On Sun, 05 Oct 2003 18:15:21 +0100 jordan muscott <morsecode(a)blueyonder.co.uk> wrote: :} Them great big cards is called "motherboards". Does yours have any distinguishing features? ...Maybe a brand name or model number? Any IRQs blocked or not enabled? Can you at least reserve any of them? Which slots are shared, do you need the SCSI? What's mapped to 3, 5 and 7, etc? Why is nothing mapped to 3, 5 or 7?

jordan muscott <morsecode(a)blueyonder.co.uk> wrote: Strangely enough... so's your sound card. We'll assume that also means that you don't need the ide on 15. If you shut off ide1, the serial and parallel ports {Soundblaster and PAS always use 5 {or 7} and you can push {reserve} other {isa, unplug and play, etc...} stuff up to the higher IRQs you may be able to clear up enough space for the Maudio card. {and your hd} If there are other peripherals that aren't showing up and you don't need them... turn them off. {You don't really need a floppy if that's what the ide thing {I doubt it} is... I've set up many systems using a cd to boot/rescue with. It's not ever been any real problem.} If your bios really doesn't offer you the option to switch things around you can always do it in software. I've not run Slackware for 7-8 years... frankly I've forgotten how. None of the Systems {Suse, Redhat, Mandrake, Debian and lots of variants and versions {currently, I'm banging my head against the wall with HURD {it's actually fairly simple... I've just not had the time to read all of the set up stuff.}} I've run in the past 5 or so years has "given me the option". Slackware's really tough and it's not going to get a lot easier. It's made for folk that *really* know linux/unix, etc... {and masochists}. My suggestion would be to either buy or download Redhat, set it up and save the configs for the rest of the time you own the board. Alternately, {and probably better} there's a very small Debian distribution that's really easy and pretty sure fire. {Somewhere at http://www.debian.org } It's ~15o megs and gives you an entire system. Everything else you can set up over the 'net with dselect or apt-get. {Stick to stable for a couple months}

At 08:04 AM 9/10/2003, Benjamin Flaming wrote: I totally agree. Started with Debian 2.2, tried Mandrake, RedHat, and now Slackware. This is where I am staying. I feel totally in control of my system, I know exactly what is running, and how it is started and stopped, I can break a package open to fetch one file without having to install the whole damn thing, and even rebuild it again without having to write some criptic file just to tell the package manager that something should be done when the package is installed etc. I also like the fact that all the setup programmes, eg the installation and configuration, is all written in bash scripting, using the dialog programme to make it interractive. Installation programmes written and compiled are more of a problem IMO, as if you have a problem, you can simply open the script file, find the spot with the problem, and make a modification on the fly, and continue with the running of the script. ---------------- Luke Yelavich AudioSlack Founder and main package maintainer Audio software packaged for the Slackware Linux Distribution http://www.audioslack.com luke(a)audioslack.com

Rick Taylor wrote: Thanks for that.... but I've just discovered that ecasound records without any of the problems I was experiencing with arecord, so I'll save your advice for when/if I get any other related problems :) Oh btw, I did use Mandrake, and briefly Redhat for about 18 months before I switched to Slackware, and to be honest I prefer Slackware... I haven't had that much trouble setting things up how I want, ok occasionally I have to plough through a few docs but thats not a bad thing in the long run. (Debian does sound nice too, i agree). regards, Jordan.

Rick Taylor wrote: Would this really be any easier with another distro? Bearing in mind that all I've tried so far with Slackware is swapping the slots which my sound card and ethernet card are plugged into, and now things seem to work with ecasound anyway ( i did another thread in the archives that said that arecord is only intended as a demo app and shouldn't be relied on for serious work, which would explain why it gave me problems.) Jordan.

Rick Taylor wrote: Ok to be honest I'm not gonna switch distros...... but are you saying that Redhat offers you extra software that allows you to change the IRQs that your pci cards are on?

wes schreiner wrote: Ah.. thankyou, this is what I thought to be the case. Again, thanks for the clear info. Jordan.

At 08:55 PM 9/10/2003, Robert Jonsson wrote: I can vouch for this. My BIOS allows me to set IRQs for PCI slots. Having read the information linked to, I set up my soundcard to sit on IRQ 9. My BIOS was originally set to APIC, so at that stage, I left it. Linux didn't have a problem, and left the card where it was, but when I used Windows, things were totally stuffed. Windows had the hide to move the card to an APIC IRQ of 22, giving bad latency, and clicks and pops, with both ASIO and kernel streaming. Unfortunately, Windows doesn't allow one to simply change the BIOS setting to PIC. You have to re-install Windows for it to use that. Even then Windows decided to share the IRQ with something else. Interesting enough, even with APIC support compiled into the kernel, Linux did no such thing with the IRQs. I would personally suggest avoiding ACPI as well. IMO it is very much a waste of resources. Luke ---------------- Luke Yelavich AudioSlack Founder and main package maintainer Audio software packaged for the Slackware Linux Distribution http://www.audioslack.com luke(a)audioslack.com

Hi, I may be barking up the wrong tree about APIC, there are other acronyms that may be at work here ;).... But, to conclude, I think the source of my argument is probably here on the list. If memory serves me it was Mark Knecht (who also had written the text on the page below) that had commented about it earlier... The reasoning (i think) was that IRQ priority and IRQ sharing are the two important things to look out for. With APIC you get enough IRQ's, but you don't know which priority they have to each other which is fatal. Cool! I didn't know it was possible to device such a program. Have to check it out! /Robert

Rick Taylor wrote: OK, I forgot about lspnp/setpnp and lspci/setpci. I use lspnp/setpnp on my IBM Thinkpad 600E to turn the external serial port on and off, among other things. lspnp/setpnp require a kernel with PNP support compiled in. Kernel 2.4 mainline doesn't have this yet, but it is in the -ac patches and also in the kernel that some distros have (Redhat has it I think, but Debian doesn't). 2.6 has PNP support. The support for using lspci/setpci is in all 2.4.x kernels I think, but it doesn't always do what you want. I have a Zoran 36057 video capture device sitting on IRQ 10, same as my sound card. IRQ 9 is unused (no ACPI), so I just tried "setpci -v -s 03:09.0 INTERRUPT_LINE=09" to change its IRQ. lspci -v still says it is at IRQ 10, but lspci -b -v says it is at IRQ 9. Which is it? OK, I modprobe zr36067 and the module loads, and now both lspci -v and lspci -v -b agree that the Zoran chip is at IRQ 10, so nothing changed. *Sigh* I suppose setpci will work in some cases, with some cards, but it sure isn't a panacea. wes

Clemens Ladisch wrote: Well there we go, so it's back to juggling cards in PCI slots and switching motherboards. I can report that irqtune does indeed change the interrupt priority though, using kernel 2.4.21. That might help someone. wes

Rick Taylor wrote: "It is important to note that setserial merely tells the Linux kernel where it should expect to find the I/O port and IRQ lines of a particular serial port. It does *not* configure the hardware, the actual serial board, to use a particular I/O port." Only mentions changing ISA network card interrupts. Does the same job as setpci. Includes an interactive mode.

jordan muscott <morsecode(a)blueyonder.co.uk> wrote: No. They do have the anaconda thing and some nicely written scripts that do a lovely job of detecting what's on your system and setting it up optimally.