[ale] ThinkPad sound working

Bob Toxen transam at verysecurelinux.com
Thu Sep 15 12:28:21 EDT 2005


On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 10:13:43PM -0400, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-09-07 at 14:54 -0400, Bob Toxen wrote:
> > All,
> > 
> > I got Xine working (sort of) at about 4am; Ogle wouldn't play my Dilbert
> > or Trek IV disks!
> > 
> > However, Xine cannot run fast enough for normal video or sound.
> > 
> > 
> > The xine_check made some suggestions for performance improvement, such as
> > adding Kernel MTRR support, X YV12 Overlay support, customizing X for
> > my hardware (IBM Thinkpad R31), etc.  The R31 seems to have fast display
> > hardware and has a 1.2 GHz Celeron.

> Very strange, Bob. My T20 has a 700MHz P3 and 256 MRAM and it plays
> DVD's full screen with no problems. However, a celeron is a bit slower
> on the decompression but your 1.2GHz should still be faster than
> my .7GHz P3.
THANKS for that.  That tells me that it should work well once I verify
that I'm doing DMA and have tweaked X.

> > 
> > 
> > Will these improvements likely get sufficient speed for normal play?

> The biggest slowup I've seen yet has been running X in the frame buffer.
> It is simply too generic to have any speed to it. Make sure you are
> running the i810 module. 
I'll have to set this up.  I've not needed fast graphics before.

> > Recommendations?

> No flame war intended here, but if I know Bob like I think I do, that
> laptop probably has Slackware on it. Slack is great for servers (Bob's
> specialty) but is not as terrific in the userland, graphics intensive
> world of games and multimedia. There is a big advantage to the Fedora
> series that Slack doesn't have: Freshrpms.org  That is a great
> repository of cutting edge multimedia stuff built for use on Fedora
> systems. There is also an apt-get repository of the same stuff as well
> so Debian users can feel to love as well :)
You know me!  It is Slackware and I don't want to change unless I absolutely
have no choice but DVD movies have become important to me.  I'll report
back to ALE when I have resolved this.

> And there's Dag's site that also provides cutting edge stuff primarily
> for RedHat based systems like Fedora.
Thanks.

> Even if you stick with slackware, the src.rpm's would provide some
> heavy-duty info on what tools to upgrade. 
Compiling X?  Now that's scary.

> > Do I need to switch from a 2.4 to a 2.6 kernel (which I don't want to
> > bother with)?

> There is better graphics subsystems support in 2.6.x although it is
> supposed to be backported to 2.4.28+
Thanks.

> > Can someone advise on how I can customize X for the R31 hardware?

> Make sure you are using the i810 module. I don't know if there is an
> i830 out yet but if so, you will need to be using xorg and not XFree86.
> That is a lot of compile time fun.
> > 
> > Thanks very much,
> > Bob Toxen,
> > Server geek who is week on multimedia stuff
Bob

> Hope it helps.
> (server geek who builds render farms for fun and tinkers with graphics
> as a hobby)
> (P.S. Any one have a 12kBTU room air conditioner they want to sell? When
> I turn on the craylinked origin's the 5kBTU POS can't handle the load.)
> > 
> > On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 12:00:16AM -0400, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > > Hi Bob,
> > > (Different Jim here...)
> > 
> > > I have a DVD drive in both of my Thinkpad T20's. I can play DVD movies
> > > using Ogle, Xine and mplayer. In fact, it makes long car trips with the
> > > kids quite tolerable :) Be sure to install libdvdcss to decode the
> > > (feeble and annoying) encryption in commercial DVD movies.
> > 
> > > I don't have burner capability on either laptop but I do on other
> > > systems. I have had consistent success using k3b to create DVD data
> > > archives as well as bootable DVD disks. It is quite possible to create
> > > the same CD/DVD's using mkisofs and cdrecord as they are the underlying
> > > tools of k3b (and gcombust and xcdroast), but burning the occasional
> > > disk as opposed to burning repetitive, custom ones from a script works
> > > well with k3b.
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> -- 
> James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
> CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
> Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
> 770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
> http://www.localnetsolutions.com

> GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
> <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
> Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7



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