Archive for March 5th, 2013

How to configure old ISA sound card on Debian / Ubuntu / Xubuntu Linux

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

isa old soundcard make work on Debian Ubuntu Xubuntu Fedora GNU / Linux
If you happen to install a modern GNU / Linux distribution to a relatively old computer hardware with an ISA non-PNP (Plug and Play) soundcard it will be not visible neither among PCI devices list with (lspci) command nor in USBs list (lsusb). Thus with ISA cards, the way to configure a 16 bit SoundBlaster is via a special kernel modules snd-es18xx and snd-sb16 which thanksfully is still existent even on latest Linux distros. Without this two modules enabled in the kernel trying alsamixer command will be unable to launch the mixer as the soundcard is not detected on run of /etc/init.d/alsa start – ALSA enabling boot script – loaded during the system enters runlevel 2.

For one time test of sound card driver, I tested by running:

manastir-pomorie@manastir-pomorie:~# /sbin/modprobe snd-es18xx
manastir-pomorie@manastir-pomorie:~# /sbin/modprobe snd-sb16
 

On enabling enabling the sound card via above two drivers on the speakers – volume raised to Loud a kind of beep sound was heard, this led me to thoughts now it might work. Before testing the sound in running Youtube Video with sound in Firefox, I launched alsamixer to see if volume settings for SoundBlaster are not muted. Not surprisingly they were set raised to lowest level as you can see on picture:

alsamixer xubuntu configuring isa old sound card on deb based distro

After raising the volume level for PCM and testing in browser thanksfully soundblaster worked fine.
To make the two kernel modules making the ISA card work, I added the modules to /etc/modules

manastir-pomorie@manastir-pomorie:~# echo 'snd-es18xx' >> /etc/modules
manastir-pomorie@manastir-pomorie:~# echo 'snd-sb16' >> /etc/modules

Even after restarting XUbuntu sound drivers gets loaded. Though I tested this on Xubuntu as Xubuntu is Debian based, same kernel module should be working fine on Ubuntu and Debian. The exact Xubuntu version and kernel on which the ISA card worked is;

manastir-pomorie@manastir-pomorie:~$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS \n \l

manastir-pomorie@manastir-pomorie:~$ uname -a;
Linux manastir-pomorie 3.2.0-38-generic #61-Ubuntu SMP Tue Feb 19 12:20:02 UTC 2013 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

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Posted in Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video, Various | No Comments »

Who were our ancestors – Genetic history of Europe – DNA – Truth or Machination from IGENEA

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

genetic-history-of-europe-Percentage_of_major_Y-DNA_haplogroups_in_Europe

As I've said earlier in my blog posts, I keep deep interest into the origin of things. Thus I'm quite interested into the origin of Bulgarian nation and rest of European nations. I've stumbled across a project called IGENEA which aims at researching into DNA of nations and determining to what kind of ancestry nation is most likely to be. The data provided by IGENEA is put into question by a lot of Historians for the reason the method of IGENEA is based merely on scientific logic and scientifical data which can't be 100% proven and there is also hypothesis as part of it. One other thing is IGENEA project has commercial side, as they offer DNA tests that can be done at home and later analyzed in iGENEA laboratory and tell you individually who are your most likely ancestors and where you're most likely to find your relatives. Igenea claism they can tell you if your DNA somehow links to famous people like Napoleon Bonapart, Michael Jackson, Nicole Kidman or even the Popoe 😉

Though of course as everything in this life the results one gets from igenea are finally based on faith, as mostly all in life is based on faith.

Though below video data might be incorrect, some general data provided for some Northern Europe nations looks trustworthy. For those interested to know exactly how IGENEA testing and analysis is done check here
As I'm a Christian and I firmly believe God Created all I support the Creationism theory, I look in the data a bit sceptical for the reason many of the results and conclusions driven from IGENEA project lay on believes in Darwin's theory credibility. Everyone who seriously considered to know where we come from has already questioned the credibility of Evolution. Anyone who digged deep already knows there are a lot of problems with Darwin's theory which are unsolvable by modern archeology 'little' species findings. Also it is big problem with the idea that man came from Africa, that credibiliy of such claims is and will probably forever stay one big Hypothesis.
Enjoy, the highly specular findings of IGENEA in below video
 


 

Who were our ancestors- Genetic history of Europe – DNA – Truth or Machination from IGENEA.

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Posted in Curious Facts, Various | No Comments »

How to configure Matrox Graphics MGA G200 AGP on Debian and Ubuntu Linux

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

I just had to configure a Matrox Graphics MGA G200 AGP on a very old computer installed with Xubuntu 12.04. The Graphic card is not automatically detected and Xorg Linux server automatically runs X without generating any config in /etc/X11/xorg.conf after Xubuntu install. By default Linux uses the VESA driver for running X, the problem with VESA is it is very slow in videos and is only good for text reading and simple browsing. For watching video and Youtube, one needs to install the custom Video card driver on this host the Video card was identifying in lpsci as:

user@oldhost:~$ lspci |grep -i matrox
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA G200 AGP (rev 03)

In deb package repositories, there is a special xorg MGA driver suited to run MGA cards, thus to use it I had to first install it with:

 

user@oldhost:~# apt-get install --yes xserver-xorg-video-mga
....
For allowing card to normally watch movies – you have to have installed a special video driver which is to be lated built from source:

user@oldhost:~#  apt-get -b source mga-vid-source
user@oldhost:~# dpkg -i /usr/src/modules/mga-vid/debian/mga-vid-source_2.6.32-1_i386.deb
....

There is also special program to test if MGA video driver is installed and work correctly mga_vid_test. To have it installed and use it you have to be running on 2.6.x Linux kernel cause it is a bit of old software plus it is necessary to have installed mga-vid-common i.e.:

user@oldhost:~# apt-get install --yes mga-vid-common
.....

I did a quick research online for other people who faced similar problem and found in Ubuntu Forums the following MGA G200 recommended xorg.conf
Below config was little modified by me as by default it was configured to run in 1280×1024 in 24 bit depth color. Usually 24 bit color is high for old cards, plus the resolution of 1280 seemed quite high for this piece of old iron, so I decided to use the better suiting old computers 1024×768 in 16 bit color depth.

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Posted in Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | 1 Comment »