thechangelab.com

Day 2 – thechangelab project

Time to check what’s wrong.

The RAM slots

The Iwill DBD100 is an interesting board for the memory it can handle. According to it’s manual, it safely accepts PC66 and 100 SDRAM AND EDO. Naturally, there is no safe mixing of the three. It will boot using PC133, as this is what they used at the shop to get it to post the BIOS.

So the board was refusing to acknowledge the two sticks of 64MB PC100 SDRAM. It was time to test the RAM slots, under the assumption that the RAM itself wasn’t faulty.
Opening the chassis,, the big problem was the position of the RAM slots. Only the bottom third of the 4 slots were visible. Blocking my view and easy access was the drive cage for the optical drive. So rather than removing the chassis’ backplate again, I squeezed my hand in to get at the RAM. NOT RECOMMENDED.

After swapping slots, my suspicion was confirmed that the two furthest away from the CPUs were not functioning. Bottomline, any future memory upgrade would max out at 512MB ( 2 x 256MB ).

The USB

Post-install of Debian Sarge ( kernel 2.4.27-2-686-smp ), I noticed that my external HP USB cd-rewriter wasn’t being recognized. Then I remembered a BIOS setting. YES or NO (the default option) for automatic IRQ assignment of the USB ports. I’d left it at the default.

What’s interesting about this is that, it’s a reflection of the age of the board. You’d expect something simpler like “Enable USB : YES/NO “. However, this board was produced at a time when USB was a relatively new thing. Also, one has to consider that a lot of people would be installing Windows NT 3.x or 4 with this board. An OS that has no USB support.
Anyway, after the BIOS changes, I could finally access my cd burner as /dev/scd0. If you’re ever unsure as to which device it’s been mapped to, try the dmesg command, piped through less.

The Audio

The yamaha sound card wasn’t playing friendly with my default barebones install. So it was time to install the necessary Alsa packages. Next, run ” alsaconf ” to get the sound card properly detected. Next, run ” alsamixer ” to see the settings. Finally, ” alsactl store ” to SAVE THE SETTINGS. I’d forgotten to do this before, and ended up with a screaming pitch each time my machine booted to life.

Anyway, since I was reluctant to spend a few dollars on some ultra cheap PC speakers, I decided to reuse my old second hand stereo speakers. Their defining feature is a phono plug in the back, as opposed to having to run a bare wire to it. So two of these speakers hooked via a phono-to-1/8 inch stereo plugged into my old Dell Dimension 2300. I then took the speakers that were for my Dell to my upgraded box. Actually, these speakers originally came with the old Packard-Bell I’d retired. Unfortunately, they were designed to be attached the Packard-Bell’s monitor, now long gone.

What’s To Come

Next up, I hope to splurge on a video card – hard to come by if you’re stuck with an AGP 1x/2x board, with PCI ver.2.1 This pretty much eliminates almost anything that could be purchased new. Still, Day 3 has yet to come.