digsite

I worked 72 hours straight on gomjabbar this weekend taking breaks only to eat and pee and I’m still not done!!! making the tuner of a AIW Radeon 8500 work under linux is *not* easy business.

Let’s see ….
I had to install redhat’s source rpm for XFree86 4.0-72 or some odd version
Install all of GATOS ati packages. 5 total which include ati.2, avview, ffmpeg, drm-kernel, vm, ati_remote (optional). Install ALSA sound drivers, libs, utils, and tools (4 packages total) and then pull some module aliases outta my ass cuz the alsa documentation SUCKS

installing alsa was the trickiest. Like someone said in one of the 100 different help-me’s i read, installing alsa is something of a black art. the documentation out there including from the developers themselves is incomplete so you gotta find 2 or more “good” fragments of instructions either from
contributors or news group posts and fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle. then after that, you’re almost guaranteed that the sound won’t work so you gotta use trial and error the rest of the way. configuring the mixer was another challenge. every device is muted by default and i needed to unmute and turn up the volumes on the command line using some convoluted command like this..

amixer cset ‘Wave’,0 75%,75%,75%,75% unmute nocapture.

one by one. there were about 60 of those damned things! (boy, i wish i had installed gnome-alsamixer sooner cuz it would have saved me all the trouble!) getting surround sound to work took me another 30 minutes. and cost me the worst scare of my life! imagine holding one of the rear speakers up against your ear cuz you’re afraid the volume might be too low for you to notice when they start working. and then clicking on some mixer analog/digital device on/off button and BAM!! you lose an ear drum! oy-vey! Dennis goes “hey, the surround sound is working now!” um, i’m not sure i could have missed that it was so forking loud, but thanks!

l also needed to recompile the kernel. that part, by far, was the easiest. i can practically do that in my sleep but the *time* it takes to do all these things is crazy.

anyway, after everything was installed i launch the tuner software and i get nothing out of it. no sound, no picture.

THEN, in the middle of my lack of sleep induced stupor, i go do something as brilliant as run a dorked up rm -rf command to the wrong directory path that totally f’ed things up! and i had to start ALL over starting with a complete linux reinstall. AAAAAAHHH!!! boy, it’s been ages since i’ve done that.. i must be slipping.

it took me 6 hours to get back to where i was before. but it only took me that long cuz i spent way too much time perfecting my work environment. i can’t stand it when things aren’t “just so”, know what i mean? and i was lucky enough to have burned all the tar, rpm and config files onto a cd before having to start over. whew!

and yeah.. I went to bed after 7am this morning.
I was afraid eric might ask me if i’m taking drugs lol! .. i always look so zoned out during those meetings.

wish me luck, i’m going to tackle this thing again when i get home tonight. i do my bestest work when i’m exhausted and sleepy. i might just rm -rf from / next time.