Hot answers tagged hardware
25
While openness is certainly part of it, I think the key factor is Linus Torvald's continued insistence that all of the work, from big to small, has a place in the mainline Linux kernel, as long as it's well done. If he'd decided at some point to draw a line and say "okay, for that fancy super-computer hardware, we need a fork", then completely separate ...
20
This is highly platform-dependent. Also different methods may treat edge cases differently (“fake” disks of various kinds, RAID volumes, …).
On modern udev installations, there are symbolic links to storage media in subdirectories of /dev/disk, that let you look up a disk or a partition by serial number (/dev/disk/by-id/), by UUID (/dev/disk/by-uuid), by ...
19
If your system supports a procfs, you can get much information of your running system. Its an interface to the kernels data structures, so it will also contain information about your hardware. For example to get details about the used CPU you could cat /proc/cpuinfo
For more information you should see the man proc.
More hardware information can be obtained ...
14
What you're asking for is called DMA. You need to write a driver to reserve this memory.
Yes, I realize you said you didn't want the OS to intervene, and a driver becomes part of the OS, but in absence of a driver's reservation, the kernel believes all memory belongs to it. (Unless you tell the kernel to ignore the memory block, per Aaron's answer, that ...
13
If you want the OS to totally ignore it, you need to make a memory hole using "memmap." See this reference. For example, if you want 512M at the 2GB barrier, you can put "memmap=512M$2G" on your kernel command line.
You will need to check your dmesg to find a contiguous hole to steal so you don't stomp on any devices; that is specific to your ...
11
I can address your question, having previously worked with the Linux FB.
How Linux Does Its FB.
First you need to have FrameBuffer support in your kernel, corresponding to your hardware. Most modern distributions have support via kernel modules. It does not matter if your distro comes preconfigured with a boot logo, I don't use one and have FB support.
...
10
You can use hdparm to retrieve information about your hard drives, eg.,
hdparm -I /dev/sda
Where I, according to the man page:
-I Request identification info directly from the
drive, which is displayed in a new expanded format with considerably
more detail than with the older -i option.
For SCSI drives, use sdparm.
9
If your partition is ext2,ext3 or ext4, you can use the e2label command to set the label:
e2label - Change the label on an ext2/ext3/ext4 filesystem
SYNOPSIS
e2label device [ new-label ]
after you have set the label to, say, "data" you can add a line in /etc/fstab like this one
LABEL=data /mnt/data ext4 noauto,users,rw 0 0
then you just ...
9
Let /dev/sda be the new drive on which to test destructive-rw and /dev/sdb the old drive where you want non-destructive-r
# badblocks -wsv /dev/sda
# badblocks -sv /dev/sdb
-s gives the process indicator
-v gives verbose output
-w enables destructive read-write
-n would be non-destructive read-write
Read-only testing is the default and doesn't need ...
8
A pending unreadable sector is one that returned a read error and which the drive has marked for remapping at the first possible opportunity. However, it can't do the remapping until one of two things happens:
The sector is reread successfully
The sector is rewritten
Until then, the sector remains pending. So you have two corresponding ways to deal with ...
8
The HylaFAX Handbook has some documentation about making sure you have a compatible fax device. According to that document, external serial modems will work almost without exception, but some external USB modems may be softmodems and require a driver. Regarding internal modems, that document references some chipsets and model numbers that are known to work.
...
7
you could have been writing to a file during a hard reset, or your hard drive could have problems. a fsck should fix it (you will have to umount the fs to do this). I'd check dmesg and smartctl -a /dev/hdx (latter is part of smartmontools ) to see if your HD is reporting any errors. I'd also run a non-destructive badblocks on the partition.
You should also ...
7
If your hardware is from a big vendor, say HP, Dell and so, they might have specific tools for what you're looking. I use to work with HP and they already have tools for reporting bad hardware.
If that's not the case, then it'll be trickier (based on my experience), you already started well testing memory as it uses to be a usual failing point.
Now if you ...
6
I and friends of mine made some good experiences with the tablets from Wacom.
The Bamboo series contains different tablets in different pricing categories.
My Bamboo for example is connected via USB, the pen as 2 Buttons, the tablet is only sensitive to the pen, has some more buttons and works with my linux out of the box.
So this should satisfy your ...
6
From the information you've given, I surmise that:
You have a black box device which you can communicate with only by plugging a USB mass storage device into it.
Physically plugging and unplugging a USB drive is not acceptable, you won't have physical access after deployment.
If any of these assumptions is false, you'll have an easier time.
What you're ...
6
To display a nice overview of my hardware, I use lshw -short, best run (as root). You can just run lshw plain of course, but I prefer the conciseness that the -short option offers.
To check my HDD usage, I use df --human-readable, which should be available by default on your system (unlike lshw).
Also, have a look at checking hardware on linux.
6
Is not so powerfull as a normal PC, but you should try arduino platform.
You can buy a great and cheap unit here: http://www.libelium.com/
Google a little bit about arduino and you will find a lot of references and a big community
6
As geekosaur and Tshepang are saying: Assuming that both distributions are using the same kernel, remaining differences should boil down to default configuration settings.
It could be worth exploring a bit before switching distributions (changing settings is presumably quicker than installing a new OS), I suggest
Check System > Preferences > Appearance > ...
6
The quick and dirty way to disable it is with xmodmap:
$ xmodmap -e 'clear Lock'
The next question is what would you like to do with it? I usually make it either a Ctrl key:
$ xmodmap -e 'keycode 66 = Control_L'
Depending on your DE/WM, there is likely a way to do this in the GUI configuration. For example Gnome has a "keyboard layout" option on the ...
6
Use xmodmap.
The setting to disable your capslock is
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
This would be placed in your .xmodmap file.
Another option - to disable it temporarily, you can use a setxkbmap option:
setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps
and then, to restore normal behavior: setxkbmap -option
6
Check out this How do I detect the RAM memory chip specification from within a Linux machine question.
This tool might help:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/check-ram-speed-linux/
$ sudo dmidecode --type 17 | more
Sample output:
# dmidecode 2.9
SMBIOS 2.4 present.
Handle 0x0018, DMI type 17, 27 bytes
Memory Device
Array Handle: 0x0017
Error ...
6
It is 'safe' to remove an external drive when it is unmounted.
The reason it might not be safe simply if programs aren't using it is that the Linux kernel does write caching. Meaning that when a program has written to disk, that data might not physically be on the disk, it could still be in memory (unless the program uses fsync or fdatasync). Linux does ...
5
Actually I was going to suggest VirtualBox too. Seems like the best solution, but if you want cheep hardware what about a SheevaPlug? Only $100 and it is the size of a wall wart. In fact it is a wall wart.
Oops. Missed that part of your question. Ok, then how about an old computer from a recycling place like Freegeek. This one is in Portalns but there is ab ...
5
To see the device description for the controller (assuming an internal (PCI) controller), which usually contains SATA for SATA controllers:
lspci -d $(cat /sys/block/sda/device/../../../vendor):$(cat /sys/block/sda/device/../../../device)
If you want to type less, just browsing the output of lspci is likely to give you the answer in a laptop (many desktop ...
5
Not knowing your price range, I suggest Gumstix.
The boards are quite expensive, but very powerfull, especially with the ATmel Robostix expansion board.
I suggest the Robostix Starter Pack, this should get you going programming with Gumstix.
5
Every device with upgradeable firmware is probably going to have its own methods for doing that. Motherboards in particular are notoriously incompatible in this regard.
As to hard drives, again, this is a proprietary matter. Seagate provides liveCDs and Windows downloads to perform firmware updates, but not Linux or Unix tools.
You can build bootable ...
5
Use the sysfs control files in /sys/class/gpio. The following links will hopefully be useful to helping you get started:
http://www.avrfreaks.net/wiki/index.php/Documentation:Linux/GPIO
Have seen reports of this article on the Beagle Board also working with the mini2440:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/02/blinking_leds_with_the_beagle_board.html
In ...
5
@Giles says this is highly platform-dependent. Here's one such example.
I'm running a CentOS 5.5 system. This system has 4 disks and a 3ware RAID controller.
In my case, lshw -class disk, cat /proc/scsi/scsi and parted --list shows the RAID controller (3ware 9650SE-4LP). This doesn't show the actual disks:
only shows the 3ware RAID controller which ...
5
This is heavily dependent on the set up of the system. One way to get the information would be if xrandr is being used:
xrandr --query
This will display something like:
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 3046 x 1050, maximum 8192 x 8192
VGA1 connected 1680x1050+1366+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 473mm x 296mm
1680x1050 60.0*+
...
5
You could try using the tool monitor-edid, which produces output like this
Name: DELL 2407WFP
EISA ID: DELa017
EDID version: 1.3
EDID extension blocks: 0
Screen size: 52.0 cm x 33.0 cm (24.25 inches, aspect ratio 16/10 = 1.60)
Gamma: 2.2
Digital signal
Max video bandwidth: 170 MHz
HorizSync 30-83
VertRefresh 56-76
# Monitor preferred modeline ...
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