DJS Consulting Tech Blog
Technical Information You Can Use (or not – but hey, at least it's free!)

We’re speedily working towards a Friday deadline at work, so tonight I had some analysis work to do on some COBOL code. Great, I thought, I can use my VSlick setup under wine. I moved my computer from the living room back to our now-empty bedroom (soon to be nursery), and booted it up. Kernel panics galore – never got past the network stuff. When I booted to Windows, I found that the wireless network didn’t reach that far, and I’m guessing that the ndiswrapper folks haven’t tried their driver a lot with a wireless card, but no wireless network. Once I get past that, I may grab the dumps from these kernel panics and see if the developers need them to see what went wrong. So, for tonight, I had to use WXP (in which I actually had to disable the wireless connection – seems Windows doesn’t handle a barely-there wireless connection much better than Linux).

The diagnostics I ran last night never found anything – they ran for about 10 hours. I suppose I’ll just have to wait until I have problems again, then run it right then. Another person from the WBEL users list suggested I check the way I have my hard drives set up; he thinks that a 2GB drive slaved to a 20GB drive may be causing conflicts, which would cause freezes or panics.

At work, we use an editor called Visual SlickEdit (VSlick). It’s got a lot of features, and supports color-coding for many different languages. I decided that I’d give wine another shot, as we only have the Windows version of this program. I installed wine and winesetuptk, used winesetuptk to configure the installation, then ran the installation program. Everything installed, and the program ran up to a point, when it started complaining about a missing DLL. I booted to WXP, found the DLL, copied it to the FAT32 drive, rebooted to Linux, and copied the DLL into the “fake windows” system directory. Soon, it was working great! I can’t believe it – success with wine!

I also have made little headway towards getting Apache and MySQL to working. I changed the process that Apache uses to run as “summersd”, and I was able to see pages (although any pages that relied on a database didn’t work). I still haven’t figured this one out yet…

I’m still getting kernel panics from time to time, and it seems to be whenever I access networking. A suggestion from one of the folks on the WBEL users list was to download the Ultimate Boot CD, filled with diagnostic programs. I downloaded it, burned it, and ran some memory checks. Those checked out, so I’m going to run a “CPU Burn-In” program to see if it can detect errors from the CPU. It runs for up to 7 days, but I think I’ll just run it overnight – folding@home didn’t take nearly that long to crash it before.

My wife bought me a wireless network card, so I could move the second computer out of the living room (or, as she calls it, “not a computer lab!”). Everything works okay under WXP, but when I boot to Linux, no joy. (I sort of expected that, at this point…) I downloaded the Red Hat 8 drivers from iBlitzz’s website, but the interface for a network card is what’s called a “kernel module,” which is, as best I can tell, a highly-specialized object module that tells the kernel all the details of the hardware. At any rate, the kernel module is very much tied to a particular version of kernel, so the RH8 doesn’t seem to be working. Oh well – time to play with my new toy – WXP for now.

Upon returning from vacation, I found that the power supply was finally here. After installing it, I fired up the computer, and it works! I fired up my e-mail client (to pull all the mail off the server that I had received for the past few weeks), and downloaded the Folding@Home (F@H) client for Linux. I’ve been running that on a couple of other computers (user name LX_i, team #37825), and I’ll probably write more about it in particular in my regular blog. Anyway, once I got that started, I started reading the e-mail I had missed. Then, the machine locked up!

I reset the machine, and repeated the steps (started Evolution, started F@H), and before long, it happened again. I restarted them both again, but it’s getting late – I’ll have to continue this tomorrow.

The power supply has been ordered, but I’m going out of town between the 19th and the 26th, so it probably won’t make it here before I leave. This adventure will have to resume at that point.

Searching for power supplies was very interesting. I determined that I needed at least a 300W supply, and considered upgrading case and all. Some of the bigger stores, such as Best Buy, Office Depot, and OfficeMax, revealed nothing under $30 (just for the power supply). I checked some other sites, such as Tiger Direct and TCWO, and found one for $17 on Tiger Direct. I thought that was pretty good, and was planning on ordering it, when a friend (the person I bought the computer from) found one on PC Direct Source for $10. I’ll probably order it tomorrow.

I fired up the computer today while I was at home for lunch. I booted it into Windows so my younger son could play a game. When I came home from work, I noticed that the computer was off. Seems that it just completely shut down while he was in the middle of the game. After some hardware troubleshooting, I narrowed the problem down to the power supply. Time to go power-supply hunting…