finally, suspend / resume works!

Yeah I know, most of you out there think I am crazy to have used my laptop without working suspend to ram or disk. Well in my case the combination of my graphicscard and a widscreen resolution forced me to use the fglrx driver from ati (not even vesa was an option). Fortunately, the newopen source radeonhd driver works like a charm 🙂

I deactivated the fglrx driver and am now radeonhd only … yeah that will keep me from gaming … not a big issue currently anyway …

Here are the instructions to install from git.

Happy holidays!

4GB RAM restrictions and Physical Adress Extension (PAE) exceptions

I lately got my hands on 4GB of RAM which I tried to put to use in my Laptop. My Fujitsu Siemens Celsius H240 is a Intel CoreDuo based Platform and I had hoped that I would be able to acess all of the memory. Long story short: the circuit / BIOS combination does not support PAE. The BIOS does not provide an option to remap the shadowed memory to an adress range above the 4GB barrier (Memory/PCI Hole remapping). Unfortunately, this means that the memory will be lost to operating systems supporting PAE. In general, the following preconditions have to be met in order to access RAM shadowed by PCI adress ranges on a 32bit operating system:

  • CPU supporting PAE (better than Pentium Pro will suffice)
  • Chipset supporting PAE (on notebooks the four extra address lanes will often stay unconnected. Maybe to consume less power and save that two cent of production cost)
  • BIOS with a „memory hole remapping“ option (64bit systems usually come with this BIOS option)

    • Under these circumstances Linux will not have a problem accessing all your memory (provided the HIGHMEM options are enabled). On the other hand Microsoft removed PAE support for 32bit Windows XP since SP2. In other words, you will currently only be able to access more than 4GB physical RAM with Windows 2000/2003 Server. Or Linux that is 😉

    The amount of virtual ram is a total different issue as well as the amount of RAM acessible by virtulization technologies such as Vanderpool and Pacifica which will at least require the conditions above. The rest is up to the implementations. KVM supports any combination of non/PAE 32/64bit hosts/clients except 64bit client in 32bit host. Whereas VMware will not (yet) support PAE enabled client operating systems.

    Installing gforge on ubuntu feisty

    1. install ubuntu server – no lamp
    – mailman wants you to choose languages, „newlist mailman“ and afterwards „/etc/init.d/mailman start“
    – gforge-db-password wants you to choose a password for the database user
    – gforge-mta-exim4 asks wether or not to modify /etc/aliases for you – answer yes
    – gforge-shell-postgresql asks wether or not to modify /etc/nss-pgsql.conf – answer yes
    – gforge-shell-postgresql asks wether or not to modify /etc/nsswitch.conf – answer yes
    – proftpd: start as daemon
    – postgresql-common: pg8.1 is deprecated … dunno just ok
    – gforge-common has some unexpected operators in /etc/gforge/gforge.conf
    – gforge-db-postgresql asks wether or not to modify /etc/postgresql/8.1/main//pg_hba.conf – answewr yes
    – the database tables will be created for you
    – gforge-web-apache asks wether or not to modify /etc/apache2/httpd.conf – answer yes
    – gforge-mta-exim4 asks wether or not to modify /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template for you – answer yes
    – gforge-mta-exim4 asks wether or not to modify /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/01_exim-config_listmacrosdefs for you – answer yes
    – gforge-shell-postgresql asks wether or not to modify /etc/pam_pgsql.conf – answer yes
    – gforge-shell-postgresql asks wether or not to modify /etc/pam.d/common-account – answer yes
    – gforge-shell-postgresql asks wether or not to modify /etc/pam.d/common-auth – answer yes
    – gforge-ftp-proftp asks wether or not to modify /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf – answer yes
    the install will list errors for gforge-web-apache, gforge-plugin-scmsvn, gforge-lists-mailman, gforge
    * „sudo newlist mailman“
    * /sudo etc/init.d/mailman start

    still the following problems:
    /etc/apache2/httpd.conf is empty

    much is broken

    Using the o2 Laptop Card with Ubuntu

    lsusb shows the card as:
    Bus 007 Device 002: ID 0af0:6701 Option
    and the Feisty kernel supports it out of the box.

    Using umtsmon I can set the PIN and not worry about it anymore. However, I was unable to connect using the tool.

    I had some difficulties with connectiong to the APN „surfo2“ so I’ll just post my working ppp scripts:

    /etc/ppp/peers/o2s:

    #device
    /dev/ttyUSB0

    # baud speed
    460800

    # log all packets to syslog
    debug

    #use hardware flow control
    crtscts

    #disable compression:
    noccp
    nobsdcomp
    noaccomp
    novj

    # create a lock file for the serial device
    lock

    # we do not neet to authenticate ourselves?
    noauth

    # Disables the default behaviour when no local IP address is specified, which is to
    # determine (if possible) the local IP address from the hostname. With this option, the
    # peer will have to supply the local IP address during IPCP negotiation (unless it speci‐
    # fied explicitly on the command line or in an options file).
    noipdefault

    noproxyarp

    # add default route using the peer as the gateway
    defaultroute

    # ask the peer for up to 2 dns servers
    usepeerdns

    # use this for auth to the peer
    user “
    password “

    # chatscript to use
    connect „/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/o2-surfo2“

    # accept te peers ip adresses for both connection ends
    ipcp-accept-remote
    ipcp-accept-local

    and /etc/chatscrips/o2-surfo2

    'ABORT' "BUSY"
    'ABORT' "ERROR"
    'ABORT' "NO ANSWER"
    'ABORT' "NO CARRIER"
    'ABORT' "NO DIALTONE"
    'ABORT' "Invalid Login"
    'ABORT' "Login incorrect"
    'TIMEOUT' '10'
    '' 'ATZ'
    'OK' 'ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0'
    # this next line is extra for O2
    'OK' 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","surfo2"'
    'TIMEOUT' '60'
    'OK' 'ATDT*99***1#'
    'CONNECT' ''
    'TIMEOUT' '5'