FC6 to Fedora 7 upgrade on ECS RS482 motherboard

This post was written by matt on November 23, 2007
Posted Under: Linux
Nov. 23, 2007

Here’s a tip for you USA AbiWord and/or Gnumeric fans, add the following
to your .cshrc:

setenv LANG en_US
or add this to .bashrc:
export LANG=en_US

Configuration:

  • ECS RS482-M motherboard
  • on-board ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 video
  • on-board Realtek ethernet
  • USB 2.0
  • 768MB PC133 RAM (old & slow).
  • Athlon-64 3700+ 2.2GHz, 1MB cache
  • Masscool copper low noise CPU cooler
  • 2 IDE hard drives
  • HP 9100 CD writer
  • DVD reader
  • Video capture card
  • Samsung Syncmaster 204T 20″ LCD display
  • 4 available SATA ports – capable of supporting RAID-0 or RAID-1

Hardware:

Output of /sbin/lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 Host Bridge (rev 10)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc Unknown device 5a3f
00:11.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI 437A Serial ATA Controller
00:12.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI 4379 Serial ATA Controller
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB2 Host Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 SMBus Controller (rev 11)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller ATI
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-ISA Bridge
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-PCI Bridge
00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 AC’97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS482 [Radeon Xpress 200]
02:01.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 11)
02:01.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 11)
02:05.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
02:06.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)

The ECS RS482-M socket 939 motherboard/Athlon-64 was an upgrade replacement from a
Shuttle AK32E/Athlon 1600+. After 2 failed attempts to purchase Athlon 2400’s through
e-bay (both DOA), it was time to move up a generation. I upgraded to FC5 after swapping the
Shuttle AK32E in place of an ASUS A7V 800MHz Athlon that had served me well for several years.

The RS482-M changeover worked surprisingly well, the ethernet worked without intervention.
Upgrading from FC5 to FC6 worked with very little intevention.
The video took a little tweaking, mostly because the SyncMaster 204T is not listed in
the system-config-display list of monitors. The 210T is close, but tended to push the
bottom menu-bar off the bottom of the display, and it was not running 1600×1200 @60Hz.
Below are the tweaks to make this work:


Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "Monitor0"
        VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
        ModelName    "Samsung SyncMaster 204T (Analog)"
        DisplaySize  410        305

        HorizSync    30.0 - 93.0
        VertRefresh  50.0 - 85.0
        Option      "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        Driver      "radeon"
        VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
        #Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps"
        #ChipID      0x5B60
        BoardName   "ATI Technologies Inc RS482 [Radeon Xpress 200]"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Videocard0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth     16
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     16
                Modes    "1600x1200" "1280x1024"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

A google search had yielded the “XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps” and “0x5B60”
suggestions, these did not seem to help. Dropping to 16-bit color was
necessary to run “tvtime”, 24-bit color resulted in complaints about
a lack of available video memory. This may show the achilles heel of
on-board video with shared memory – this was not a problem with my
previous Nvidia MX4 AGP card.

I have not tested the ATI video driver as of yet.

mplayer blue-screen on files created with mencoder mpeg4

can't build DRI - can't find stddef.h:

Installed Packages
libXmu.i386                              1.0.0-2.2              installed
libXmu-devel.i386                        1.0.0-2.2              installed
libdrm.i386                              2.0-2.2                installed
libdrm-devel.i386                        2.0-2.2                installed
libtool.i386                             1.5.22-2.3             installed

This motherboard hangs randomly, cause undetermined. Frequently runs for 1-2 weeks w/o problems, then simply freezes. Only recovery is a hard reboot.
Strangely enough I have a new HP dv9428nr Athlon 64X2 laptop running Vista that also freezes randomly and must be rebooted to recover.

setting up the Linksys wmp54g wireless LAN for WPA-PSK was a little tricky. I ended up
adding commands to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless:


ifconfig mode managed
iwpriv ra0 set AuthMode=WPAPSK
iwpriv ra0 set EncrypType=TKIP
iwpriv ra0 set WPAPSK="xxxx"
iwconfig ra0 essid "xxxx"

I didn’t find a way to add this to the ifcfg-ra0 script that would work.

Upgrading from FC6 to Fedora-7 has mostly been a disaster. Many, many packages did not upgrade
properly, leaving me with a mix of fc6 and fc7 packages on my system. Trying to update packages
frequently does not work due to one error or another with stale fc6 packages. All too often I
have to rpm -e a complete package set, then re-install with yum. Python is messed up. gnucash wouldn’t
run, first because of this error:

 gnucash-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libgtkhtml-3.8.so.15: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

yum update -y gnucash guile-devel got closer:

gnc.bin-Message: main: binreloc relocation support was disabled at configure time.

ERROR: In procedure open-file:
ERROR: No such file or directory: "/usr/share/guile/1.8/slib/require"

Then:

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=156431

yum install -y guile-devel gtkhtml38 libgsf-gnome goffice

still didn't work.  ln -s /usr/share/guile/1.8/slib /usr/share/slib changed the error to:

ERROR: No such file or directory: "/usr/share/guile/1.8/slib/mklibcat"

This did not work, links to the library seemed to be broken.
http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=libgtkhtml-3.8.so.15 

yum install g-wrap g-wrap-devel
didn't help either.
ln -s /usr/share/slib /usr/share/guile/1.8/slib
ls -l /usr/share/guile/1.8/slib/mklibcat*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8120 2006-07-12 09:19 /usr/share/guile/1.8/slib/mklibcat.scm

attempting to build from gnucash 2.2.1 source resulted in
“libgoffice not found.”

Accidentally installed libgnome-2.18.0-4.fc7.i386.rpm

now it works???

Useful references:

Smartcard references:

Other sites by Matt Sale:

Cassini D&D Mfg, Inc., Metal Fabrication, Granite, and obsolete tile
Further Light Lodge #1130, AF & AM

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