MSNE4K internals

First time it occured, I shook it, vacuumed it and it started working. Second time it happened I opened it up I found snack fragments mostly from Lays. Cleaned it up and it started functioning normally. Today its messed up the third time and after an hour of moving the membrane around (or rather praying and hoping it works) its working.

In case you have one of these and want to dissassemble here is the thing: After all the screws on the bottom are removed, pull out the soft wrist padding pieces. Then you’d find two more screws to be removed. Then pry the space bar out (carefully) to find the two final smaller screws.

I thought they would not screw hardware up and wished it was more durable.

• Add Yukon etherenet support (sky2.ko module).
• Add w83627ehf module for sensors.
• AHCI for disks (Which borked the windows 7 install; fixable by enabling ahci in windows registry)
• And ofcourse SMP (incase you did not have it).
• Proprietary nvidia drivers for the video card.

Funny my DRAM speed went down to 1066 Mhz (from 1333) cant recollect why. Now I’ve ‘set’ it to 1333.

Its a fact that computer games are far from main-stream ‘entertainment’ in my country (probably its the same everywhere). What I am worried is that by the time it becomes ‘important’ enough something drastic might happen across the world that would make ‘gaming’ take a turn for worse, like, say the whole idea of virtual world being shunned due to some silly accident or something. Or perhaps we run out of ‘producers’ for games and the only ones left alive independent games (which sounds good when heard through a narrow pipe). These two events mark a time window which would have to coincide with my lifes ‘interesting’ years. I cant imagine playing FPSs or high-reflex+button-mashing “Prince of Persia: a grain of sands of time that was leftover under that vase” games at 40+.

All that makes me want to upgrade to a core i7 rig. But I cant get any ‘peer’ or ‘family’ support for the insanely costly rig (ranging from 60-75k ). At mere mention of the upgrade it gets attributed to the ‘crazy camera business’ (my buying D80 in ‘white’ market) and communication with home base breaks down.

Speaking of games, The obligatory game update:
Just finished, Prince of Persia: Two thrones (yeah – I’m 4 years behind the times).
Started following The escapist magazine (please dont start off now looking at the name of the mag). Games that I am dying to play/try out: Farcry 2, Mirrors Edge, PoP:Prodigy.

The “M$ occassionally we make usefulstuff” keyboard is working fine after foolishly attempt looking at xev output and modifying /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/evdev to map what I thought was the correct codes. The wrong codes were due to my mixing the kbd driver and evdev driver (for extended events aka fancy buttons). You get both if you comment the kbd driver out (in xorg.conf) and add two evdev keyboards (for me the event devices are event5 and event6). X not getting the device from HAL automagically has something to do with the GDM kinda session creation. I login to console and ‘startx’ – more digging later.

The Caps to Control map that did not work in console (mentioned in earlier post) was due to change in approach to doing it – Now you set X-like option (XKBOPTIONS=”ctrl:nocaps”) in /etc/default/console-setup.

I stumbled on another bug – apparently related to evdev driver or xorg – the left arrown, down arrow and the ‘end’ key lose their ‘repeat’ capability – Using the work around mentioned here.

Compiz was crashing with :
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::logic_error'
what(): basic_string: :_S_construct NULL not valid


Googling indicated someone had gotten past the error by setting the LANG variable – tried it and it worked (LANG=en_US.utf-8 for me.)

Still broken:

Mplayer playback acts funny – every 30 seconds to one minute it apparently realizes it was slow and does a quick ‘catching’ up. No clue on this one yet – VLC also acted in similar manner a couple of times.

My “TyTN II – OpenSync – synce” setup is blown mostly by the python upgrade. This is going to take quite some time to get back.

Kishore is my friend from high school, uber geek material who chose to join seminary. He had a head that carried and processed orders of magnitude more content than me and me peers. So, both of being at kinda mid-life now, its really scary to think of getting into a philosophy discussion with him.

Package changes:

• acpid: Does not use /proc/acpi/event. Instead uses netlink to get events. So new kernel needs new acpid.
• xargs: There was an old problem with xargs getting huge command lines (was fixed many months ago). I still had the old version.

Kernel:

• RTC vanished: The module rtc-cmos is needed and nodes /dev/rtc -> /dev/rtc0 needed (major  = 253).
• Nvidia: Just like previously downloaded the package from nvidia. Should work without problem.
• Keyboard: Okay this needs another paragraph.

Keyboard issues: Ironically I thought of upgrading the kernel to get the “Microsoft Natural® Ergonomic 4000” working with all those special buttons. The pain started like this:

After configuring X display and first run – black screen nothing happens. Well actually there is no crash. Incidentally the black screen was just Nvidia’s idea of a default surface for X (Instead of my favorite X crosshatch pattern). The non-response is due to new X not using hal for some reason to get te mouse and keyboard. HAL is working fine lists all the devices (even the other half of  “Microsoft Natural® Ergonomic 4000” with the fancy buttons) – X just does not get it. Currently X is set to use the ‘kbd’ driver and evdev mouse (yeah, funny – hal supposed to suggest ‘evdev’ for both keyboard and mouse).

Getting to use the keyboard in some is a relief after which surfaces minor problems that have crept in. The remapping of CapsLock to Control in console is gone (apparently the sed scrpt /etc/kbd/remap is not working and resulting in some funny symbol like “keycode 58 = CtrlL_Lock”) – Left it at that for now – not much console usage once X is working.

Keyboard issue did not stop. A good one came in. I see that the shell pipe lines I make lose space after the ‘|’ i.e (ls /foo |grep bar). This was due to overlap of ‘Right shift’ while the ‘|’ and space keys are hit – so Shift-Space gives no space. After googling and starting of with info from http:/pascal.tsu.ru/en/xkb/setup.html, ended up in base.lst file. This file describes an option called nbsp:none which when enabled causes any level of modified space key appears as space. I’m sure this has broken something else somwhere – I’ll wait for it.