Posts for the 'Gentoo' Category (Feed for this category)

Acer Aspire 1694 and ACPI

17th May, 2006     Life, Gentoo,

So, 3 months in from purchasing my laptop, and I finally decided that i would have another shot at trying to fix ACPI problems with it. This being the fact the battery always reports dead by default, while this statement is conclusively not true (the laptop itself tells me it is full ;-)

So, to resolve this, it requires a custom DSDT file to be read in, and used instead of the vendor supplied one. To do this, required some gentoo patching, with the DSDT initrd patch. Basically this allows you to put a custom DSDT that is read on boot, from the initrd (or more so, the initramfs).

The kernel patching, and recompiling part wasn't overly hard, as the patch for my kernel applied cleanly to gentoo-sources. Recompiling to simply enable support for RAM disk and DSDT from initramfs was painless.

The hardest part in the task, was the creation of the initramfs image. While some other distributions seem to provide a mkinitramfs application, gentoo does not, only a mkinitrd. So this created some problems, with me trying to work out how to create a initramfs manually. In the end I found the solution by emerging media-gfx/splashutils, which contains a script called splash_geninitramfs, which gave me the answer on how to do it. For notes sake, here is how it is done.

Put all your files to be on the initramfs in a directory, for example ~/disk Then, while in directory of the files (~/disk), type the following command:

find . | cpio --quiet --dereference -o -H newc | gzip -9 > ../initramfs.img

From there, you will find your new initramfs image in the parent directory named initramfs.img.

After that, just copy initramfs.img to /boot, and add to your grub.conf

initrd /initramfs.img

And there, now I have a working Battery meter, so i know when the battery is going to go flat in future :-)

Note: These notes were how it would be done on gentoo, some distros might have a easier way of doing it (can it get much easier tho?! ;-)

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All systems go again

16th January, 2006     Life, Gentoo,

Had some offline time in a sense this last 5 days, when my computer of about 6 years (a P3-900Mhz), decided that it would finally blow-up, but only in a way that would cause me to wonder wtf it was doing.

2 Gentoo installs later, I realised it was not the hdd's going, but it was the motherboard (sigh).

So now, I have spent some money, and upgraded to a new fast machine (xorg compiled in 36 minutes!). So I am slowly catching up on email and things that have happened over the past week.

For those who are interested, some stats about the new computer:

• AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+ (2211.355 MHz)
• 1 Gig of ram
• 4 x 250G HDD's
• 6600td graphics card
• asus motherboard with on board gigabit (nforce4 chipset)
• nice coolmaster 531 case.

Gentoo seems to run okay on it (running in actual 64 bit mode), with some apps requiring emulation due to no 32 bit support for now.

nforce4 drivers took a bit to get working - once i realised they used OSS instead of ALSA, things became much more apparent.

Will post some more info about the system in a week or so, to let you know how its going in 64 bit stuff.

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