I’ve been busy, so it’s a long one.

It has been long time since I’ve written here before. I got lazy, but I have few new things to share with whoever reads this blog, and myself, for future reference.

First – I’ve got a nice VGA card from a friend of mine, a nice looking TI8200 x8, which is a great upgrade comparing to my older GeForce2 GTS… I’ve put it into my computer, during a major reorganization of our room, and I was unable to boot into X. Not only this, but my computer got hang every time I tried. I’ve tried running X standalone, running it through GDM, XDM, whatever. It got hang as soon as it started. Well, I’ve said to myself, maybe it’s time to upgrade kernel, and recompile this whole NVidia package from scratch. That’s exactly what I’ve done. Using the generic NV driver worked ok. Not good enough, but we can live with it.

I’ve downloaded and compiled 2.6.14.2, configuration attached (config-2.6.14.2), but I was unable to boot into it. It gave me kernel panic just as it should have accessed its initrd (INITial RamDisk). It’s not the first time for me to compile a kernel, so I got confused, until I’ve figured that the method of creating initrd has changed, and now it uses cramfs, while in the past it has used ext2fs. I have altered my /etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.conf file (mkinitrd.conf attached), and was able, finally, to boot into my newly compiled kernel. I have installed NVidia’s driver, and things, after a short while, seemed to be ok. For now.

About a year and a half ago, a friend of mine left to Australia, as part of his emigration procedure, there. Few days prior to him leaving us, his wife’s somehow-obtained LCD screen, 17″ (at that time it was huge!) broke. It was a nice LCD CTX 17″, and it died. We cut a deal so he would get some RAM he needed, and I’ll get the screen as soon as I would pay for repairing it. Nice deal. The screen did not get fixed. It was claims and excuses, and explanations all the time, but the screen has not been fixed. I must admit I have almost completely forgotten about it. All until three days ago, when the electrician called me and told me that the screen is fixed. I could hardly believe it. I’ve came to take it, and it did work, supplying image much inferior to today’s LCD screens, but it worked. I have convinced my wife to use it for now (it’s good enough, and it would supply her with “natural”-like display, looking like her customer’s screens), and I’ve added myself the 2nd one here.

It took me a while to make it work. The generic driver NV failed to use two screens, and the propriety driver, “nvidia” managed to hang my computer once a while.

With the help of this site, I have managed to rebuild, almost from scratch, my xorg.conf file (xorg.conf attached). I have managed to activate dual-head, as displayed in the following pictures:

I have also added a nice card reader to my Linux, and had no hardships with it whatsoever. I’ve added few lines to my /etc/fstab, and they look like this:

/dev/sda /mnt/DoK auto noauto,user,exec,iocharset=utf8,codepage=852 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/DoK1 auto noauto,user,exec,iocharset=utf8,codepage=852 0 0
/dev/sdb /mnt/sdb auto noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1 auto noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/sdc /mnt/sdc auto noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1 auto noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/sdd /mnt/sdd auto noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/sdd1 /mnt/sdd1 auto noauto,user,exec 0 0

Here’s a picture of this little thingie.

Mind you that I’ve added Hebrew support only to the first two devices. I’m lazy, right?