11.1 and SD Card Support on eeePC
Torsten Kaiser
did I miss a discussion, or am I really the only one so far facing vital
probs with a broken support of SD/SDHC cards in 11.1/32bit/KDE3 ?
The bottleneck of my system is my
eeePC 4G
Celeron M 600MHz
512MB RAM
4GB non-volatile for system
4GB SD/SDHC-Card)* for /home
800x480px display
)* SD with builtin reader, SDHC with HUAWEI-Stick via USB
To get optimal performance and support out of this sold-as-toy, I ended up
with running across all recent versions of SuSE being available to me:
SuSE 10.2 was probably already too old to support eeePCs, didn't install at
all, and I didn't really mind.
SuSE 10.3 installed fine. Alas without LAN(!), sound and webcam. But WLAN
kept stable via ndiswrapper. No real problems, except the poor support for
dumb copper wires sold as hardware. Even booted with inserted SD-Card.
SuSE 11.0 added sound support to my fraudware-composition, left LAN and
webcam unsupported but now refused booting with some SD-Card inserted at
boot time. Simple Workaround via inittab-entry, to mount /home on
SD-Card-Floppies once they appear, between booting and login. Ugly being
urged to think about it. But feaseable. And the WLAN-module-driver-suite
would fall apart on being accessed by YAST more than once in a lifetime.
SuSE 11.1 then finally added support for my builtin LAN-Device (Attansic)
and some kind of webcam support for dark-rooms (/dev/video0, no picture).
And most annoying, abandoned the support of SD-Cards completely. Readers
and controllers get recognized correctly. But as soon as any of my SD-Cards
appears, the machine freezes completely. The most and so far only vital
reason for me to roll back to 11.0 since I need the machine for work.
After rollback to 11.0 I discovered, that my nonSDHC capable SD-Card-Reader
shows predicteably a similar behaviour, when I try to read my first and
brand new SDHC-card with it: Read-errors until torn out of physical reach.
Before I started to roam across distributions, I managed to configure,
compile and run some latest stable kernel (2.6.27.xxx). With definitely
activated SD-Card support. On my old 10.3 environment. Performed exactly
like SuSE 11.1 does now as a brand new, and said to be, consistent
distribution. So I suspect the kernel module for SD-card-support to be
buggy by tradition due to efforts to add SDHC-support.
My Questions to narrow down this bug:
- Anyone out there with SuSE 11.1 running and accessible
SD-Cards/SDHC-Cards? Maybe hardware works but fraudware doesn't...
If so:
- Which hardware/system configuration is implemented?
- does "mount" see the assignment when the card gets mounted by HAL?
- does "fdisk -l" see the partition(s) when mounted/unmounted?
Don't try on productive machines! This might end up in tearing the power
cable out of physical reach...
Greetings from Hamburg
Torsten Kaiser
ray
no offense, but isn't suse a little 'heavy' for a eeepc? I've installed
Debian on my wife's and everything is fine - have it set up with 8gb sdhc
card for /home.
Vahis
> Hello NG,
>
> did I miss a discussion, or am I really the only one so far facing vital
> probs with a broken support of SD/SDHC cards in 11.1/32bit/KDE3 ?
>
> The bottleneck of my system is my
>
> eeePC 4G
> Celeron M 600MHz
> 512MB RAM
> 4GB non-volatile for system
> 4GB SD/SDHC-Card)* for /home
> 800x480px display
Mine here is a 900.
I have home on sda2
<snip>
>
> SuSE 11.0 added sound support to my fraudware-composition, left LAN and
> webcam unsupported but now refused booting with some SD-Card inserted at
> boot time. Simple Workaround via inittab-entry, to mount /home on
> SD-Card-Floppies once they appear, between booting and login. Ugly being
> urged to think about it. But feaseable. And the WLAN-module-driver-suite
> would fall apart on being accessed by YAST more than once in a lifetime.
I installed first 11.0 with these instructions:
http://paleheretic.blogspot.com/2008/07/installing-opensuse-11-on-eeepc-900.html
I installed with an external USB CD drive from Live CD KDE.
The 11.0 kernel didn't support the NICs.
Then I changed to KDE 3.5.9.
Afterwards I had everything working just fine then.
Even the Huawei E169 played nicely with Network Manager.
>
> SuSE 11.1 then finally added support for my builtin LAN-Device (Attansic)
> and some kind of webcam support for dark-rooms (/dev/video0, no picture).
> And most annoying, abandoned the support of SD-Cards completely. Readers
> and controllers get recognized correctly. But as soon as any of my SD-Cards
> appears, the machine freezes completely. The most and so far only vital
> reason for me to roll back to 11.0 since I need the machine for work.
I made a network installation 11.1 just for fun. This time directly with
KDE 3.5.10.
Everything works fine except that the Huawei doesn't work with the
Network Manager, I'm using wvdial with that, works fine.
I installed the eeeevents with one-click-install and the special function
keys work, too.
My notes are here: http://waxborg.servepics.com
<snip>
> My Questions to narrow down this bug:
>
> - Anyone out there with SuSE 11.1 running and accessible
> SD-Cards/SDHC-Cards? Maybe hardware works but fraudware doesn't...
Yes, but with Eee PC 900.
> If so:
> - Which hardware/system configuration is implemented?
> - does "mount" see the assignment when the card gets mounted by HAL?
> - does "fdisk -l" see the partition(s) when mounted/unmounted?
Yes to both.
>
> Don't try on productive machines! This might end up in tearing the power
> cable out of physical reach...
I wouldn't call these gadgets real production machines anyway...
The only setback for the time being is that I'm having to first log out and
then shutdown. Then there are no problems.
If I just shut down directly something is keeping /home busy and it gets
unmounted uncleanly. Then /dev/sda2 is checked and fixed by the next boot.
I can see this "something" by tailing .xsession-errors.
But the same thing is happening also on other (normal) machines without causing
this disk problem.
So I assume it's beyond my current skills and I'm using this workaround for now.
Other than that, nice thingy, the normal laptops are too big for me to
keep on me and the E90 Communicator is too small.
Vahis
--
http://waxborg.servepics.com
"If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there"
George Harrison
Torsten Kaiser
ray wrote:
> no offense, but isn't suse a little 'heavy' for a eeepc? I've installed
> Debian on my wife's and everything is fine - have it set up with 8gb sdhc
> card for /home.
I feared so myself, since it didn't work for me with SuSE 7.x and Notebooks.
But to my own surprise even 11.1/KDE3 worked fine, concerning system loads
and response times. Always in mind, that this is not a dual-core machine,
but 600MHz. And 4GB internal storage, being ripped from everything being
obsolete, is few but sufficient for a productive system.
Since the real bottleneck is the lack of wired networking, I try to get the
maximum out of the wireless solution.
Approaching home by abt. 100m, I automatically export my netbook:/home to
the office network and by this way provide my empty user@office with the
notebook:/home. So in fact I always work on netbook:/home, mobile and
stationary. Mail exchange and backup are also done automatically.
Since my WLAN device only provides half the bandwidth of 100BaseT, the
bandwidth is a bottleneck by itself. Divided by two, (upstream plus
downstream). So I sometimes need to be really patient until some
application opens. Even if it is not started on the netbook. But once
loaded it works fine. This way I do all my office work and communication.
It's more intelligent than a mass storage but of course less powerful than
my biggest machine (2GHz Sempron). And most important: It can be made work
and react by itself intelligently via scripting and crontab.
But don't do that to your wife! She will go crazy when she's not used to
thinking in Unix: The network is the system.
Some examples:
- Q:What happens when you move a document from/to the Desktop?
A:It gets transferred across the network. Somewhere, depending on the
symbolic link structure below /home/yourhome grown on your desktop...
- Q:Where do you have to connect your USB-Stick to be sure it appears as
icon?
A:It is no real remote access. Only the data come from far away (abt. 2m).
- Q:I created a spreadsheet and stored it in a subdirectory. Arrived at some
meeting out of office it was gone. And I couldn't even re-create it,
because there was no OpenOffice. Back to office the document was back. And
OpenOffice as well. Am I getting old??
A:The subdirectory within your home is a symbolic link to a data folder on
the wired network. Outside your home directory, outside your netbook. And
for creation you used the OpenOffice-Installation of your desktop machine.
The netbook doesn't have any. Wouldn't be useable anyway on that 800x480
digital postcard.
Even with Unix, some time the system is nothing but your own machine...
Vahis
> On Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:08:57 +0100, Torsten Kaiser wrote:
<snip>
> no offense, but isn't suse a little 'heavy' for a eeepc? I've installed
> Debian on my wife's and everything is fine - have it set up with 8gb sdhc
> card for /home.
Works fine here, even with KDE. Why would it be 'heavier' than Debian?
P.S. You didn't have to quote the whole story if that's all you have to say.
Torsten Kaiser
> On 2009-01-01, Torsten Kaiser <Torsten...@its-tk.net> wrote:
> Mine here is a 900.
> I have home on sda2
So you chose not to create a separate partition for /home ?
/dev/sda2 is the second partition of the wired disk. Provided default
configuration /dev/sda1 would then be your swap device.
I recommended this myself for a long time. Especially on machines with poor
disk space. To avoid wasting free disk space on the wrong partition. But
since partitons now can be resized easily at runtime, I prefer a
separate /home in the meantime. Was quite helpful in the last two months,
since the only static item during my re-installation marathone was my /home
partition...
I don't have specifications for the 900 at hand. But compared to
conventional machines it has quite a limited wired storage too. Emphasis
lies on wired storage. So in case of a crash you wouldn't be able to
reassemble your data physically to another machine as it would be possible
with a hard disk as the remains of a fried or frozen notebook.
The root partition of my fully-featured multimedial Office station (SuSE
11.0) actually occupies 8.8GB of provided 20GB. The rest of my HD contains
more or less static data like backups and original documents of abt. three
years. My /home occupies 1,4GB. Mainly for the mail archive of the same
three years. And I know that abt. 50% of that /home is wasted by
the .beagle-daemon. So for your system
/dev/sda2 for / 10,0 GB (system)
/dev/sda3 for /data-local 2,0 GB (for data stored temporaly)
might be an option, provided you choose e.g. /home to be mounted
as /dev/sdb1, which is most likely to be your card reader device.
> Everything works fine except that the Huawei doesn't work with the
> Network Manager, I'm using wvdial with that, works fine.
That's nice to read! So far I was only guessing that wvdial might be able to
do the ppp-dialin for my own contitional script-control. Hope it works with
my provider as well.
> I wouldn't call these gadgets real production machines anyway...
Sure. I meant "productive" in contradiction to a gaming console/literally
open system (no case), where data loss would really hurt.
> The only setback for the time being is that I'm having to first log out
> and then shutdown. Then there are no problems.
So maybe some KDE application needs more time than provided to terminate
before it gets killed. Kontact/KMail might be candidates for that, if open
all the time.
> If I just shut down directly something is keeping /home busy and it gets
> unmounted uncleanly. Then /dev/sda2 is checked and fixed by the next boot.
I still didn't get it. Usually /dev/sda2 becomes the root partition on
standard install. So your whole root partition would hang on shutdown?
> I can see this "something" by tailing .xsession-errors.
> But the same thing is happening also on other (normal) machines without
> causing this disk problem.
Just an idea: Could it be the function keys being the only difference
between KDE@netbook and KDE@desktop ?
> So I assume it's beyond my current skills and I'm using this workaround
> for now.
>
> Other than that, nice thingy, the normal laptops are too big for me to
> keep on me and the E90 Communicator is too small.
That was exactly my argument for selling my 4G to myself. Adverdised and
delivered with some cell-phone-like non-Windows Gaming Console, pronounced
to be Linux...
But only with a fully working SuSE-11.0-Linux machine you can really
persuade people remember Linux as a serious alternative. It's simply
mortifying, that core features like LAN or SD-Card support still lack
support, as years before similar devices like PCMCIA ...
David Bailey
On Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:08:57 +0100, Torsten Kaiser wrote:
>
> The bottleneck of my system is my
>
> eeePC 4G
> Celeron M 600MHz
> 512MB RAM
> 4GB non-volatile for system
> 4GB SD/SDHC-Card)* for /home
> 800x480px display
>
> )* SD with builtin reader, SDHC with HUAWEI-Stick via USB
>
[snip]
> SuSE 11.1 then finally added support for my builtin LAN-Device
> (Attansic) and some kind of webcam support for dark-rooms (/dev/video0,
> no picture). And most annoying, abandoned the support of SD-Cards
> completely. Readers and controllers get recognized correctly. But as
> soon as any of my SD-Cards appears, the machine freezes completely. The
> most and so far only vital reason for me to roll back to 11.0 since I
> need the machine for work.
>
> After rollback to 11.0 I discovered, that my nonSDHC capable
> SD-Card-Reader shows predicteably a similar behaviour, when I try to
> read my first and brand new SDHC-card with it: Read-errors until torn
> out of physical reach.
>
> Before I started to roam across distributions, I managed to configure,
> compile and run some latest stable kernel (2.6.27.xxx). With definitely
> activated SD-Card support. On my old 10.3 environment. Performed exactly
> like SuSE 11.1 does now as a brand new, and said to be, consistent
> distribution. So I suspect the kernel module for SD-card-support to be
> buggy by tradition due to efforts to add SDHC-support.
>
> My Questions to narrow down this bug:
>
> - Anyone out there with SuSE 11.1 running and accessible
> SD-Cards/SDHC-Cards? Maybe hardware works but fraudware doesn't...
I have an eeePC (701, same specs as yours)
I have openSUSE 11.1 running fine from a SDHC card. For me, "it just
works" (TM).
I am using a Lexar 16GB (class 4) card. I can also mount and access my
old Lexar 4GB (class 6) card via the USB card reader that came with it.
As far as I can tell, there is no general issue with SD(HC) cards and
openSUSE 11.1, especially on the eeePC.
The only issue I'm having at the moment is setting up the wifi. Whilst
the ath5 module recognises the wireless card in the eeePC, it doesn't
seem to actually work. I can't connect to my home wireless (even with
encryption completely disabled).
This issue does not appear to be anything that openSUSE have done, but
rather in the base kernel module. I have tried downloading and making
the compat-wireless-2.6 stuff from kernel.org, but it gives the same
behavior.
>
> If so:
> - Which hardware/system configuration is implemented? - does "mount" see
> the assignment when the card gets mounted by HAL? - does "fdisk -l" see
> the partition(s) when mounted/unmounted?
>
> Don't try on productive machines! This might end up in tearing the power
> cable out of physical reach...
>
> Greetings from Hamburg
> Torsten Kaiser
--
Regards,
David Bailey
david _AT_ bailey dot id dot au
Vahis
> Vahis wrote:
>
>> On 2009-01-01, Torsten Kaiser <Torsten...@its-tk.net> wrote:
>
>> Mine here is a 900.
>> I have home on sda2
>
> So you chose not to create a separate partition for /home ?
Sure I did. It's /sda2.
You didn't check my notes on this.
> /dev/sda2 is the second partition of the wired disk. Provided default
> configuration /dev/sda1 would then be your swap device.
No. No swap. just / and /home.
/sda1 /
/sda2 /home
/sdb1 /media
>
> I recommended this myself for a long time. Especially on machines with poor
> disk space. To avoid wasting free disk space on the wrong partition. But
> since partitons now can be resized easily at runtime, I prefer a
> separate /home in the meantime. Was quite helpful in the last two months,
> since the only static item during my re-installation marathone was my /home
> partition...
I don't think resizing partitions in a live system is a good idea.
>
> I don't have specifications for the 900 at hand. But compared to
> conventional machines it has quite a limited wired storage too. Emphasis
> lies on wired storage. So in case of a crash you wouldn't be able to
> reassemble your data physically to another machine as it would be possible
> with a hard disk as the remains of a fried or frozen notebook.
Backup in advance is always the key to recovering.
I keep backup on a remote server.
> The root partition of my fully-featured multimedial Office station (SuSE
> 11.0) actually occupies 8.8GB of provided 20GB. The rest of my HD contains
> more or less static data like backups and original documents of abt. three
> years. My /home occupies 1,4GB. Mainly for the mail archive of the same
> three years. And I know that abt. 50% of that /home is wasted by
> the .beagle-daemon. So for your system
>
> /dev/sda2 for / 10,0 GB (system)
> /dev/sda3 for /data-local 2,0 GB (for data stored temporaly)
>
> might be an option, provided you choose e.g. /home to be mounted
> as /dev/sdb1, which is most likely to be your card reader device.
Partitioning is something that strongly divides opinions.
I have different schemes on different machines.
Depending on many things.
>
>> Everything works fine except that the Huawei doesn't work with the
>> Network Manager, I'm using wvdial with that, works fine.
>
> That's nice to read! So far I was only guessing that wvdial might be able to
> do the ppp-dialin for my own contitional script-control. Hope it works with
> my provider as well.
>
>> I wouldn't call these gadgets real production machines anyway...
>
> Sure. I meant "productive" in contradiction to a gaming console/literally
> open system (no case), where data loss would really hurt.
I think a thin client is the closest word I would use of my application
here.
>
>> The only setback for the time being is that I'm having to first log out
>> and then shutdown. Then there are no problems.
>
> So maybe some KDE application needs more time than provided to terminate
> before it gets killed. Kontact/KMail might be candidates for that, if open
> all the time.
>
>> If I just shut down directly something is keeping /home busy and it gets
>> unmounted uncleanly. Then /dev/sda2 is checked and fixed by the next boot.
>
> I still didn't get it. Usually /dev/sda2 becomes the root partition on
> standard install. So your whole root partition would hang on shutdown?
No. /sda2 is /home.
>
>> I can see this "something" by tailing .xsession-errors.
>> But the same thing is happening also on other (normal) machines without
>> causing this disk problem.
>
> Just an idea: Could it be the function keys being the only difference
> between KDE@netbook and KDE@desktop ?
>
>> So I assume it's beyond my current skills and I'm using this workaround
>> for now.
>>
>> Other than that, nice thingy, the normal laptops are too big for me to
>> keep on me and the E90 Communicator is too small.
>
> That was exactly my argument for selling my 4G to myself. Adverdised and
> delivered with some cell-phone-like non-Windows Gaming Console, pronounced
> to be Linux...
>
> But only with a fully working SuSE-11.0-Linux machine you can really
> persuade people remember Linux as a serious alternative. It's simply
> mortifying, that core features like LAN or SD-Card support still lack
> support, as years before similar devices like PCMCIA ...
>
I don't care what other people (ones who don't use it) think of Linux.
I don't preach for Linux, I just use it.
houghi
> Partitioning is something that strongly divides opinions.
> I have different schemes on different machines.
> Depending on many things.
I know what it depends on: boobies. ;-)
houghi
--
How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Iraq?
How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
Vahis
> Vahis wrote:
>> Partitioning is something that strongly divides opinions.
>> I have different schemes on different machines.
>> Depending on many things.
>
> I know what it depends on: boobies. ;-)
>
Nowadays I keep adding disks to that, tera by tera.
Torsten Kaiser
thank you for your reliefing reply. I'll try to install my next 11.1 effort
to the microSDHC-chip controller. So if that really works, I even have a
dual-boot machine on the first-ever inhaleable storage medium. In doubt I
still can do a fallback to the conventional fingernails ...
David Bailey wrote:
> The only issue I'm having at the moment is setting up the wifi. Whilst
> the ath5 module recognises the wireless card in the eeePC, it doesn't
> seem to actually work. I can't connect to my home wireless (even with
> encryption completely disabled).
How far do you get? When the kernel module gets loaded successfully (lsmod
grep ath5k), do you already see wlan0 with ifconfig?
By configuration: Is it started on system boot? As for 11.0, Yast configures
even a wireless cards by default to be started "on cable connect".
Once the card is running correctly, somehow but known running, for check and
maintaining the network settings I don't touch Yast any more, since there
seems to be a problem on (re)starting the module (or module-suite as for
11.0). Ended up for me several times as you describe.
Instead of that, I compare and modify configurations "back stage":
All the card-configuration details, except system-wide proxy, reside in
/etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0.
My favorite bugs are
- unsupported mode (I have Ad-hoc, default is Managed)
- ESS-IDs differ (where unencrypted/public mode requires NO ess-id)
- Password settings defaults to Passphrase, unsupported by WEP
- invalid Passwords (e.g. WEP-Ascii less than 13chars)
- different submodes within same wpa encryption
I then just correct the settings in the target to the values of a known
working source and finally restart the network via start script
(/etc/rc.d/network restart) or reboot. I had to do the latter with my
ndiswrapper-configuration...
> This issue does not appear to be anything that openSUSE have done, but
> rather in the base kernel module. I have tried downloading and making
> the compat-wireless-2.6 stuff from kernel.org, but it gives the same
> behavior.
No question, they do a great job. Most of the time. At least. Otherwise all
of us wouldn't ever be able to complain on such a stunning high level...
On the other hand I hope it's comprehensive that I loose my temper after
abt. 36 hours of nonstop reinstall and reconfiguration (each time), when I
finally discover that known working features, trivial to me, reliably for
several versions, wouldn't work !any more! in the brand new release. I
couldn't tell people any more "this new piece of hardware is not
supported !yet!".
The more I'm really glad to read, that it's NOT a general issue.
Pete Ricksecker
following wiki page which explains how to install madwifi.
Arrowcatcher
<Torsten...@its-tk.net> wrote:
>> This issue does not appear to be anything that openSUSE have done, but
>> rather in the base kernel module. I have tried downloading and making
>> the compat-wireless-2.6 stuff from kernel.org, but it gives the same
>> behavior.
I'm having exactly the same experience. I figure it has to be
something dumb since the adapter almost works.
I have a dual boot ASUS eee 1000HA with XP and SuSE installed. There's
the built-in Atheros adapter, and I also have a USB RTL8187 WiFi
adapter that can be plugged in.
I did today's compat-wireless stuff from kernel.org and have those
drivers for both adapters. I thought the trouble I was having was
with possibly downlevel distro drivers. I've been through those and
also the MadWiFi thingies.
Both network adapters almost work. They get an IP address by DHCP and
they can even scan for networks and see other ones besides mine. They
look normal in Yast and also command line files such as iwconfig and
dmesg. They cannot see the gateway IP even though they get a correct
local machine IP - it can ping itself even.
However, neither with neither adapter can the machine take the final
steps to connect. The firewall is turned off, and turning off the
encryption didn't help either even though I can see in sysconfig that
the machine has the correct WPA key.
The machine works fine on a hard wire network connection, and the two
adapters both work perfectly in XP, so there's no hardware problem..
I'm reasonably knowledgeable but don't know how to trace deep into the
internals to find out what's not connecting. I hope there's just some
little box somewhere that simply hasn't been checked.
Arrowcatcher
<arrowc...@nospam.kg> wrote:
>On Sat, 03 Jan 2009 11:27:57 +0100, Torsten Kaiser
><Torsten...@its-tk.net> wrote:
>
>>> This issue does not appear to be anything that openSUSE have done, but
>>> rather in the base kernel module. I have tried downloading and making
>>> the compat-wireless-2.6 stuff from kernel.org, but it gives the same
>>> behavior.
>
>I'm having exactly the same experience. I figure it has to be
>something dumb since the adapter almost works.
I solved this problem. Rather than try to configure the wireless
network with "ifup" like I've always done, I switched to
"NetworkManager" and got instant success. Dunno why I couldn't do it
with "ifup", but whatever. It works now.