The video card in this lappy supports H.264 offload, and it always has, BUT NOTHING IS USING IT. In fact, Google Chrome flat-out refuses to because Google doesn't want to support it (thanks a fuckload :P). Every time I play a YouTube video full-screen, my fan spins right up.
Do I have to install Windows just to get video to play smoothly? Seriously? This is basic shit I thought you fuckers had nailed YEARS AGO.
Well, I don't think the entire premise is dying, but it's always been stronger behind the scenes and in tools and languages. When you get down to it, asking the people who built Linux to care about "lusers" is, in many cases, asking too much unless there's a corporation demanding it (case in point: Android).
By which I mean that developers of this sort have typically had a dim view of end users, and tend to complain about things like user-interface guidelines and standardised APIs the same way polluters complained (and still complain) about the EPA.
I remember (fuzzily) an incident that happened on the FreeBSD lists years ago. One of the main technologist/architect types suggested that FreeBSD should support NDIS drivers from Windows, to get support right away for network cards where no native driver existed (and where one wouldn't be forthcoming in the near future, either due to the IC manufacturer—looking at you, Broadcom—balking about their IP, or because it would just take time).
While it wasn't as much of a bombshell as it would have been on linux-kernel at the time, the idea still inspired a bit of "but Windows is evil and yucky" hue and cry from a few corners. I think the bigger reaction was "we would have to emulate at least some of Win32 or NT itself to get that to work", which was the more reasonable one.
Anyway, my point is, some people just don't "get" user experience, and they don't seem to consider Linux users a priority because clearly they're all still stuck in the 1990s. :P
Hmmm, so apparently the "reusing the DAC as an ADC" trick the first Sound Blasters seem to do is a standard thing you can do with an 8048. It's in the original Intel manuals! Now I really wish we had kept our old Sound Blaster 1.5, so I could trace the DAC circuitry...
Talking about Not Computers again for a sec: It turns out the 6BN6 is even more advanced than I thought. It's not so much a quadrature detector as a coincidence detector, which is something you need a NAND gate for...and if you stare at the grid configuration on a "gated beam" tube long enough, it looks a whole lot like a NMOS NAND gate.
Wow, even Damn Small Linux (which uses Linux 2.4 and fits in 50-60 MB of disc space) is slow on the 486. I guess 25 MHz is really not enough for a modern OS.
So I just replaced the 3C509B in the 486 with a cheap NE2000 clone, since I still need to fix the jack on the '509. I noticed something weird about the '509: It doesn't use a standard +5 to -9 inverter like most cards that can do CNET/Thinnet. It would seem 3Com rolled their own inverter using a power MOSFET (RFP3055), a transformer I can't for the life of me find any specs on (which means it was probably custom), a fairly standard diode-and-cap rectifier circuit on the other end, and—get this—a LM79M09 linear regulator.
There's no oscillator that I can see, so I suspect the 3Com MAC itself was generating the PWM...
I finally got the Pentium OverDrive I ordered, and guess what: It works at 33 MHz bus speed with the cache on! I've always suspected that the 486DX-33 I bought was defective, but this seems to confirm it. (It's also possible that I misconfigured the bus speed jumpers—I totally did earlier tonight—but even at 50 MHz, the POD made it into Windows 95 far enough to bring up the network logon box. The DX-33 would barf long before that, at rated speed.)
Good news: I ordered an ATI video card for the PC 350, and it got here yesterday. Now I can run X in jessie without having to settle for the VESA driver!
Bad news: It's a Mac card. It won't POST. Dammit. :P
Not-so-bad news: Mac ATI cards, especially ones that will work on OldWorld PCI Power Macs (Radeons won't without a lot of fiddling), are rare as hen's teeth. I'll be hanging onto this in case I ever get me a 7600 or 7300 again (8600s are too damn big). Also, I was able to dig up the spare GeForce 6200 PCI at the office, so I'll try that. Nouveau is still a joke, but if accelerated 2D works, that's the battle won right there.
Well, it turns out that my Debian install is hosed because I decided to try and save time and skip ahead. :P The problem is, I can't boot the standard Debian install CD because this thing's BIOS is too old, and Smart Boot Manager gets confused and crashes. I will have to netboot it, which is a bit of an adventure in itself.
Also, the IDE on this machine is broken. It seems the BIOS isn't marking the ports as enabled, which is confusing Linux. If I want fast disk I/O, I will have to install a SATA card, which means no USB (not that USB will be very useful on something this old, or that it matters much since it has a network card).
The good news is, the GeForce card is working so far. I haven't been able to try it in X yet, but it POSTs at least.
I figured out what I did wrong: I was using the installer for testing and not jessie! (Though it would seem testing has dropped 486 and Pentium support, so that's something I should watch out for.)
Okay, jessie is installing (finally) and it should be finished soon (all the better because I need to get to bed).
I've made a few adjustments. The CompactFlash experiment is officially dead. For one thing, the IDE-CF adapter I have uses a strange form factor and can't be mounted in a 3.5" bay (and my metalworking skills aren't good enough to make an appropriate bracket), and for another, if I continued using it, I would still be stuck with the motherboard IDE and its foibles. I'd much rather use a SATA hard drive.
This also means that, between the new video card and the SATA card, there's no room for my good 100BaseTX card. I put the NE2000 from the 486 in, and also ordered a second one. This thing was barely pulling down 500 kB/s even on Fast Ethernet, so downgrading to 10BaseT will be no great loss.
Well, fuckasses. I can't use the Nvidia card in wheezy because fucking Nouveau depends on ACPI. >:P If I want accelerated video, I either have to buy a card that is supported (and risk losing DOS/Windows 3.1 support if the card is too new), or downgrade to wheezy and stay there. God fucking dammit.
Also, PC-DOS 7 keeps freezing when EMM386 loads. No idea what that shit is about.
Okay. I can't get PC-DOS 7 to go for love or money. I have no idea why (Linux will run fine, oddly), so I think I may split the difference and put Windows 98 SE on. Also, I'm relatively sure the onboard IDE is...well, it's not dead, but it's stuck in ISA mode, which Linux (or Debian 8, at least) no longer supports. I'm wondering if there's a DMI utility or something that can turn the PCI IDE on and off, because there sure ain't one in the BIOS.
Okay, this is bizarre. The PCI IDE isn't coming up as a separate device because IBM decided to program both channels as instances of PNP ID *PNP0680. Of course, because Linux is stupid and doesn't think to check PNP/ACPI IDs (as far as I know, anyway; ata-generic might), it thinks there's no IDE controllers installed.
Oh well. Modern Linux is a bit to slow on this machine anyhow.
So anyway! I have Windows 98 SE installed on the P100 using the SCSI card and the 50 GB drive, and I kind of want to devote some of the left over space to NetBSD (because let's face it, this thing has to have some kind of BSD on it). The trouble is, I can't decide what all to put on the Win98 partition! Jim didn't have many games (a couple of shareware clones of Mario Kart, some thing I forget the details of), and many of the things he had on his 486 back in the mid-1990s (particularly the Star Trek: TNG CD gift box he had, Microsoft Office 4.2, and After Dark) won't run now because I don't have the original install discs. There was also some utilities installed that are relevant only to hardware we haven't had in years...Jim's ScanMan, an old Western Digital VGA card, stuff like that. There's also a few things Jim used for work.
The obvious things for me would be DOOM and Descent. I'm also considering some of the older iD games (Wolf3D, Commander Keen). Scorched Earth should be on here, too. Anything else?
(As for the 486, I finally have a sound card in that, but it should have a different selection of stuff than the Pentium, owing to its lesser capabilities. I'm wondering just how many late-1980s/early-1990s DOS shareware games are still easily available.)
Good news: My ALi USB/FireWire card actually works in 98SE. I haven't tried plugging in a device, but the card comes up, at least.
Annoying news: Try finding drivers for something these days that is either very old, for a very old OS, or both. Just try. Sites that used to cater to this are worthless now; they're all just DriverAgent[1] affiliates, and they'll try to trick you into downloading the demo under the guise of a legitimate OEM driver package. And yes, I ran into someone attempting to clickjack, too. :P
Eventually, some digging got me an official ALi EHCI installer that works on 98SE.
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[1] Or something like unto it, anyway. Aside from the fact that they fall into the same level of crapware as registry cleaners and "system optimizers", you're trying to sell me something I can't use in this situation. I need a driver for Windows 98, you idiots, and your software won't even install on 98.
Zachmann always was something of an OS/2 stan (even when the writing was clearly on the wall after, oh, mid-1995), but that bit about NeXT is hilarious in hindsight.
Prediction 10 is pretty much right, except that s/1990/2000, and the "OS/2" machines will be running that "portable OS/2" Microsoft cooked up instead of OS/2 1.3...
Neat: One of my test machines at work died...I was playing with a Linux boot disk that claims to be a useful replacement for Norton Ghost, and I noticed that it couldn't see this machine's network card—because it had disappeared off the PCI bus.
Then I turned it off, and not only would it not turn back on, but it was emitting the "I'm shorted" squeal of death. If I open it up and pull it out, I know what it's going to be...
Yup. It's one of those Antecs from the mid-2000s which were electrically and functionally sound, but used cheap-ass capacitors on the low-voltage side which suffered from The Plague. I counted at least 5 bulging low-ESR caps, all of them from Taiwanese brands like Teapo and Fuhjyyu (fudge-you?). This power supply is dead, and with mATX cases so cheap these days, it doesn't pay to fix it, so I have a new case and power supply on order. In the meantime, I have another, working power supply wired in so I can try and finally get some work done—I've been struggling with hardware issues for days!
(Why do I have to replace everything? This is an Antec ARIA case, which uses a non-standard form factor PSU. I imagine that, just like with XPCs, direct replacements are not easy to come by. Besides, this case has other problems; the power light hasn't worked in years, for one.)
I also have a new office chair and floor mat, and I've got the new Pi doing NAT for the other machines (since the Buffalo generated gobs of EMI, and the XPC is too noisy to just leave running). The old Pi has the latest Raspbian on it, and a fresh install of A2SERVER as well, so the IIgs is up and running again too. Now I just need to get some crap to run on it.
The open-source ATI driver has rendering bugs that still aren't resolved (tool tips in Chrome look very weird, and I'm sure Google Maps is no better than it was), and I can't install the ATI proprietary driver because they don't support Linux 4.4.
I'm going to have to put the Nvidia card back in. That or fall back to stable (which means reinstalling at this point). Fucking waste. I should just send the ATI card back. 😡
So I ordered a Seagate Medalist Pro 7200 6.4 GB SCSI off of eBay. I had the 9.1 GB PATA version of it back in 1998-1999, so it's got sentimental value.
The bad news? The person I bought it from didn't know how to ship a hard drive properly; it arrived in a completely generic Priority Mail box with no padding.
The good news? The damn thing still seems to work so far. If there are any bad sectors, I haven't run into any unrecoverable ones yet.
One of the things I liked about the Medalist Pro 7200 range was the sound. On spinup, it doesn't sound all that much different from a later Seagate Barracuda 7200.7-10 (this was one of the first production models to use fluid dynamic bearings). The seek tone sounds hauntingly familiar, though. Back in 1998-1998, I associated it with old Control Data drives from the 1980s, but listening to it again now, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense because those were dedicated-surface drives with hybrid servos at best, and this thing is embedded servo like all modern drives are. It has a high-pitched twang to it like a lot of Conner or older Western Digital drives had; in fact, it sounds a lot like the ST31276A in the 486.
SUCCESS. The G3 can now boot Debian from the Medalist Pro without me having to fiddle with it or work around this thing's ATA bugs. Now I just need a drive rail for it...I know I have some around here someplace. I can deal with it some other time.
And since I found one cheap on eBay, I got a Conner CFP4207S. This is a rare bird indeed, the only 7200 RPM drive Conner made before the Seagate merger, and I'm wondering just how much influence it may have had on later models.
Okay, so the G3 is doing that thing where it'll run fine at first with 768 MB in...then it'll start throwing fits and giving me random signal 11s, a classic sign of bad memory. Thing is, I'm relatively sure the memory is good, and I'm also pretty sure this doesn't happen with just 2 sticks in instead of three.
I suspect either the RAM itself or the CPU is overheating. There's an outside chance that the north bridge (which isn't heatsinked) might be, but I don't have freeze spray to test this.
Fixing the CPU overheating should be pretty easy; it's almost certainly dried-up thermal grease, and cleaning out the 20-year-old crap that's there and putting in fresh Ceramique should eliminate that problem.
The man page for wipe(1) is delightfully, pants-wettingly paranoid. While it's certainly good to be careful (and HTTPS is good, too), it seems like it spends more time fretting about the DHS and magnetic-field microscopy than getting to the actual point.
It also shows its age, too. This is a very late 1990s/early 2000s view of computer security; it's much, much easier to pull off SIGINT and social engineering attacks now than it was In The Year 2000. Back then, you were probably right to be worried about people seizing hard drives and such. Thing is, though:
Complaining about the DHS/FBI/CIA/NSA/Illuminati/Nostradamus/Cthulhu isn't going to help someone use the program. Save it for your blog, dude.
While magnetic field microscopy attacks are possible, they were approaching the realm of impracticality even in the late 1990s, and it would be tedious, expensive work now for very little gain (especially considering that HDDs are not the main storage for a lot of people's personal data anymore; the Flash in their phones is). Also, data recovery places' methods are less James Bond or Mission: Impossible and more MacGyver: Most of the time, they just swap in parts (heads, controllers, etc) from a known good drive and use those to read the discs.
Gutmann's paper was written at a time when there were still quite a few stepper-motor and dedicated-servo drives around, and the tiny inaccuracies in those older servo systems could be exploited. Since then, embedded servo has taken over entirely, and even Gutmann himself has said that on today's larger drives, overwriting with zeroes should be enough.
The government (the US goverment, at least; local and state governments are different) is the least of your worries when it comes to everyday life. Phishing and ransomware attacks by private concerns are much more common and far more destructive. Most of the information here isn't useful unless you're an activist being targeted by political enemies or a hostile government.
Lastly: Encryption was black magic in 2000, largely because the existing methods of using it were slow and difficult to operate, and unless you were in the US (or got equipment completely made outside of the US, say, in Germany), you were almost certainly going to end up on someone's shit list. AES and the loosening of US export regulations did a lot to change this, as did the patents on D-H and RSA expiring. HTTPS by default is no big deal now, and if you want to encrypt your hard drive using something like BitLocker, that's not a big deal either.
I think I understand now! The two big chips are the MPU (most likely Z180-ish with some extra fetures, if their really old boards are anything to go by) and an AIC-010-ish sequencer/ ECC chip. The other not-so-big chip, the 087 (may be different on RLL models), is the ENDEC/WAM/AMD and seems to be AIC-250/260-ish. It even uses an outboard VCO like the Adaptec chips. All the other chips are either firmware ROMs, bus interface or glue logic for the floppy controller (if present).
also, somehow the max PCI-E payload size on my old XPC got set to 128 somehow. it should be 4096. setting it higher made this thing quite a bit peppier, especially when it has to swap.
98SE works, but for some reason, the Cirrus Logic driver is allergic to the ISA CL-GD5428 I have in and will freeze solid on a regular basis. >.< I had to force-install the VGA driver just to.make it usable. I'll also have to see about installing the generic VESA driver, so I can get 256/64K colors without hanging the machine.
Also, after some fiddling, I was able to get Damn Small Linux to boot to a desktop, though it's slow (forget about running a web browser that's not Dillo or text-mode) and not terribly useful except maybe as a low-performance X terminal. I had it running in 64K mode, since the palette in 256-color mode was fuxx0red.
In the end, I think this machine would be happiest in DOS, or perhaps with an older version of Linux that still supports the SVGA server from XFree86 3.x. Neither XFree86 4.x nor xorg are terribly friendly to old ISA VGAs, and a lot of old drivers were dropped between 3 and 4 due to lack of interest.
Another problem I ran into with DSL: Some of the applications are so old that they don't support modern encryption standards. Dillo had the most luck connecting to HH, but "Bon Echo" gave up saying the required protocol wasn't enabled. I couldn't SSH to my other Linux PC because it was missing a protocol. I suspect the Debian this is based on is a good 5-10 years out of date based on this (and the fact that it's stuck on Linux 2.4).
Comments
Do I have to install Windows just to get video to play smoothly? Seriously? This is basic shit I thought you fuckers had nailed YEARS AGO.
I have the Windows 7 DVD written, and I'm going to install it once I get back to my room (I took a break to make some soup).
I've made a few adjustments. The CompactFlash experiment is officially dead. For one thing, the IDE-CF adapter I have uses a strange form factor and can't be mounted in a 3.5" bay (and my metalworking skills aren't good enough to make an appropriate bracket), and for another, if I continued using it, I would still be stuck with the motherboard IDE and its foibles. I'd much rather use a SATA hard drive.
This also means that, between the new video card and the SATA card, there's no room for my good 100BaseTX card. I put the NE2000 from the 486 in, and also ordered a second one. This thing was barely pulling down 500 kB/s even on Fast Ethernet, so downgrading to 10BaseT will be no great loss.
Oh well. Modern Linux is a bit to slow on this machine anyhow.
Also, after some fiddling, I was able to get Damn Small Linux to boot to a desktop, though it's slow (forget about running a web browser that's not Dillo or text-mode) and not terribly useful except maybe as a low-performance X terminal. I had it running in 64K mode, since the palette in 256-color mode was fuxx0red.
In the end, I think this machine would be happiest in DOS, or perhaps with an older version of Linux that still supports the SVGA server from XFree86 3.x. Neither XFree86 4.x nor xorg are terribly friendly to old ISA VGAs, and a lot of old drivers were dropped between 3 and 4 due to lack of interest.