Useful HOWTOs

This is just a collection of notes I have created about how to get tricky various things running, generally because the instructions are not available elsewhere, or there are only collections of conflicting or incorrect instructions.  More added as I find them.

Dell Latitude C600/C500 series direct rendering (3D hardware acceleration):

You must use a 16-bit colour depth in xorg.conf (DefaultDepth 16) for this to work, 24-bit doesn't allow direct rendering on this graphics card.

Toshiba Libretto 100CT:

To use the native 800x480 resolution of the laptop's LCD, you must use the following Modeline in xorg.conf:

Modeline "800x480" 29.59 800 832 944 976 480 490 495 505

Graphics driver:

The neomagic driver renders the screen in a more ugly fashion than the vesa driver, but neither of them seem to allow me to run video from mplayer/vlc etc.

udev no space left on device booting error:

Due to the small amount of memory, default settings won't work when booting up (for at least the kernel I used, 2.6.16).

To get around this, edit /etc/conf.d/rc and change RC_DEVICE_TARBALL="no" to RC_DEVICE_TARBALL="yes".

Battlefield 2 Demo and Battlefield 2142 Demo in Wine:

I haven't been able to run the full versions yet, as the copy protection causes problems in Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 2142 isn't out yet.

To get the demos running (but with graphical flaws), put d3dx9_24.dll and d3dx9_25.dll in your ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/ directory.

Now in winecfg, add both this DLLs as native in the Libraries tab.

Try to launch the game with "wine bf2[142].exe +fullscreen 0", as fullscreen may cause problems.

You may need to edit My Documents/Battlefield 2[142] Demo/Profiles/Default/Video.con to use a valid resolution and refresh rate to make it run.

SATA drives on 64-bit Linux with ICH7 chipset on an ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard:

I found the system froze for ages whenever I accessed a SATA disk using the ata_piix kernel driver.

This had works fine on an x86 32-bit build, on the same chipset with the same BIOS settings.

In the BIOS I found that changing the SATA type from the default to AHCI, and then using the AHCI driver worked fine.This was an x86_64 kernel, built for an EM64T CPU.