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Linux in a CF card !
by Wayne Stallwood 07 Aug '04

07 Aug '04

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2844504302.html A UK firm is going to producing a linux based embedded system in CF format, they even make a tiny backplane allowing this card to interface with CF memory and device cards. Could be a handy tool for rapid prototype of embedded systems

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Sound issue
by Wayne Stallwood 05 Aug '04

05 Aug '04

After jumping though a few hoops getting RTCW Enemy Territory to install on my AMD 64 machine I had one remaining problem...no sound I was getting the error "Could not mmap /dev/dsp" Anyway after finding the ALSA FAQ I discovered that running echo "et.x86 0 0 direct" > /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/oss Resolves this issue for me. However I want to make this change persistant, I can't add this the the et start up script as it requires root to set. What would be the "clean" way of making this a permanent change. Or do I just drop it in an init script. -------------------------------------------------------

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Formatting a CF card
by Graham 04 Aug '04

04 Aug '04

Last week I bought a 256MB CF card in a PC shop in Brussels, having filled the one in my camera. It seemed to be OK but now the camera is reporting card errors. Can't take the card back so I'd like to try reformatting it. The camera refuses and my Sharp Zaurus sees it but can't read or write. I have a USB card reader that will take it, but how do I use that under Linux? -- GT

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Reference on CD writing?
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 04 Aug '04

04 Aug '04

Hi Folks, Does anyone know of an on-line reference which summarises the technical aspects of writing CDs (CD-R and CD-RW)? The reason is that CD-RW software tends to ask you to make choices, using terms which I don't think I understand well enough, and I'd like to have a little "bible" which tells ma all about it, at least in summary. With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 03-Aug-04 Time: 11:47:05 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Re: [ALUG] Formatting a CF card
by Brett Parker 04 Aug '04

04 Aug '04

On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 09:07:31PM +0100, Chris Walker wrote: > On Tue 03 Aug, Graham wrote: > > > > Last week I bought a 256MB CF card in a PC shop in Brussels, having filled > > the one in my camera. It seemed to be OK but now the camera is reporting > > card errors. Can't take the card back so I'd like to try reformatting it. > > The camera refuses and my Sharp Zaurus sees it but can't read or write. I > > have a USB card reader that will take it, but how do I use that under > > Linux? > > Are you aware that formatting a card on a camera lays down extra information > that formatting on a PC can destroy? > > I did the same thing on a CF card but fortunately the card was recovereable > in the camera. I did a web search and found lots of information about this > extra 'information'. Erm, the only extra info I've seen on one is the "dcim/cameramodel" directory, which will be created when you shove the card in the camera anyways. I don't know of any extra info that the camera sets (mine sets the SD card name, but never mind... It does that on any card you throw at it... so now I have lots of cards labelled "Concorde" which is, erm, handy. Specially on the one that only really has Palm software on it, and was only thrown in the camera to check that I could store data and piccies on it from 2 different devices). Cheers, -- Brett Parker

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Re: [ALUG] Formatting a CF card
by adam＠thebowery.co.uk 03 Aug '04

03 Aug '04

On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 09:07:31PM +0100, Chris Walker wrote: > > Are you aware that formatting a card on a camera lays down extra information > that formatting on a PC can destroy? What on earth cameras do this? I would feel that if a camera did have a problem like this it would be a bug in the camera, at least I have never had a problem with either of my Canon cameras or the other cameras I have used. I would be interested in reading some links on this if you have any handy. Thanks Adam -- jabberid = quinophex(a)jabber.earth.li AFFS || http://www.affs.org.uk/ || Not a filesystem

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Neill Newman 02 Aug '04

02 Aug '04

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include tkirc, bitchx, xchat and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://freshmeat.net/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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Card reader Suse 9.1
by Nick Daniels 01 Aug '04

01 Aug '04

Hi I have a 6 in card reader it works fine under SuSe 9.0 as Sdb1, and in Digicam as media/sdb1 On Suse 9.1 i get error message' error could not enter folder /media/usb-storage-9205291:0:0:1p1 and cannot get Digikam to reconise it Googling, tells me to install/remove hotplug patch but I cannot find any succesful results, and I have tried all suggestions I found. Regards Nick Daniels

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How much RAM can be grabbed?
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 01 Aug '04

01 Aug '04

Hi Folks, As we all know, the "free memory" reported by e.g. 'free' is usually very small. E.g. on this machine (endowed with "a massive 128MB RAM" (OK it's an oldish laptop and I'm cynically quoting typical ad material) I get > free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 126024 117952 8072 0 1476 50184 -/+ buffers/cache: 66292 59732 Swap: 400640 124092 276548 and of course the "free 8072" is illusory. In reality much more is available -- at least, I suppose, the 59732KB "free" in buffers/cache, though I;m not really sure about this since I don't know the underlying details of this report. My Question is: suppose I want to embark on a RAM-intensive task, e.g. a numerical computation with large objects, or maybe a CD burn, where I'd like to make the most use of RAM. I can tell the application how much RAM it can expect to use. So: How can I determine, by some system command, how much of the RAM is actually up for grabs. so that I can tell the program to use (e.g.) 64MB RAM? In other words, how could I find out that 64MB RAM would be available? And should I use 'nice' to make sure that the program can jump the queue? All advice appreciated! Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 27-Jul-04 Time: 19:18:28 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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How to Allocate Huge Amount of RAM to Process?
by Dan Hatton 31 Jul '04

31 Jul '04

I'll continue today's RAM usage theme... I understand from references around the web that, by default, Linux kernels will only allocate a maximum of 3GB of RAM+swap to a single process. I've been writing a program (in Perl) to perform some numerical calculations on very large data sets, and, by being very careful to do things in the order that minimizes the overlap between different pieces of original and calculated data being needed in RAM+swap, and making sure that, as soon as a given list of numbers is finished with, a block ends, so that Perl's garbage collector gets called, I've got the program to run within this limitation (it's now using just over 2GB at peak.) The trouble is, I've gone about as far as I can with this efficiency drive, and in a couple of weeks, I have to do the same thing, with even bigger data sets. Since I have plenty of physical space (1GB RAM+10GB swap,) I'd like to get the kernel to allocate more to my program. I know there are various patches with names involving "HIGHMEM." My current kernel is 2.6.6, with # CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM is not set CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G=y # CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G is not set CONFIG_HIGHMEM=y Would setting CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G=y and recompiling the kernel help me, or do I need to do something tricksier, please? -- Thanks Dan Hatton <http://www.bib.hatton.btinternet.co.uk/dan/>

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