| Setting up the server |
| Posted by bleader -- Saturday 20th of December 2008 13:05:44 PM |
| Now that's I've moved in with Kraken, we obviously needed a server to store data in a centralized place and avoid duplicating thing everywhere across our computers. We already had most of the parts we needed for this box, we just had to buy a mother board and hard drives. Unfortunately we took the best price/features ratio we found quickly (w0rst was parked outside of and waiting for us). And that's where things are getting fun. 1- IDE chipset We had a harddrive for the system, with an arch linux already installed, but it wasn't booting up, unable to find rootfs. Arch live CD wasn't starting. Yes that's true: we managed to buy the one motherboard that wasn't working at all with the OS we had all setup before... An older ubuntu CD was booting ok, and after some research we found out that linux kernels from 2.6.25 up to 2.6.27 have a regression and that the IDE chipset isn't working... So we built a custom kernel 2.6.28-rc8 and finally got it to boot. I've speed up the explanation because this step was really an annoying one and took a while... 2- Fglrx kernel module We've bought ourselves a nice Full HD TV, and this computer in addition to be a server will be used as a mediabox too, so we had to setup Xorg properly to watch movies and eventuelly play a few games (Frets on Fire and Mame). I had the bright idea to compile the linux kernel in an unconventionnal place, therefore the build script of ATI wasn't able to build the kernel module. I didn't see the error message being too busy ranting about everything not working and me being pissed off... The bad point is that Xorg and the fglrx driver didn't even warn about this, X was simply freezing at boot time, no warning no nothing. On a hinch I checked if the module was loaded and found the problem. The fix itself was a quick one. 3- Black borders We spent a large amount of our evening trying to find out why the hell we had a black border around the screen instead of being completely fullscreen. The problem wasn't showing with radeonhd driver, but we had other troubles with it so we stayed focused on fglrx fix. I played with modelines and tried a lot of things. It happens to be that the problem is only present when connected through a dvi->hdmi adapter, the driver place the screen at some strange position. I found the solution over at phoronix
4- Bluetooth We were planning on playing Frets on Fire with the wii guitar hero 3 controller, which obviously is using the bluetooth to connect. Of course we lacked the kernel module for this... I built it, installed it and... nothing I had no clue why the hell we weren't getting the device, the driver was there, loaded and all I could see it in another computer with the same driver, but no, nothing. /etc/rc.d/dbus start and we were ready to go. That's quite frustrating. 5- XPad We were willing to play in two player mod too, as we have only one wii gh3 guitar, we needed my playstation 2 gh2 guitar. with the adapter, of course once again we were missing the driver, but this one was painless to install. So we finally have something almost working straight away, there's still the issue of wminput (the userland driver to get the wiimote to be recognized), the main problem is as long as the wiimote is within range it will stay sync, given the battery consumption of the wiimote this can be quite a problem... But things start to get in shape and I'm confident that it will be working as we expect it to in a little while either this weekend or the next one. Incoming fun: - lvm stripping test (with the 2 brand new sata2 hard drives), to have a look at performances. - samba and nfs - ftp - switching to gigabit network And that's should be it. Let's hope these steps will go smoothly. |
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