Re: I am having trouble getting VLC or Ogle to work

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

jeremy wrote:

> cancel that, after I could not find the correct drive name I just linked to 
> /dev/cdrom and it worked.
>
> I would however like to know how to turn on DMA as my video is realy choppy
>  

Find out what /dev/cdrom links to, and then run
hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc
(where "hdc" refers to whatever /dev/cdrom points to)

The man page also suggests using the -X flag where it discusses the DMA 
flag, but later in the -X section it says that it's seldom necessary.

I'd probably turn on 32-bit addressing, so a more complete command might be:
   hdparm -d1 -C1 /dev/hdc

If you don't want to do this manually after each reboot, you might want 
to create a startup script. For example, I've created 
/etc/init.d/sethdparams and then created a link to it in /etc/rc2.d..

EnJaeLove[westk]:/home/westk> ls -l /etc/init.d/sethdparams
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     root          290 Jan 18 10:32 
/etc/init.d/sethdparams

EnJaeLove[westk]:/home/westk> cat /etc/init.d/sethdparams


#! /bin/sh

N=/etc/init.d/sethdparams
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

set -e

case "$1" in
 start)
       hdparm -c1 -d1 /dev/hda
       ;;
 stop|reload|restart|force-reload)
       ;;
 *)
       echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart|force-reload}" >&2
       exit 1
       ;;
esac

exit 0