or whatever name it has been given rather than /dev/dvd

2. Recompile the kernel enabling himem support

3. More information required (chipset) you might need to install some vendor drivers or similar

5. Install some truetype fonts

Have a read of http://www.slackbook.org/html/index.html, to help with some of your more common problems

Edit: compiling and installing a 2.6 kernel may solve a lot of problems if your using more modern hardware

Thank you very much. That is very helpful. Just the kind of information I was hoping for...just a link to teach myself.

Bob

The dmesg returns almost entirely information about hotplugging (USB/PCI) and indicates autoprobe failed, no ATAPI devices found.

Not much help there. The Tulip driver seems to control just about everything.

Bob

Hi again Bob

If your CD/DVD drives are IDE devices (which I suspect from the problems you're having with cdrecord), the one that is recognised is probably /dev/hdc (2nd IDE bus, master device), which /dev/cdrom is a symlink to. Note the corresponding line in /etc/fstab. Your second drive is probably /dev/hdd. These are the /etc/fstab lines from one of my systems with a CD-R/W and DVD-ROM:

(had to make the /mnt/dvd directory myself)

Note also the addition of "users" in the 4th column - this allows regular users to mount/umount the drives. The alternative is to add your user to the group that owns the drives (see man groupmod).

Does the onboard NIC show up in the output of lspci -v?

I have had trouble using cdrecord with IDE drives. However, GUI cd burning proggies like k3b have no trouble, so I guess that's more an effect of my inability to correctly use cdrecord .

If you want to install truetype fonts, copy the .ttf files to /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/TTF/ and run fc-cache.

Oh, sorry I forgot, for the 2.4 kernel series you need to use scsi emulation for your rewriter drives.

http://www.usafirst.net/users/welker/ide-cd_burner.html

I know it says its for Slackware 8, but it is still relevant. Again check dmesg (pipe it through less) to read it all to see which device names are assigned to your burners because I'm pretty sure they weren't scd0 for me back when I used the 2.4 kernel series

For point 4.

Talking about fonts, run pkgtool and check if you have x11-fonts installed (especially x11-fonts-scale). Truetype is included there. As well you can get additional fonts from Tex(Latex) packages if you have them installed.

Hi, thanks for responding.

Yes the on-board Marvell ethernet shows up in lspci. Add the line following to /etc/fstab:

/dev/hdd /mnt/dvd auto noauto,owner,users 0 0

It does not mount. I am sure I have to discover where the other cd/dvd writer is assigned and make a link to it.

The first drive mounts fine, but it is assigned /dev/cdrom, not hdc.

Thanks for your help.

Bob

do a $dmesg |grep CD or DVD
then u can get the devices or if u r not getting it $dmesg |more and scroll this is out from my comp
-----------
rkrishna@rkrishna:~$ dmesg |grep CD
hdd: GCR-8521B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: ATAPI 52X CD-ROM drive, 128kB Cache, DMA
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
---------
ssimilarly u wil get two devices
some hdc and hdd, here my cdrom drive is hdd
say if ur second device is hdc, then for smooth working
"cd /dev ",make a simlink "ln -sf hdc dvd" now u have /dev/dvd pointing to ur 2nd device,
then edit fstab for permenent setup
"/dev/dvd /mnt/dvd auto noauto,users 0 0"
both owner and user are not needed (create a dvd dir in /mnt)
which one, writer or reader??
say ur 2nd is writer, u haev to add line in lilo for scsi emulaton, otherwise "cdrecord scanbus" will show error.
for writting, i hope k3b, will do all the job and it will automatically find the device and show u(while running "k3bsetup")

but appending lilo and making things according to u, is slackers way!! so, we have many threads relating this, plz go through tht in this forum

if u find trouble i can help u
what is "cat /proc/meminfo" shows.
other problems i cant help
regards

it is not /dev/cdrom, device may be hdc or hdd, /dev/cdrom is a simlink to this, u can check tht by "ls -al /dev/cdrom"

first get what all r ur devices and then do the job
regards

edt: as root
eject /dev/hdc or /dev/hdd u can c if u have any errors

Can you post the Marvell relevant output from lspci -v? Also, what command are you using to try and mount your second CD/DVD drive? You don't actually need the symlink, the /dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdc link is really for convenience (possibly to provide a device agnostic device path for simplicity). You could mount the drive directly thus:

To trim some of the cruft from the output of dmesg, try

Failing that, there's always ide_info:

substitute /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, /dev/hdd as desired.

As for the memory thing, the stock Slack 2.4 (and the 2.6 "testing") kernels don't have HIGHMEM turned on, you'll need to roll your own.

it is only for "4 gb or more" less than 4 u dont need to enable tht

this is for security. better create that.

Thanks odevans and rkrishna

I will try these things and get back to you. I also need to change my keyboard layout to UK. Some ofthe neccessary keys are not even showing up (i.e. the pipe command, isn't on the keyboard). I will figure it out.

Thanks for the help

Bob

Are you sure about that? My experience is exactly opposite. I believe that the 4GB (and 16GB? been a while sine I rolled a kernel) are upper limits, not lower. I have a couple of systems with >1GB RAM (but <4GB) that will not use all the mem if HIGHMEM is not set.

Also, could you expand on your explanation that the /dev/cdrom symlink is created for security, I'm not following you.

Bob, that's sort of bizarre about not having the | key. Can't recall having seen a keyb--neither US or GB that didn't have it (with the possible exception of my old Amstrad CPC). It may look like two dashes -- (but vertical).