All posts in Hardware

Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8: DRIVER_TIMEOUT

I have been using the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 host bus adapter on quite a few Linux machines recently.  Supermicro/Marvell only provide stable drivers for Windows and a select few (outdated) Linux distributions.  I had to rely on the open-source support in the drivers/scsi/mvsas tree of the Linux kernel. Running this card with 8 x 2TB hard drives on Fedora Core 13 (2.6.34.6-54.fc13.i686.PAE) was tricky to say the least, machines with identical Read More...

DVB Support for the Videolan Client (VLC) on Fedora Core 5

The version of the Videolan Client (VLC) for Fedora Core 5 from freshrpms does not include DVB support. [foo@localhost ~]$ vlc --program 4704 dvb:12207000:0:3:27500000 VLC media player 0.8.5 Janus status change: ( new input: dvb:12207000:0:3:27500000 ) status change: ( audio volume: 256 ) status change: ( play state: 1 ) [00000295] main input error: no suitable access module for `dvb:12207000:0:3:27500000' status change: ( stop state: 0 ) [00000285] main playlist: Read More...

IT Terminology – Hard Drive Jenga

Hard Drive Jenga A term used to describe removal of Hard Drives from a RAID storage array where the objective of the game is to remove as many drives as possible without the array collapsing causing catastrophic data loss. Not for the faint hearted! Not to be confused with Hard Drive Dominoes (another fine example).

Update: TI 7×21 FlashMedia/SD Host Controller (104C:8033 & 104C:8034)

Bit of an update, my previous post is now getting a significant amount of traffic; in fact it’s my hottest post yet! Progress over at http://tifmxx.berlios.de/ – I downloaded the latest revision of this driver and it appears to be going through re-structuring, still not-functional I am afraid. However, a month since contacting TI I received a response to my telephone-based support request by email. From: support@ti.com Hello Michael, I Read More...

Sitecom CN-502 USB Bluetooth Dongle works on Linux

To my absolute surprise, the Sitecom CN-502 USB Bluetooth Dongle works perfectly with out-of-the-box Fedora Core 4 x86_64. The lsusb output shows it’s a Cambridge Silicon Radio chip (0a12:0001) which is very widely used and well supported. I bought this thing some time ago because of its protruding aerial; my original intention was to dismantle it and add a huge-gain antenna – Car Whisperer-esque – but I just haven’t got Read More...

TI 7×21 FlashMedia/SD Host Controller (104C:8033 & 104C:8034)

Update: TI 7×21 FlashMedia/SD Host Controller (104C:8033 & 104C:8034) The Compaq R4100 series of laptops feature a 6-in-1 memory card reader based on the widely used Texas Instruments 7×21 chips. Although TI provides Windows drivers there is very little information available to assist in development of a free Linux device driver for it. It appears that TI actually contracted another company (Everest) to write a Linux device driver, although the Read More...

Broadcom BCM4318 PCI id 14E4:4318 Wireless Adapter

In my previous post I mentioned that I got the wireless adapter in my Compaq R4100 series laptop working with ndiswrapper. It appears this was a total fluke, others have had to add “noapic” kernel parameters to get it working correctly. I found if I set this kernel parameter the wireless adapter wouldn’t work at all; without it everything works normally. Tested on Fedora Core 4 x86_64 (2.6.11-1.1369, 2.6.14-1.1656, 2.6.15-1.1830 Read More...

Fedora Core 4 x86_64 Linux on Compaq R4000 Laptop

The majority of the hardware worked out of the box, the WXGA (1280 x 800) screen needs to be manually frigged into the X configuration. Only the wireless adapter and the memory-card reader are unsupported by the base install. I got the wireless adapter (Broadcom BCM4318 PCI id 14E4:4318) working using ndiswrapper 1.8 from ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net, it built & installed cleanly into my 64-bit kernel. However, this means you must use Read More...

MediaCodeSpeedEdit tool for DVD-Writers by ala42

Stumbled across this when trying to find out why my 16x DVD media wouldn’t burn at anything higher than 4x. Download your drive’s latest firmware, feed it into MediaCodeSpeedEdit and you can edit the burn speeds for all media the drive can recognise. Save the modified firmware and re-flash your drive with it. Pretty neat! My only gripe is that the way you do it seems a little odd from Read More...

Prolific PL-3507 Hi-Speed USB & IEEE 1394 Combo to IDE Bridge Controller

I have a generic USB2/IEEE1394 (Firewire) external hard drive enclosure. It is built on the Prolific PL-3507 Hi-Speed USB & IEEE 1394 Combo to IDE Bridge Controller; this is a record of my recent troubles with it. Currently it house’s a Maxtor 6 Y130M0 (120Gb) Hard Drive. I’ve found it to be totally unreliable over the firewire interface and only just bearable over the USB interface. The enclosure itself isn’t Read More...