Htam::Diary.Thread

This Monday, I tackled one of the last standing issues with my new laptop. My ring is a T60, with new S-ATA hard disk drives. The Linux support for it is not yet mature enough to handle suspend to RAM. (After suspending to RAM, the first write to the S-ATA HDD will fail, and the kernel will think it was a RAM problem.) It gave errors that said

ring kernel: Uhhuh. NMI received. Dazed and confused, but trying to continue
ring kernel: You probably have a hardware problem with your RAM chips

Everytime I close the lid and repoen it, the screen is locked up with bizarre colours. This did not happen before I used the ATI fglrx driver. However, without the fglrx driver, the screen display is extremely slow, most noticeable when xscreensaver runs.

After searching online for power managment issues a bit, I realized this behaviour might be controlled by the ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), which allows the operating system (here Linux) to distribute the power to various devices. After being able to reproduce the errors by simply typing a command, I decided to go with it and disable the command by inserting an "exit" instruction at the top of the code. This solved the problem.

Now my new expensive laptop ring is finally "strictly better" than my old laptop ideal (read: component-wise vector domination). I am glad that I can get everything to work before going back home.

Actually, ring is not strictly better. I cannot get my TV card driver to compile on ring, but this should reduce my random TV watching anyways, and I can continue to do automated recordings (which is what I got the TV card for anyways) and watch time-shifted TV shows on my primary laptop ring.

Tonight, my parents also invited six NDHU students whose parents know my parents (primarily from NCTU) to dinner at my house. One of them was Kevin Huang, my childhood friend. Another was my kindergarten classmate. The rest I did not know or did not know well.

htam@192.168.0.* 2006-09-18 21:41:43	[COMP] Suspend to RAM and ATI fglrx
	This Monday, I tackled one of the last standing issues with my new laptop. My `ring` is a T60, with new S-ATA hard disk drives. The Linux support for it is not yet mature enough to handle suspend to RAM. (After suspending to RAM, the first write to the S-ATA HDD will fail, and the kernel will think it was a RAM problem.) It gave errors that said ring kernel: Uhhuh. NMI received. Dazed and confused, but trying to continue ring kernel: You probably have a hardware problem with your RAM chips Everytime I close the lid and repoen it, the screen is locked up with bizarre colours. This did not happen before I used the ATI `fglrx` driver. However, without the `fglrx` driver, the screen display is extremely slow, most noticeable when `xscreensaver` runs. After searching online for power managment issues a bit, I realized this behaviour might be controlled by the ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), which allows the operating system (here Linux) to distribute the power to various devices. After being able to reproduce the errors by simply typing a command, I decided to go with it and disable the command by inserting an "exit" instruction at the top of the code. This solved the problem. Now my new expensive laptop `ring` is finally "strictly better" than my old laptop `ideal` (read: component-wise vector domination). I am glad that I can get everything to work before going back home. Actually, `ring` is not strictly better. I cannot get my TV card driver to compile on `ring`, but this should reduce my random TV watching anyways, and I can continue to do automated recordings (which is what I got the TV card for anyways) and watch time-shifted TV shows on my primary laptop `ring`. Tonight, my parents also invited six NDHU students whose parents know my parents (primarily from NCTU) to dinner at my house. One of them was Kevin Huang, my childhood friend. Another was my kindergarten classmate. The rest I did not know or did not know well.