Posts about hardware

New Printer “Just Works” in SUSE 10

This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 22 March 2006.


Well, here's a first for me: go to local Dick Smith's, buy a cheap printer, for my wife (HP Deskjet 3940, AU$66). Because I don't really care about printing from Linux, I didn't care if it works or not on that OS, just bought whatever Windows printer was cheapest.


Brought it home, plugged it into my PC (in Windows) and it works, after installing drivers and software and about 15 mins of setup time.


For the heck of it, I rebooted to Linux to see what would happen. Well lordy “New hardware detected: HPdeskjet3940” and an offer to set it up. After 5 minutes — just accepting all the standard options — out comes a test page, in colour, bi-directional and fast.


Neat. Linux is ready for me....

Problems with my CD recorder

This post was originally posted at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 10 February 2006.


I think I may have figured out the issue with my CD recorder. It seems to fail more when the weather is hot (as in, more than 32° C ambient). The internal case temperature would be in the low to mid 40s then, and this is probably close to the maximum operating temperature for the device (a SONY CD-RW CRX140E).


Bummer.


So, either I confine my CD writing to early in the morings on hot nights, or I evaluate some sort of cooling solution.

Radeon Performance Enhancement

This post was originally published at sinewalker.blogspot.com.au on 30 March 2005


Place these settings in your xorg.conf:


The RADEON driver (man radeon) supports the following options for the RV280 chip (which is found on RADEON 9200 boards). The default values are in red:


  • Option "AGPMode" "1" (driver currently supports up to x4)
  • Option "AGPFastWrite" "off" (only used when DRI is enabled)
  • Option "BusType" "AGP" (if driver's bus type detection is wrong)
  • Option "DisplayPriority" "AUTO" (set to "BIOS" or "HIGH" to fix tearing)
  • Option "EnablePageFlip" "off" (turn "on" 3D page flipping for better performance)

The biggest wins would come from APGMode and EnablePageFlip. APGFastWrite may help DRI. DisplayPriority may help KDE. Don't use BusType unless the log shows the driver has selected a PCI bus for the card...


Note:- when playing with Xorg 6.5 I got X crashes with EnablePageFlip turned on.