755CD & Linux success!!!

[pepersb@cuug.ab.ca (Brad Pepers)]

> Brad, 
> Your problems with the CD-ROM under Linux are very similar to mine (although
> my CD-ROM is built in). On a good side, yesterday I made a SCSI Toshiba
> CD-ROM work with a Bust Toaster PCMCIA card. It worked superbly. All I
> needed to do is 'mount -t iso9600 /dev/scd0 /cdrom' and I was done.
>
> The build in CD-ROM for 755CD is IDE ATAPI, and it was identified as such.
> but the file ide-cd.c in the kernel drivers/block directory seems to have
> bugs. Your Caldera drive is also ATAPI, so it points to the same source of
> problems. 

Hmmm.  Seems a bit of a misunderstanding.  The Caldera is a CD, not a drive.
It is a Linux installation like Slackware and just happens to be the
first CD I've really tried to use with my 755CD.  I am using the
builtin CDROM drive of the 755CD and so am having the exact same
problems as you!

The good news is I stayed up almost all last night and finally fixed
it!  What I had to do was get the source code for linux/drivers/block/
ide-cd.c from the linux-1.3.0.tar.gz source code.  The ide-cd.c code
in this release mentioned a fix for some drives that sounded like
our problem and when I copied it over and re-built my 1.2.11 Linux
kernel, everything works great!

As an added note - many thanks to someone who recently mentioned that
some DSP stuff works if you boot DOS first and then Linux by using
loadlin.  I did that and I can now use audio-cds in my 755CD and have
the sound go through to the speaker!  Also I built a kernel with the
sound stuff built-in and it says it found a Sound Blaster 2.0 card.
Sadly when I tried to use linuxxdoom all I got was load-white noise
(and I think an error from sndserver about can't play 16bit sounds
or something?).  So at least a little but works and I'm going to
play around with the Soundblaster stuff some more and maybe I can
get it working without even writing Linux MWave drivers!

> > A possibly related problem is that when I had the CDROM in my Thinkpad,
> > my PCMCIA Ethernet card (GVC NE2000 compat) was going nuts and I geting
> > errors.  When I switched the Ethernet card to the second PCMCIA socket,
> > all was fine!  ...
> 
> This seems like a different problem, perhaps with the PCMCIA card.
> I use a Kingston EtheRx card and it appears to work fine in both PCMCIA
> slots.  This one needs an entry in pcmcia/config which is a copy of the
> IBM Credit Card adapter's entry.

Yes I figured it was more card related but thought maybe it had some
bearing...

> Thank you.
> -- Marek R. Rychlik

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+------------------ Brad Pepers -- pepersb@cuug.ab.ca -------------------+