Hi all
I have searched the manuals and other self-help books and have not found the answers. Linux support will not help because they only offer support for the installation of the Linux system until the point in time when desktop opens. They tell me that installing and configuring DVD-RW drives are outside their work description.
The two problems are
1 A slow machine.
2 Difficulties installing a Philips DVD-RW (dvd recorder). This is the most important problem.
I have a Gateway computer with a Pentium III 500 MHZ,
768KB of RAM,
13 GB hardrive (hda) (9GB free),
1.44MB/120MB superfloppy (hdd),
2 USB storage devices,
1 old CD/DVD reader (hdc),
1 new Philips DVD-RW dvdrecorder (hdb).
I have been running SuSE Linux 9,3 since April and when I installed it the machine became so slow it froze several times. I removed the old 128kb RAM and installed 3X 256 = 768 RAM. That stopped the freezing. However, despite all that new RAM, the machine is now the same speed as with 128KB and Linux 9,1 - no better. I don't know whether the slow speed is due to the difference between 9,1 and 9,3 or whether I have inadvertently changed some settings that I am not aware of. I suspect the latter.
Question 1
How does one optimise the speed? (I am running only Linux and have no partitions on my harddrive for any other OS)
Question 2
Just after I upgraded to Linux 9,3 I installed this Philips DVD-RW into my tower.
Specifications:
DVDR1640P
Bus:IDE
Class (spec): CD-ROM
Class: Mass storage device
Device numbers
Major:3
Minor:64
Range:1
Type:b
Device name: /dev/hdb
Device DVDR1640P
Driver: PIIX_IDE
Model:PhilipsDVDR1640P
also
dev_names
/dev/hdb
/dev/dvdrecorder
/dev/cdrecorder
/dev/cd/by-path/pci-0000:00:07.1ide 0:1
/dev/cd/by-id/Philips_DVDR1640P_DMXXXXXXXXXXXX
dvd:Yes
dvdr:Yes
notready:Yes
sysfs_bus:id:0.1
Exactly what must I do to get the Philips DVD-RW dvdrecorder to work in reading and writing CDs and DVDs?
The disc I got with it with software for burning etc is in .exe format, i.e. microsoft, and it will not open.
Situation A: Putting music CDs or video DVDs into the Philips drive.
When I put a SuSE Linux installation DVD in the drive, it spins and lights up. A window opens with /media/<name of DVD> showing in the title strip. All the component files are neatly arranged as icons around the window.
However, when I put a music CD in, it lights up and spins and appears to read the music files which I can see from the various tracks appearing in the KSCD window, but no sound comes. The same CD (commercially produced) CD music disc works perfectly in my old CD/DVD-R drive. Video does not function in this drive at all, even though the same DVD video works perfectly in my old CD drive (hdc).
The two error messages that come up (in Xine windows) when I insert the video DVD are the following:
1
No plugin found to handle this resource (dvd:/)
xine: cannot find input plugin for MRL [dvd:/]
xine:input plugin cannot open MRL [dvd:/]
xine: found input plugin: DVDNavigator.
2
The source cannot be read
Maybe you don't have enough rights for this. or source doesn't contain data (e.g. no disc in drive).
Well the disc was certainly in the drive, and I am root (which I double checked), so the second message is difficult to understand.
Situation B:
Burning (recording) DVDs with the DVD-RW drive:
Would not work properly after installation. I installed the latest K3B software from a website (k3b-0.12-3.pm.0.x86_64.rpm), thinking that maybe 9,3 required the latest updated version. However there was no improvement in effective performance. Judging by a window that came up the machine appeared to be copying the files prior to burning them but in actual fact the session just spun on and on for several hours and in reality did nothing. I could not shut down the machine since everything had frozen, even the konsole, so I had to switch off the computer!!
Is there something wrong with the permissions in /etc/fstab, and if so, what should I change? (I know how to use the pico editor successfully)
This is what my /etc/fstab file now looks like:
/dev/hda2 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/hda1 swap swap pri=42 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
/dev/dvd /media/dvd subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy auto rw,noauto,user,sync 0 0
/dev/dvdrecorder /media/dvdrecorder subfs noauto,fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
Thanks again for your assistance.
Yours sincerely
273Chris
