Floppie's Blag » Floppie

Vacuum/Boost Gauge for the RSX Type-S

Floppie — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 03:19:34 +0000

Breather Tank for the RSX Type-S

Floppie — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:59:21 +0000

Fedora 11

Floppie — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:15:29 +0000

The Fedora logo

About a week ago, I ordered a new hard drive. A 750 gig Western Digital Caviar (model number WD7500AACS), specifically. With this new hard drive, I wanted to upgrade to the newest version of my OS. I had been running openSuSE since building this box a few years back – starting with 10.1, and upgrading to 10.2 when it was released. I didn’t switch to 10.3 after that, because I didn’t do a decent drive setup (I had a /boot/ partition, but everything else was just jammed into the root partition) and using a bootable gPartEd CD to move everything around was a painfully long process…like, three days long. Needless to say, I’m not making that mistake again.

Anyway, this drive is a SATA drive – SATA2, but it has a jumper setting for backwards compatibility with SATA1; my motherboard (an old-ish Asus A8N5X) is a SATA1 board. I brought it home, burned my openSuSE 11.1 installation DVD, shut the system down, plugged the hard drive in, and booted back up. I noticed that the drive wasn’t listed at the BIOS POST screen. I booted from the DVD, went to install it, and found that the drive wasn’t listed in the partition manager. Not really a surprise, since it wasn’t listed in the BIOS.

I shut the system down and tried my other SATA ports – none of them worked. So it’s looking like either the hard drive is bad, or my motherboard is screwed up and the onboard SATA controller isn’t working. I got a PCI SATA controller (some no-name card based on the VIA VT6421A chipset) from a friend, hooked it up to that, and the installer was able to see it. Additionally, my motherboard supports boot from PCI – sweet. So I run the installer, set up my /boot/, /, /home/, and swap partitions, and tell it to install GRUB to the MBR on the SATA drive.

Once it’s done getting all the packages installed, it falls to a black screen. No terminal, no GUI, no power save mode on the monitor, just an empty screen. I wait a little while, and there’s no indication of activity, so I do a hard reset. It tries to boot…no luck. So I tried it again, this time installing to the MBR on the old PATA drive and setting GRUB up with an option to boot from the new hard drive’s root partition. Again, no luck.

At this point I’m sick of screwing with it, I figured that the installer hanging with that black screen was screwing up the GRUB install – so I tinkered for a little bit until I got it to boot from the old openSuSE 10.2 installation, downloaded the Fedora 11 installer, and went to town. I still couldn’t get it to boot from the new drive. So I looked online and found that a lot of people have had trouble booting from these VT6421A-based cards, and decided to look through my BIOS for some PCI boot options.

Lo and behold, my onboard SATA ports were all disabled. I shut the system down, removed the card, plugged the new drive into the port marked “SATA 1″ (out of 4) on the motherboard, and booted from the Fedora 11 DVD…again. BIOS showed the new drive this time. When I got to the installer’s partition manager, I saw that the new drive was still being considered the second drive – sdb. Well, I planned on removing the old PATA drive, and when I did, the identifier would switch – that would be a problem.

So I shut down, pulled the old drive out, and reran the installer. It went through everything without a hitch – while it did this, I dug out my USB enclosure for PATA drives and stuck the old 160 in that. When Fedora was all up and running, I just copied everything off of the old drive, and I’m in the process of going through and dealing with it all. Some things are being deleted, the music that was freshly downloaded is being compressed further (LAME ABR112 for the win), etc.

It’s taking me a while to get Fedora 11 configured the way I like it. KDE4.2 takes some getting used to when I’ve been on 3.5 for years. Compiz is pretty much totally out of development, so after using it for a while and seeing some of the stability issues, I gave that up pretty quickly. I finally got MediaTomb and my P2P file utilities fully functional when I realized there was a firewall and disabled it. I still can’t get the Samba server running though – when I try to run /etc/init.d/smb start or /etc/init.d/nmb start it fails, outputting the following to the log:

[2009/06/30 21:45:17,  0] smbd/server.c:main(1256)
  smbd version 3.3.2-0.33.fc11 started.
  Copyright Andrew Tridgell and the Samba Team 1992-2009
[2009/06/30 21:45:17,  0] lib/messages_local.c:messaging_tdb_init(96)
  ERROR: Failed to initialise messages database: No such file or directory
[2009/06/30 21:45:17,  0] lib/messages.c:messaging_init(204)
  messaging_tdb_init failed: NT_STATUS_OBJECT_NAME_NOT_FOUND
[2009/06/30 21:45:17,  0] smbd/server.c:smbd_messaging_context(101)
  Could not init smbd messaging context.

I can’t, for the life of me, figure that one out. It can connect to Samba shares fine though, and that’s good enough for now. The last thing that I was having problems with was finding a good media player – I always loved Amarok, but Amarok 2 sucks. It’s got a laundry list of missing features – no software equalizer, no collection management, severe lack of configuration options, etc. So I figured I’d install good old Amarok 1.4 – I enabled a Fedora 9 yum repository that contained an Amarok 1.4 RPM, and tried to install it – no go. First of all, removing Amarok 2 was a chore (PackageKit and its KDE front end, KPackageKit, aren’t all that great). Then, the Amarok 1.4 RPM required a bunch of older packages that would have just been completely infeasible to get going.

However, googling "amarok 1.5 fedora 11" and clicking the first result got me to another blog post – "Amarok 1.4 for Fedora 11" on "On the third side" – apparently this person had some issues of his own with Amarok 2, and decided to forwardport 1.4 to Fedora 11. Thank you very much, my friend~

And that’s the…experience…that this has been. I’m planning on trying openSuSE 11.2 when it’s released, so we’ll see how that goes. At least this time, switching from one operating system to another won’t take several days.

Zero Punctuation: The Sims 3

Floppie — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:11:59 +0000

This week, Zero Punctuation reviews The Sims 3.

Unskippable: Damnation

Floppie — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:08:55 +0000

Unskippable: Damnation

Graham and Paul use their looking glass on the steampunk robots of Damnation.

Zero Punctuation: Prototype

Floppie — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:42:11 +0000

This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Prototype in a head-to-head cage match against inFamous.

Unskippable: Haze

Floppie — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:48:04 +0000

Unskippable: Haze.

Drugs make for crazy summer blockbusters, and Haze is no different.

Zero Punctuation: The Second Annual E3 Hype Massacre

Floppie — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:06:05 +0000

This week, Zero Punctuation shares some thoughts on games hyped at E3 2009.

Unskippable: E3 Trailers

Floppie — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:36:37 +0000

Unskippable: E3 Trailers

Graham and Paul mercilessly mock the E3 trailers for Final Fantasy XIV, Edge of Twilight and Huxley

Ford Product Quality

Floppie — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:17:11 +0000

I was too lazy to go out and take one, so here's a picture, via Google, of a Mustang that looks identical to my mother's.

I have to say, I am officially floored by Ford quality right now. My mother owns a 2001 base model automatic Mustang, and for a while now she’s been having issues with it idling too high. Yesterday I decided to look into the problem. I came upstairs and asked the Internet, and the first result on Google for 2001 mustang high idle was the first of a series of five articles on Muscular Mustangs detailing how to fix the five most likely causes – this one shows you how to remove and clean the idle air flow control (IAC) motor.

I figured, why not, I’ll tackle it. So I went outside, pulled the throttle body apart, took the IAC motor off, and – lo and behold – it’s got a pretty good amount of carbon and shit caked on. I also noticed that the air filter was filthy, and the housing had a fair amount of leaves in it – she’d also been having an issue with throttle responsiveness, so I figured that might be the cause for THAT problem. So I went to Wal Mart to get some throttle body cleaner and a replacement air filter, came back, cleaned out the IAC motor, and dropped in the new air filter.

While I was at it I took a look at the inside of the throttle body, and this is the part that really floored me. It was clean. Like, brand new clean. I sprayed a bit of the cleaner on and around the throttle plate and wiped it off, and the rag came back damn near perfectly clean. There was also not a drop of oil to be seen anywhere in the intake or throttle body. This says to me that this motor has zero, or as close as you can reasonably get to zero, blowby – which, after 130k miles of my mother’s driving, says to me that Ford makes one damn high quality product.

So anyway, I put everything back together, reset the ECU’s idle parameters, and then we went for a ride. The idle issue was completely solved, and even I, from the passenger seat, could feel the difference in throttle response and power. Previously it had some hesitation, which it certainly does not anymore. It also shifts smoother, both down and up – I guess the restricted airflow was actually causing the motor to not meet the transmission’s power delivery expectations. The transmission still needs a fluid flush, but it’s certainly a big improvement.

So, the moral of the story is, Ford quality gets a thumbs-up from me.