Sunday, February 16, 2003

Now to get Goo, Common Lisp, Dylan and Smalltalk running. It's unfortunate that there is no Radio Userland version for Linux. Not sure what to do about that just yet. 5:39:17 PM

Sound was a pain to set up. I used the 0.9 series of drivers from the Alsa (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) Project. I've got an old ISA Sound Blaster AWE. I followed the instructions for this device. There was a convenient list of supported cards to pick from. To get the modules to load on boot I had to edit rc.modules to add the modprobe commands for the following devices: snd-sbawe snd-pcm-oss snd-mixer-oss snd-seq-oss The only downside now is the mixer is muted on boot. I have to run alsamixer to adjust the volume levels to get sound. Anyone know how to work around this? 5:37:13 PM

To get the wheelmouse working, XF86Config was the place to be again. Changing the mouse InputDevice section so that the protocol was "ExplorerPS/2" (I have an IntelliMouse and this protocol enables the wheel and extra buttons). I also had to add various options to enable the wheel and buttons: Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2" Option "Buttons" "7" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" Option "Device" "/dev/mouse" EndSection 5:32:57 PM

To get my screen resolution working the way I wanted I had to change in XF86Config the "Display" subsection for 24bit depth to have a Modes line like the following: SubSection "Display" Depth 24 Modes "1024x768" 5:31:08 PM

While exploring Linux distributions I used Knoppix to make sure that all my existing hardware would be supported. Knoppix is great - it's a live Linux system on CD. Boot off the CD and you are running Linux with no changes to your machine. It never touches your hard drive. It configures everything as it boots. With Knoppix my sound card, USB CD Writer, wheel mouse, etc all worked fine. Not so with TopologiLinux unfortunately. Maybe it's the Slackware base, but I had to do a lot of hand tuning. First, the screen resolution was too big and the refresh rate was 60Hz and very flickery. Tweaking the XF86Config file manually fixed that. Secondly it didn't recognise my mouse as a wheelmouse with three buttons. More XF86Config tweaking. Thirdly, no sound. I had to compile and install the Alsa Project drivers to get sound working. On the plus side I got hardware accelerated 3D OpenGL graphics out of the box on my (rather aging) Matrix G400TV card. That was essential for the project I'm working on. I'm also looking forward to installing one of the open source Common Lisp's and get FreeCLIM working. 5:27:44 PM

I needed to install Linux for a project I'm doing work for. I settled on TopologiLinux for the distribution which is based on Slackware. The reason I went for TopologiLinux is because it uses a loopmounted file for the filesystem. This means you can install it on a machine with a FAT or NTFS system already existing without repartitioning. What it does is it creates two large files. The first file is for the swap partition and the second file is for the root partition. These files live in the standard FAT or NTFS file system and when you boot into Linux it mounts those two files as if they were drive partitions and writes only within those files. The upshot being no changes needed to be made to my main Windows XP box. Booting into Linux is as simple as booting off the TopologiLinux CD. I would have prefered to go for one of the more 'user friendly' systems that configure everything for you but the 'no changes' option was a big win. 5:21:25 PM