1. Are there any software tools to test my new hardware? I'm not looking for benchmarking as much as testing. For example, I'd like to test the CPU cooler fan and temps. I have an AMD BE-2400 dual core. With Q-Fan enabled in the BIOS the CPU cooler fan runs around 1600-1700 rpm. Quiet. I'd like to stress the CPU to test the CPU heating and the fan spinning faster. I prefer to do this within a desktop environment where I can watch kima or gkrellm fan speed and motherboard/CPU temps. There is no Windows installed on this box, therefore those tools are unavailable to me. Solved, more or less. Read further in this thread.

2. I have a new Western Digital Caviar SE16 320GB SATA hard drive. I've run hdparm -tT, but have no idea whether the numbers are accurate for this drive. This is a 3 Gbps (375 MBps) drive and the motherboard supports 3 Gbps. Copying from one drive to another (an IDE/PATA Seagate Barracuda IV ATA-100) is snappy, but I nonetheless would like to know what kind of numbers to expect.

3. I do not think AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) is enabled on the new drive. The drive supports the feature and hdparm -I confirms this. According to the hdparm help screen the -M 128 option should enable AAM, but I would appreciate somebody confirming this is all I have to do. Solved. Read further in this thread.

4. Running hdparm -i on this new SATA drive does not reveal the DMA mode of the drive (no asterisks anywhere). Should this information be reported or are SATA drives unique? Solved. Read further in this thread.

5. Running "ancient" hardware until recently leaves me with no clue about udev. With my old static hardware I never ran udev. With the stock huge kernel the SATA drive is not automatically mounted anywhere. (The IDE drive mounts fine.) I prefer mapping to a specific mount point. How do I do this?

6. I bought a 1 GB USB stick to help me learn about the new hardware. GParted showed the stick formatted to FAT16 but I reformatted to FAT32 and then EXT3. Everything worked fine when I tested copying and deleting files. However, I have no clue how to get the stick to automatically mount or appear on the KDE desktop. I have rc.udev, rc.hald, and rc.messagebus executable. I have a plugdev group with users added. Solved, more or less. Read further in this thread.

7. Similarly, I do not yet grasp how to auto mount CDs or DVDs in my new DVD drive. With my old hardware I manually mounted with fstab and kwikdisk, doable but with the new hardware I prefer to finally auto mount. I don't want CDs or DVDs bugging me with auto-play crap, just auto mount and be available when I access the disk. Solved, more or less. Read further in this thread.

8. I recompiled the kernel to include lm-sensors support for my M2NPV-VM motherboard. Kima and gkrellm show the sensors. I need to create a sensors.conf file to override the default names. However, I do not know which sensor is which. Additionally, the gkrellm temperature outputs are different from the BIOS. Which should I believe? I tend to believe the BIOS numbers, so what do I do next? Solved. Read further in this thread.

I'm sure there are threads and web sites addressing these issues. Pointing me to them is fine. I just need help and direction with dealing with all of this new hardware. Please understand that technology has passed me by the past few years while I remained content with old hardware, but all of this entirely new to me now. Running old hardware was far less complicated, but now I need to get up to speed.

Thanks again.

Hi,

For hardware monitoring under Linux I think the following will be of great help:
http://www.lm-sensors.org/
As for stressing the cpu, try searching sourceforge for things like cpu burn-in and/or mersenne prime number software.

Best of luck,

Hi,

From a hardware stand point for the 'hdparm', I would use the 'I' switch;
Sounds like a sweet system and I know the drive is good drive.
You didn't state which Motherboard. That is where I would start.

Have you added the users to /etc/group cdrom (and audio and video)?

don't forget plugdev, cdrom and plugdev are the important ones. The HAL sticky tread should have all the info you need.

He already did that

I was finally able to configure lm-sensors this afternoon and thereafter gkrellm. Relabeling the sensor names is somewhat a hit-and-miss operation. However, I think I now have everything configured correctly.

I will look at some of that down the road. Coincidentally, in another thread I mentioned I discovered how to use both cores of my new CPU during kernel compiling. During that operation my CPU cooler fan speed did increase modestly as well as the CPU temperature. That provided me some comfort as I wanted to know that the fan would increase speed under increased stress.

Okay. The -I option revealed using udma6 while the -i option revealed nothing. Thanks.

I confirmed the drive supports AAM. I got bold and ran hdparm -M 128. I witnessed no apparent damage. The drive is barely audible as is, but I wanted to make sure. Using the -I option confirms AAM mode.

Yes, I think sweet is a good word. I'm so behind the times hardware wise, however, that I don't really yet know what the box can do. For example, I have yet to install the proprietary nvidia video drivers and yet my video is so much faster than either of my old boxes. My ATA-100 hard drive now runs at approximately 3x the throughput of my old box because that motherboard only supported ATA-33. I'm still learning and only have weekends to tinker. Only 24 hours in a day and I want to tackle each new problem and challenge linearly so I don't get overly confused.

Asus M2NPV-VM. AM2 BE-2400 (45W TDP) dual core CPU. 2GB RAM. If anybody else is using this board please contact me with tweaks and tips.

I'll try to explain what I discovered today.

I was trying to access CDs and an only USB stick while logged in as root. (Please spare the litany of running as root. I don't have time to play the su root or sudo lobotomy game while I am in severe testing and learning mode with my new box. ) I could not access those devices, which surprised me with root privileges.

If I added root to the plugdev group, then I received an odd message at console login: Warning: add_groups: Invalid function. Even when I added root to the plugdev group, I still could not access my CDs and USB stick. Yet the auto-mounting seemed to run well as normal mortal user.

After some surfing the web, I ran across some information about manually editing /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf. I added the following to hal.conf:

<!-- Allow root to mount volumes and avoid login error message about plugdev -->
<policy user="root">
<allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume"/>
<allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Volume.Crypto"/>
</policy>

That ended the problem. Thereafter when I inserted a CD or the USB stick, I could access them as root as the devices seemed to then auto-mount. That was really all I wanted.

Next I have to figure out how to use the mount points I want. Right now the CD or USB stick auto-mount to /media/disk and /media/disk-1. I would prefer mounting to /media/dvdwriter and /media/usb. I also cannot access my floppy drive at all. I appreciate any help with those challenges.

Here's a crazy update with respect to the add_groups error message. After I installed a fresh Slackware current in a virtual machine, I decided to investigate this error message. Starting with the stock Slackware /etc/group file, I slowly synced that file one line at a time with my existing /etc/group file. No errors appeared until I added groups beyond console:101. Then the error message appeared. The problem then quickly revealed to be having root as a member of the smbguest group.

I have no idea why the error message appeared when I added root to the plugdev group, but already having root as a member of smbguest affected any such effort. Removing root from the smbguest group allowed me to add root to plugdev without receiving the error message.

I also removed the hack I described from /etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf.