Freaking VIA

Ironically...

I have Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO) software installed on the boot sector of the hard drive, so that my old Pentium-I 233mmx motherboard could use the full capacity of the 40gig disk.  (Otherwise it had the 32gig limitation.)  But a year or so ago, I moved the system into this new VIA motherboard with a 600MHz Eden CPU, and that board doesn’t have the 32gig limitation.  But I never got around to removing the DDO software because it’s sort of a pain.

But recently I’ve been trying to upgrade to kernel 2.6, and all goes well until reboot... for some reason, 2.6 just won’t boot, it gets to the point of remounting the disk read-write, and then says it can’t find the disk or something ridiculous like that.  I’ve tried a million things and nothing’s worked, so I figured it’s time to remove the DDO software in case it’s possibly causing trouble.  It’s installed and removed via a boot floppy, and the removal process told me that it was possible to remove it without losing the data on the drive, if I set the BIOS to auto-detect the disk.  But when I try to set the disk to "Auto" in the BIOS, it detects it right there and then fills it in, instead of actually staying as "Auto" and then detecting at each boot.  I figured clearing the CMOS would set it back to Auto.

And now, it looks like if I want to have any music in my car for the next week or so, I’m going to have to get the system running again in the old 233mmx box.

I’m trying to get an ATI Remote Wonder to work (it’s an RF remote where my current one is IR), and the driver I need is in the kernel starting with 2.6.3 or something.  I haven’t been able to get it to build from scratch.

The board has the ubiquitous and crappy AC’97 audio system, and it skips.  I don’t know if it’s a memory leak, or a driver problem, or what, but after I have the system playing for a long time (hours), or after hitting the "play random album" button a lot of times, then sometimes during the first ~5 seconds of a track, 1 or 2 seconds will get skipped.  No pause, no silence, just skipped, as in it plays seconds 1, 2, 5 without playing 3 and 4, etc.  I’m hoping one of these months the audio driver and/or kernel problem that’s causing this will get fixed.  (I haven’t been able to figure out where the problem actually lies.)

And there was something with lmsensors but I forget what now -- it’s been a while since I actually compiled the 2.6 kernel and tried to use it.  But I use it for the temperature sensors on the board.

Gentoo.... which I love, but it’s a pain because it uses DevFS, which means any devices (namely sound devices) that I create aren’t actually there on the disk when I reboot to musicbox-mode.  (I boot to /bin/bash and bypass all the init scripts because 95% of the stuff isn’t needed for just playing music.)