Booting over network - Use ipxe and forget etherboot/gpxe

I was playing around with diskless options and decided to see if I could boot Puppy Linux over the network. As usual, it was easy to find a recipe on the net. I got the gpxe boot linux kernel image for forcedeth driver.

The surprise was the terrible performance I got on a 100mbps network. I did not wait for it to finish booting! On a 1GB network, the performance was 'merely' bad. I did not expect tftp to be so bad!

Searching the net, I realized that gpxe allows html as the protocol instead. There was no change if I used pxelinux.0 and it was even worse if I used gpxelinux.0! I tried pxelinux.0 and gpxelinux.0 from version 5.01 of Syslinux with no improvement. However, the performance was better on my lenovo netbook which needed the r8169 driver. The performance using html protocol was still not any better.

The search for an answer led to the ipxe project. Mercifully, the ipxe.krn from the iso file worked for both the cards. Now, the performance over html was significantly better. It took half the time to boot Puppy Linux using html protocol.

Renewing and speeding up my desktop

I had decided to buy a new desktop as the current one seemed too slow. It just did not seem useful to buy more cpu cores for primarily browsing the web.

I had been looking for solid state disk options for the last few months after reading about their prices crashing. Unfortunately, this was not reflected in the prices of these disks in my area. However, recently I found an online store offering a reasonably attractive price for a 60GB SSD. It was delivered to me the day I read Linus Torvalds"Get thee behind me, Satan" comment . A very nice coincidence.

Indeed, my desktop's performance now is terrific. I can save it from a landfill for another few years :)

Arch Linux 2.6.37, Xorg 1.9.4, Vesa driver and Intel 845/945 graphics

After a long time, I decided to retry upgrading Xserver to the current 1.9.4 version on the P4 with Intel 845 graphics controller. My experience had been that the systems with intel 845/945 graphics  would hang often with the new version of intel driver.  So, I have continued to use Xserver 1.6.3! The wonderful aspect of Arch Linux is that it allowed me to upgrade everything else but hold back 6 packages needed to keep using the xf86-video-intel-legacy driver.

After the upgrade, I got an unexpected error:
 /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so: undefined symbol: resVgaShared
I have probably made a mistake in the upgrade and some old library might not have been uninstalled. I have not had a chance to check it out as yet.

However, meanwhile, the vesa driver worked very well. Earlier, it also used to give errors on this hardware and would not work at 1280x1024 at all.  The system is stable and working well with the Vesa driver; so there is no need for me to revert to the old intel driver anymore even if the current intel driver still gives problems on this hardware.

Update: The error was pretty obvious and silly. Since the package names of the old and new inter video drivers were different - xf86-video-intel-legacy and xf86-video-intel. A pacman update did not replace the legacy driver with the new one! I am now using the updated intel driver. A short usage did not create any problem but will have to wait and see.

Update: Even with Intel driver, the system no longer seems to hang. However, several times, the display was distorted, especially when the screensaver was active. Hence, I have switched to the Vesa display driver, which is good enough for the needs of the old system.

OOPS - I got a Canon LiDE 110 Scanner

It was stupid of me. I bought a Canon LiDE 110 scanner and did not bother to check whether it was supported on Linux. I felt very foolish when I plugged it in and it did not get recognized.

Fortunately, Google helped me find the status and the issues for this model and the status of drivers available in the git repository.

Then, it was a matter finding some nice people who had already written the installation instructions - Ubuntu and Fedora

It works well. Now I have to see the best way to scan old photos and convert them to digital before they fade.

Update 14 May 2012: The Canon LiDE 110 works out of the box on Ubuntu and Arch Linux but for some reason not on Fedora 16 though it is reported to work on Fedora 17. I could build and install the sane-backends using the source from Sane project site and it works.