Re: Rer: Two Lenny problems
On Sun, 7 Mar 2010 07:08:32 -0500 (EST), Cecil Knutson wrote:
>
> I did nothing about your last email because I didn't see it until after I
> had made the last change, but, yes, the last Lenny install was to the 8400
> with a different audio card. Now the 8400 has Windows 7 Ultimate on it
> with the original Creative SB Live! audio card and the original HD. Sound
> did not work at first, but does now after downloading drivers for the
> SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio and the SB Live! 24-bit. So, the
> hardware works. Is it a lack of proper drivers for Lenny?
At this point, that would be my guess.
> FYI: the first
> three attempts to install Windows 7 failed at the point of "Starting
> Windows", so I started an install of Windows XP, stopped it because the SB
> card was not connected to the front headphone jack. After connecting it,
> I started Windows 7 again thinking it would have all the necessary
> drivers. The fourth install proceeded without a glitch. Weird, huh?
> What does a headphone connection have to do with installing the OS?
That's weird all right.
> Right
> now, I am inclined to leave Windows 7 on the 8400 and put Lenny on the
> Fujitsu, just to use more partitions on the 1.5TB drive. But, at the
> partitioning part of the last Lenny installation, I noticed that even the
> "manual" option of the partitioning scheme only offered five separate
> partitions. What did I miss?
I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you saying that the installer
does not recognize existing partitions already on the hard disk? Or are
you saying that it won't let you create more than five partitions during
installation? Or are you saying that only five different mount points
were offered?
> It also caused me to reconsider the
> usefulness of more than five partitions on a Linux system. With the ext3
> journaling file system of Lenny, what advantage is there to more than five
> partitions?
In my typical installs, I create four partitions: /, /boot, /home, and swap.
I keep /home in a separate partition to isolate user data files from the
operating system. That way, I can reformat the OS partition and not touch
user data files (except data files belonging to the root user, which are
stored in /root instead of /home/root). There can be situations where it
is advantageous to keep /boot separate too. For example, on really old
machines with a really old BIOS (no LBA support) and when using the LILO
boot loader, the kernel image and initial RAM disk image have to be within
the first 1024 cylinders for the boot loader to load them. That is rarely
a problem anymore. But on other platforms, there can still be a reason
to do it. For example, on the s390 platform the /boot partition cannot
use the dasd_diag_mod driver. Everything else can. Therefore, that is
one reason to segregate the /boot partition. And of course swap has to be
separate. Sometimes you might want to split out /var/log to keep log files
from consuming the whole file system or split out /tmp to limit the number
of temporary files.
> And is there any advantage to installing LVM?
On the S390 platform, a typical 3390-3 DASD device is about 2.3G. If you
want a partition larger than this you can use LVM to create a logical
partition which consists of multiple physical partitions, and you can
keep adding space as necessary. There are other uses for it, I'm sure,
but that is my primary experience with it.
> Another
> consideration is the appearance of "window trails" (similar to laptop
> "pointer trails") when Lenny was on the Fujitsu. There is an EVGA 8400GS
> video card in the Fujitsu. It is little more than a year old and was
> bought because the video slot in the Fujitsu is the PCI Express type and I
> had no card that would fit it. It uses an nVidia GeForce 8400 GS video
> processor. What would have to be done to eliminate the trails?
Check out the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file to see what driver is being used.
I would normally expect the "nv" driver to be used by default on an
nVidia card. But if the card is too new for the video chipset to be
recognized by the driver, it may be falling back to vesa. The nv driver
generally supports 2D acceleration, but I'm not so sure that the vesa
driver does. If that is the case, your three main options are (1)
upgrade to a newer set of xorg packages from lenny-backports, (2)
install Squeeze, or (3) try to get a proprietary nVidia driver for
Lenny to work with your card. There are proprietary drivers available.
>From reading the list, people either swear by them or swear at them.
When they work, they generally work really well, but they break easily
with, for example, security updates to the system.
Reply to: