Thinkpad 600x and Debian Lenny

I have have my 600x running quite well with Debian Lenny.

I am having to unload the CS46xx sound driver when I suspend to disk, but as I am using
pulseaudio this is not much of a problem.

It seems that it is not vital that the sound driver be removed, but if it is active then
vbetools fails to restore the virtual terminals and they become unusable. In some case
this hangs the booting process and requires a reboot. But by stopping the pulseaudio process
I can remove the snd-cs46xx module and be sure that it is not active when vbetools restores the video mode.

One of the key finds was that the video mode was not always getting saved in a state that made for a good restore, so I saved a state that worked and now use that state to always restore the state.

This might cause problems if I were to change the video mode ever, but I don't so it works.

For button control see:
/proc/bus/input/devices

SilverStone FP35B Card Reader on linux

I bought a SilverStone FP35B Card Reader awhile back, but had not used the SD card reader. I had used the USB, firewire, and headphones jacks.

When I did finally get around to trying the SD card-reader it did not seem to work.
I looked on the Google, but did not find anything right away.
I happened to need to boot into Widows XP and it did work with windows, so I went back to the Google.

This time I found that running the following snippet of code would make it work.

echo "scsi add-single-device 4 0 0 0" > /proc/scsi/scsi

I put this in my /etc/rc.local file and now it works.

I used to have a multi-LUN CD player, but it had been quite awhile since I had seen any multi-LUN hardware, and my previous card-reader did not use a multi-LUN scheme.


Bus 003 Device 002: ID 05e3:0716 Genesys Logic, Inc.

Rip a DVD

I needed to rip a DVD the other day so that I could take a movie with me on a trip.
I had a hard time finding the command to do this. Finally I found this:

mencoder dvd:// -o title2.avi -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4

I did not play with it much but it got the DVD onto my computer and the size of the
files was 850 megabytes. I also really like that this is a command line option. If I
get board on the road I can get someone to put a DVD in the player and rip and download it
without having to run any GUI over the internet.

mencoder is part of the mplayer system. I also had to track down the libdvdcss2
package and get it installed.

M2N-SLI Deluxe and BIOS 1604

I tried to update my M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard to ASuSTeK BIOS version 1604 without success.

My problems seemed to be with the SATA drivers. I could not get a complete boot as I keep having problems with the hard drives failing.

I reverted to BIOS version 1502 and except for some corruption to my hard drives I had no trouble.
Fortunately most of the problems are in the 'usr' partition.

I would suggest not upgrading to this BIOS, at least not for Debian Lenny.

En8500gt color problem

My realplayer and xine output was full of the bluemen. I assume that the Red channel was missing.

To fix this on xine I changed the video driver to the opengl driver.
This is under the menu->setting->setup->video->video driver.