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General => Users => Topic started by: colinjones on September 18, 2008, 12:32:48 am

Title: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on September 18, 2008, 12:32:48 am
It is based on the Intel Atom 1.6/745/ICT7 chipsets, with 8111C NIC. New Egg are selling these for US$140, all you need to add is some RAM (beware is it DDR2 SO RAM not standard), but I am having to import one to Australia via a friend, as most US based retailers (inc NE) haven't noticed the rest of the world exists :) and wont ship. I have already had him bring one out to me, but it was DOA. He is taking it back for exchange tomorrow, but I would really like to know if this is going to work before we go through all the hassle!
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: darrenmason on September 18, 2008, 01:05:04 am
Hi Colin,

Can't help you out but am interested in how you go. I have been tempted to get an eeeBox as they have them near work here for $388 and talking to the sales assist. yesterday they come with a VESA mounting bracket.

Is there no Australian distributor for the MSI machine?

Regards
Darren
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on September 18, 2008, 03:20:07 am
Sadly, no - it is a very new model, and there is no mention of it being available in AU yet. MSI here are clearly incompetent as well - I have tried to contact them by phone and email. They don't list any phone numbers for Australia and every email address I sent to bounced saying the mailbox was full! (Sales, marketing, tech support, all!) I finally got one through to their HR department asking them to pass it on, that was 3 weeks ago, no response...
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: justdeb on September 19, 2008, 12:11:23 am
Hi guys,

The main australian distributor for MSI is Ingrham Micro. They only sell to resellers though. You might also want to try universal enterprises. They did carry alot of msi stuff. I have not dealt with them for about a year so i don't know whether they still do or not.

Justin
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: Crawtech on September 19, 2008, 05:54:42 am
Hi All

I am picking one up today for testing i will let you know how i go
 ;D
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on September 19, 2008, 06:27:59 am
Thanks Justin - have emailed them...

ihas - great, please let me know as soon as you can, so I know whether to cancel the exchange and just get a refund or not!
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: justdeb on September 19, 2008, 09:57:23 am
Hi ihas,

Did you source this locally and if so whom did u get it from. If it does work, please let us know as it is a nice looking board.

Regards

Justin
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: Crawtech on September 22, 2008, 03:04:35 am
Hi all

Still testing but it is up and running i had to disable the  the screen saver as it locks up  as it does with all intel 945 chipsets

Justin
I got this one from RTV Computers www.rtvcomputers.com.au

:)
let you know how it goes
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 07, 2008, 04:42:55 am
Totallymaxed - I finally got this PC, it now boots and finds the core and starts going through the motions. But very quickly (before it has started doing anything real) the boot sequence stops about 35 secs in and doesn't proceed any further.

Clearly the NIC started OK and the link light was green. But immediately after it says IP-Config: eth0 hardware address aa.bb.cc.dd.ee.ff mtu 1500 DHCP RARP it then says r8169: eth0 : link down

And the link light has gone red. It does this every time at the same spot so I'm assuming this is the point at which it loads the NIC driver for LMCE and there is some issue with the driver.

Does this sound like the problem you had with the Asus EEE PC? I note that my NIC chipset seems to be 8169/8111C rather than the 8168 in your wiki article. And on the Realtek web site it seems that the 8169 is only associated with the 8110....

Have you any suggestions please?!?!?
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on November 07, 2008, 07:25:05 am
Totallymaxed - I finally got this PC, it now boots and finds the core and starts going through the motions. But very quickly (before it has started doing anything real) the boot sequence stops about 35 secs in and doesn't proceed any further.

Clearly the NIC started OK and the link light was green. But immediately after it says IP-Config: eth0 hardware address aa.bb.cc.dd.ee.ff mtu 1500 DHCP RARP it then says r8169: eth0 : link down

And the link light has gone red. It does this every time at the same spot so I'm assuming this is the point at which it loads the NIC driver for LMCE and there is some issue with the driver.

Does this sound like the problem you had with the Asus EEE PC? I note that my NIC chipset seems to be 8169/8111C rather than the 8168 in your wiki article. And on the Realtek web site it seems that the 8169 is only associated with the 8110....

Have you any suggestions please?!?!?

Hi Colin,

Sounds like the same issue as on the Eee Box. See here http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168 (http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168) for a quick page we put up on this.

Let me know if this fixes the boot problem for you.

All the best

Andrew
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 07, 2008, 08:32:30 am
Andrew - thanks, I thought it might be, but is there anything different I should do because it is 8169 rather than 8168?  I'm not clear on how it selects the driver, nor on whether the 8168 driver is ok to use with the 8169 chip....
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on November 07, 2008, 10:03:28 am
Andrew - thanks, I thought it might be, but is there anything different I should do because it is 8169 rather than 8168?  I'm not clear on how it selects the driver, nor on whether the 8168 driver is ok to use with the 8169 chip....

Colin,

do you happen to know the PCI ID of your NIC?

My colleague Uplink reckons that if it is something colon 8168, it's an 8168 and it's handled by the 8168 driver. if not, it's handled by the 8169 driver and then we'll have to look into more details.

Andrew
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on November 07, 2008, 02:32:35 pm
Hi Colin,

We looked over the MSI Wind pages, and it has a different NIC than the EeeBox. It's a 100 Mbps Realtek 8101 as far as we can tell.

Andrew
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 07, 2008, 10:55:25 pm
Andrew

That's the confusing bit for me - when it boots it says its a 8111C (and that seems to be the LAN boot in the BIOS) but later on in the LMCE boot sequence it says its 8169. Its not clear to me if both chips are involved, or one is a mistake. If a mistake i can only assume that the BIOS has it right and its a 8111C and the Linux PXE boot is mis-identifying it. On the Realtek site it seems to associate 8169 with 8110 in the drivers page, so that just complicates matters by suggesting that 2 chips are involved but not the right two!

The problem, of course, is that I can't get in at that point to do a lspci as the kernel hasn't started and I don't really have anyway of doing so. Does your colleague have any clue as to whether it really is the 8111 or actually the 8169 or both? Either way, is it still sounding like I need to compile a driver for it (v lost at the moment!) Its a shame because the unit is dirt cheap - US$140, add $20 of RAM and you have, surely, the cheapest MD around? (that's like 80 GBP or less!)
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 08, 2008, 11:19:42 pm
Andrew - did uplink have a chance to look at my last question? I'm still a bit stumped on which is the actual chip, and so what to compile for it...

EDIT:

OK, I plunged in anyway and tried following the wiki instructions you indicated. (although I'm not sure I'm even building the right driver!) It created the r8169.ko file successfully and I moved that into the running kernel's drivers/net directory (although I realise it isn't the core I'm having problems with its an MD).

Then modified the initramfs-tools-interactor/module file to include "r8169" on the line after the only existing extry "sky2" and ran the Diskless_BuildDefaultImage.sh script.

I'm assuming that this just creates the boot code that gets tftp'd to the MD on start up, and so should now include a driver for r8169....

But now when it boots, it doesn't seem to say eth0 down any more (and there is some other change in the text of the boot sequence that goes by too fast for me to read!) - instead, immediately after saying that it has registered protocol 17 (that's TCP isn't it?) it says:

ipconfig: no devices to configure
/init: .: 1: Can't open /tmp/net-eth0.conf
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempting to kill init!

Not sure, but I seem to have gone backwards....
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on November 09, 2008, 02:47:50 pm
Andrew - did uplink have a chance to look at my last question? I'm still a bit stumped on which is the actual chip, and so what to compile for it...

EDIT:

OK, I plunged in anyway and tried following the wiki instructions you indicated. (although I'm not sure I'm even building the right driver!) It created the r8169.ko file successfully and I moved that into the running kernel's drivers/net directory (although I realise it isn't the core I'm having problems with its an MD).

Then modified the initramfs-tools-interactor/module file to include "r8169" on the line after the only existing extry "sky2" and ran the Diskless_BuildDefaultImage.sh script.

I'm assuming that this just creates the boot code that gets tftp'd to the MD on start up, and so should now include a driver for r8169....

But now when it boots, it doesn't seem to say eth0 down any more (and there is some other change in the text of the boot sequence that goes by too fast for me to read!) - instead, immediately after saying that it has registered protocol 17 (that's TCP isn't it?) it says:

ipconfig: no devices to configure
/init: .: 1: Can't open /tmp/net-eth0.conf
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempting to kill init!

Not sure, but I seem to have gone backwards....

Hi Colin,

Well as far as I can see having researched this the RealTek 8111C is definitely the NIC chip used in the Wind and this chip needs the r8169 driver. Uplink is traveling today but will be in the Office Monday lunchtime GMT and I will have a chat with him again then about how we get this working.

All the best

Andrew
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 09, 2008, 08:48:41 pm
Thanks so much, Andrew!
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 13, 2008, 09:09:59 pm
Andrew - did uplink have any ideas that might help? Are there any other steps I could take?? So close but so far!!
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: niz23 on November 14, 2008, 08:19:33 am
colinjones.
Andrew - did uplink have a chance to look at my last question? I'm still a bit stumped on which is the actual chip, and so what to compile for it...

EDIT:

OK, I plunged in anyway and tried following the wiki instructions you indicated. (although I'm not sure I'm even building the right driver!) It created the r8169.ko file successfully and I moved that into the running kernel's drivers/net directory (although I realise it isn't the core I'm having problems with its an MD).

Then modified the initramfs-tools-interactor/module file to include "r8169" on the line after the only existing extry "sky2" and ran the Diskless_BuildDefaultImage.sh script.

I'm assuming that this just creates the boot code that gets tftp'd to the MD on start up, and so should now include a driver for r8169....

But now when it boots, it doesn't seem to say eth0 down any more (and there is some other change in the text of the boot sequence that goes by too fast for me to read!) - instead, immediately after saying that it has registered protocol 17 (that's TCP isn't it?) it says:

ipconfig: no devices to configure
/init: .: 1: Can't open /tmp/net-eth0.conf
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempting to kill init!

Not sure, but I seem to have gone backwards....

As Andrew indicated above your machine seem to have a different ethernet card onboard than the EEE boxes.
The message you posted indicate that there is no driver loaded or at least none that can identifiy and activate your card since ifconfig complain that it cannot find an eth device to configure.

Sorry, I cannot be of more help.
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on November 14, 2008, 10:13:05 am
Andrew - did uplink have any ideas that might help? Are there any other steps I could take?? So close but so far!!

Hi Colin,

I tend to agree with Niz23... it looks like you still do not have the correct driver loaded for the 8111C NIC.

I guess there are two obvious possibilities... one you made a simple mistake when adding the R8169 driver or this driver is still not the correct one. So I would suggest going back over the steps to add the driver to check for simple mistakes. If that does not work you could try the R8168 driver instead and see if that fixes the problem. If neither of these works then my guess is that the driver needed is not either of these and you will need to do more research I'm afraid.

Sorry I cant be more directly helpful!

All the best

Andrew
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: nosebreaker on November 14, 2008, 06:05:00 pm
I see that lots of people have had this problem with Linux in general for this board, I'd try to get the system to work as a plain Kubuntu box first and get the NIC working.
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 14, 2008, 10:50:55 pm
Guys - thanks for the help!

OK, I put Damn Small Linux on a 64MB USB key and booted the Wind PC from it so that I could run lspci and got:

RTL8111/8168B (rev 02)    using -n the ids for this are

10ec:8168

Given the instructions on the page Andrew linked to, doesn't that mean that we commented out the 8168 id? Is this perhaps the issue - that it is reporting 8168 as the product id but that isn't mentioned in the driver? Does this help you understand what is wrong at all??

Also, noticed this thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=723569 (the last post) I don't understand enough about how linux selects and uses drivers to be able to pull this info (the thread and the lspci info) into a solution, so I'm crossing my fingers that you guys can make sense of it!! I get the gut feeling that the info is there....
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 14, 2008, 11:44:52 pm
Update:

OK, seems I was getting confused between r8168 and r8169, and which we were trying to fool the other to be! I went through the http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Unrecognized_NIC article again and edited the intial ramdisk image modules file to say r8168 instead of r8169 and now it boots. Strangely, the DHCP process takes MUCH longer than before. And the eth0 goes up and down repeatedly many times during the boot sequence, but eventually settles down. Finally the image build kicks off then I went in and changed the diskless image modules file. But when trying to chroot so that I can rebuild the initramdisk image again I get

chroot: exec format error which is indicative that for some reason the image built as AMD64 rather than i386. Just changed that, and will try again.... more later
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 15, 2008, 01:35:35 am
Completely lost now!

I followed the instructions to add r8168 to the modules file for initramfs-tools-interactor and remade that image.

Initially, this seemed to work, as I said - it indicated in the boot sequence that r8168 was being loaded and the link was up. Now, it is saying r8169 again....

I am suspecting that because it chose the wrong architecture (AMD64 instead of i386) and I used the webadmin to rebuild the image, it has somehow put the old vmlinuz image back in with the r8169 driver. Does that sound right? BuildDefaultImage.sh only updates the default vmlinuz image, so that would imply that the webadmin is rebuilding the image from another source rather than the default image in tftp....

Getting tied in knots now! Tried copying the /boot/vmlinuz to /usr/pluto/diskless/54/boot and still the same result....


Can someone please help untie me and explain how this works, and how I have managed to get back to 8169? If it is the webadmin, I don't know how to get around that because it selects the wrong architecture so I have to correct that and rebuild from the web admin....
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on November 15, 2008, 08:45:42 am
Completely lost now!

I followed the instructions to add r8168 to the modules file for initramfs-tools-interactor and remade that image.

Initially, this seemed to work, as I said - it indicated in the boot sequence that r8168 was being loaded and the link was up. Now, it is saying r8169 again....

I am suspecting that because it chose the wrong architecture (AMD64 instead of i386) and I used the webadmin to rebuild the image, it has somehow put the old vmlinuz image back in with the r8169 driver. Does that sound right? BuildDefaultImage.sh only updates the default vmlinuz image, so that would imply that the webadmin is rebuilding the image from another source rather than the default image in tftp....

Getting tied in knots now! Tried copying the /boot/vmlinuz to /usr/pluto/diskless/54/boot and still the same result....


Can someone please help untie me and explain how this works, and how I have managed to get back to 8169? If it is the webadmin, I don't know how to get around that because it selects the wrong architecture so I have to correct that and rebuild from the web admin....

Hmmm... you may have cross architectures. Is your Core i386? What does Web Admin say the MD's architecture is? Also remember that if you Regenerate the MD from Web Admin then you must rebuild the initial RAM disk.

Andrew
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 15, 2008, 10:32:25 pm
Both are i386 - I have no idea why it chose amd64 but when I got the error trying to do chroot I checked the architecture in the web admin and it said amd64! So I changed it and rebuilt the image. I'm thinking that this has put back the original initial ramdisk so it was using the 8169 driver even though the modules file still lists 8168. I ran BuildDefaultImage script but that didn't fix it up - I believe that only effects new MDs, so I tried copying the vmlinuz file from the default image folder into the MDs folder and that didn't seem to fix it either....


Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 16, 2008, 07:27:24 am
Update:

I have deleted the MD completely. Using http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168 I had already built the new 8168 driver and hacked the existing 8169 driver. I thought through what we are doing, Andrew can you confirm if my understanding is correct?

It seems that the 8169 driver is trying to provide for the 8168 chip (as well as the 8169 and others) but apparently this doesn't work. So the editing and recompiling done for the 8169 driver is to remove the 8168's PCI product ID from it so that the kernel doesn't consider the 8169 driver appropriate for the 8168 chip. We then compile and insert the real 8168 driver module so that the kernel picks that one instead. True?

So I made the initial changes http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Unrecognized_NIC to include the correct driver in the default initramfs and that works fine to get the MD booted first time and start building its diskless image. Once that was complete, I went into the web admin and changed it to i386 and rebuilt again.

Then I copied both the r8168.ko and r8169.ko modules into the diskless image in the same location, added r8168 to the diskless /etc/modules and /etc/initramfs-tools/modules files, and finally ran the mkinitramfs command to create a new initramfs that presumably would then include the new/updated driver modules and the modules files telling it which driver to use.

But I still get a kernel panic! It doesn't seem to be finding any ethernet hardware now. Message:

ipconfig: eth0: SIOCGIFINDEX: No such device
ipconfig: no devices to configure
/init: .: 1: Can't open /tmp/net-eth0.conf
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempting to kill init!

I feel like I am SO close, but I really need a hand in getting past this point.... Andrew/Niz/anyone??

Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: philippefs35 on November 17, 2008, 01:03:10 am
I'm also looking at the MSI Wind PC. Do you know if it has TV-out capabilities through the VGA port (with a simple VGA to s-video cable)?

Thanks,
Philippe
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 18, 2008, 12:52:32 am
Anybody at all?? I'm completely stuck!
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 18, 2008, 03:08:17 am
OK no idea what fixed it because I changed 3 things at once!

1) I noticed that the permissions on the r8168.ko file were -rwxrw-rw- instead of -rw-rw-rw ... very unlikely, but changed it anyway
2) Version 8.009 was the current one on the Realtek website but the instructions were for 8.008 so I found an older version, recompiled and used that
3) Not sure exactly how depmod works, but noticed that the instructions are for you to run it on the core, which isn't really relevant when the NIC is on the MD. But there is no equivalent step for the MD instructions. So I inserted a depmod after the chroot.

The PXE boot still takes 60 seconds to get an IP, when initially it was getting one instantly - seemed related to when I insert the 8168 module for the default initramfs but I can't see why that would effect it..

And whereas after getting the 8168 driver working initially, the boot sequence just indicates that the 8168 eth0 is up. On several tries since, and now that the full MD is working, the eth0 goes up/down/up about 5 or 6 times before finally settling on up. Each about 2-3 seconds apart and repeatable across reboots. Guess I have to live with these issues.

And yes, the Intel 945 chipset is still causing crashes with PSS so I had to disable that device.

Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on November 18, 2008, 10:05:00 am
OK no idea what fixed it because I changed 3 things at once!

1) I noticed that the permissions on the r8168.ko file were -rwxrw-rw- instead of -rw-rw-rw ... very unlikely, but changed it anyway
2) Version 8.009 was the current one on the Realtek website but the instructions were for 8.008 so I found an older version, recompiled and used that
3) Not sure exactly how depmod works, but noticed that the instructions are for you to run it on the core, which isn't really relevant when the NIC is on the MD. But there is no equivalent step for the MD instructions. So I inserted a depmod after the chroot.

The PXE boot still takes 60 seconds to get an IP, when initially it was getting one instantly - seemed related to when I insert the 8168 module for the default initramfs but I can't see why that would effect it..

And whereas after getting the 8168 driver working initially, the boot sequence just indicates that the 8168 eth0 is up. On several tries since, and now that the full MD is working, the eth0 goes up/down/up about 5 or 6 times before finally settling on up. Each about 2-3 seconds apart and repeatable across reboots. Guess I have to live with these issues.

And yes, the Intel 945 chipset is still causing crashes with PSS so I had to disable that device.



Hmmm... well we dont see any problem on our ASUS Eee Box's. Can you describe what actually happens? Also what version of server-xorg-video-intel are you using?

Andrew
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 18, 2008, 08:59:59 pm
Andrew

Several others have had this issue with the 945 in other machines, and so have I - in two different Dell laptops that also use the 945. All my experiences were the same. The MD boots and sometimes it goes for a short while, other times it crashes almost immediately that it comes up. When it does the screen saver freezes but so does everything else. So it wasn't me that made the pss connection it was a newbie in this thread http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=5494.msg32863#msg32863

I disabled the pss device and now it seems fine. From niz's post it may only be in UI2/overlay. He also was looking for the new Intel driver but was having difficulty getting it compiled for 0710, but he obviously thought that was the issue. Dunno if he ever got it working... would love to know because without pss the screen gets to be a bit of a mess!

How do I determine which version server-xorg-video-intel I'm using? Is that the intel video driver mentioned in the xorg.conf? Would modinfo intel work?

Col.
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on November 22, 2008, 10:17:19 am
Andrew

Several others have had this issue with the 945 in other machines, and so have I - in two different Dell laptops that also use the 945. All my experiences were the same. The MD boots and sometimes it goes for a short while, other times it crashes almost immediately that it comes up. When it does the screen saver freezes but so does everything else. So it wasn't me that made the pss connection it was a newbie in this thread http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=5494.msg32863#msg32863

I disabled the pss device and now it seems fine. From niz's post it may only be in UI2/overlay. He also was looking for the new Intel driver but was having difficulty getting it compiled for 0710, but he obviously thought that was the issue. Dunno if he ever got it working... would love to know because without pss the screen gets to be a bit of a mess!

How do I determine which version server-xorg-video-intel I'm using? Is that the intel video driver mentioned in the xorg.conf? Would modinfo intel work?

Col.

Colin,

Try this;

Code: [Select]
dpkg -l xserver-xorg-video-intel <return>


Some i945 based machines do seem to be less capable than others with respect to their GPU's and the same driver. Strange but true!

Andrew
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 22, 2008, 10:26:51 am
I recently chatted to uplink and niz. Seems that the only way around it is a newer version of the xserver which requires a newer kernel. Uplink was aware of the issue and had tried to backport the newer driver that solves the problem, but came across the issue with the xserver and kernel version so I think he gave up. Guess I just wait for 0810...

BTW, the MD is now running nicely. The driver issue for the NIC was a pain, but finally resolved it, and without the screensaver the screen gets a bit messed up because there is no redraw, but other than that its a nice MD and cheap at around 80GBP all told (just a stick of ram)... plus shipping
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on November 22, 2008, 06:25:55 pm
I recently chatted to uplink and niz. Seems that the only way around it is a newer version of the xserver which requires a newer kernel. Uplink was aware of the issue and had tried to backport the newer driver that solves the problem, but came across the issue with the xserver and kernel version so I think he gave up. Guess I just wait for 0810...

BTW, the MD is now running nicely. The driver issue for the NIC was a pain, but finally resolved it, and without the screensaver the screen gets a bit messed up because there is no redraw, but other than that its a nice MD and cheap at around 80GBP all told (just a stick of ram)... plus shipping

Yep the problem as I said only affects some i945 machines (for example Eee Box works 100% fine... zero pss issues).

Andrew
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: bulek on November 22, 2008, 08:44:07 pm
...
BTW, the MD is now running nicely. The driver issue for the NIC was a pain, but finally resolved it, and without the screensaver the screen gets a bit messed up because there is no redraw, but other than that its a nice MD and cheap at around 80GBP all told (just a stick of ram)... plus shipping

Can you please show us where you can get it for 80gbp ?

Thanks in advance,

regards,

Bulek.
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on November 22, 2008, 09:05:57 pm
I didn't actually buy it in GBP, I just converted it roughly for Andrew's convenience.

I bought it on NewEgg here http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856167032&Tpk=msi%20wind%20pc
For US$140 and purchased a 1GB stick of SO-DIMM RAM locally for about AU$15 so that works out roughly to GBP80

But note that NewEgg (as with most US online sites) does not ship "overseas". I got a friend in San Francisco to bring it to me when he came over (was small enough to fit in his backpack :) )

In reality it cost me a lot more than that, as it was DOA, and he had to take it back with him, shipped it back to NewEgg, who sent it back again saying they wouldn't accept it for RMA without its original box which we didn't have. Then I called MSI USA in CA and shouted at them a lot (the guy hadn't even heard of the Wind PC and thought I was talking about the Wind laptop!) until they agreed to RMA it directly. Shipped it to them, they shipped my friend back a new one, then he airmailed it back to me in Sydney. So shipping costs were substantially more than the unit itself ... about which you can imagine I was unimpressed! But the principle is there for others so i thought I should let you all know.

The unit is essentially silent, generates almost no heat, runs on tiny amounts of power (less than 40w and I believe that is including a HDD which I'm not using) and performs very well with the exception of the NIC and PSS issues. The power supply is an external adaptor the same as a laptop supply which you can just replace the mains cable piece with a local one for your local power plug standard - it accepts 110-240v 50/60Hz. I have no idea what other countries it is available in. Originally, I think only the US, but it has been out for about 4 months now, so it should be available in EU by now.

EDIT:

Actually just found some "used for eval" units here in Australia for around US$220 including 1GB and 160GB HDD. So if they are available here, now, then they will definitely be available in the EU.
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: freymann on December 10, 2008, 07:37:30 pm
I ordered one of these and it arrived today. Got 2GB of Ram at the same time... from newegg.ca.

I followed the instructions on this page:

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/R8168

The file I got today was "r8168-8.009.00.tar.bz2"

I couldn't get the patch to run without it complaining it couldn't figure out what file to edit, so I edited "drivers/net/r8169.c" manually and commented out the "{ PCI_DEVICE(PCI_VENDOR_ID_REALTEK,   0x8168), 0, 0, RTL_CFG_1 }," line.

and this page:

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Unrecognized_NIC

I edited "/etc/initramfs-tools-interactor/modules" and added r8169 and saved.

And used this command "mkinitramfs -d /etc/initramfs-tools-interactor/ -o /tftpboot/default/initrd" to recreate the initial ramdisk.

and when I do a network boot, it stops at:

request_module: runaway loop modprobe binfmt-464c

I get five lines of that and then nothing.

I don't see any new directories under /usr/pluto/diskless/ nor did I see any errors while following the step by step instructions.

Any suggestions?
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: freymann on December 11, 2008, 05:29:07 am
I did make some progress with my box tonight...

I think the "clue" was the post about confusing r8168 and r8169...

I can't remember everything I fiddled with either, but I did get it to announce itself to the router but on the reboot after all the diskless building it hangs.

I checked the Media Directors in the pluto-admin web... the architecture was AMD64, so I changed it to i386 and said rebuild image.

But I'm thinking... when I created the new r8168.ko module, that was done on the core, which is AMD64. Can I copy that over to the i386 diskless image for device 208? If not, can I just follow the same instructions while in a chroot environment?
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: Zaerc on December 11, 2008, 07:45:57 pm
I did make some progress with my box tonight...

I think the "clue" was the post about confusing r8168 and r8169...

I can't remember everything I fiddled with either, but I did get it to announce itself to the router but on the reboot after all the diskless building it hangs.

I checked the Media Directors in the pluto-admin web... the architecture was AMD64, so I changed it to i386 and said rebuild image.

But I'm thinking... when I created the new r8168.ko module, that was done on the core, which is AMD64. Can I copy that over to the i386 diskless image for device 208? If not, can I just follow the same instructions while in a chroot environment?
No you can definitely not use amd64 kernel modules with an i386 kernel.  Following the same instructions in a chroot might be worth a try though.

Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: freymann on December 11, 2008, 08:04:51 pm
No you can definitely not use amd64 kernel modules with an i386 kernel.  Following the same instructions in a chroot might be worth a try though.

 Hi Zaerc. I did try to do that in a chroot environment, but it failed on the very first step of compiling the new driver!

 Starts off with:

Code: [Select]
root@dcerouter:~/r8168-8.008.00# make
make -C src/ clean
make[1]: Entering directory `/root/r8168-8.008.00/src'
rm -rf *.o *.ko *~ core* .dep* .*.d .*.cmd *.mod.c *.a *.s .*.flags .tmp_versions Module.symvers Modules.symvers *.order
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/r8168-8.008.00/src'
make -C src/ modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/root/r8168-8.008.00/src'
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/build SUBDIRS=/root/r8168-8.008.00/src modules
make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.22-14-generic'
  CC [M]  /root/r8168-8.008.00/src/r8168_n.o
In file included from include/linux/cpumask.h:84,
                 from include/asm/paravirt.h:18,
                 from include/asm/msr.h:78,
                 from include/asm/processor.h:17,
                 from include/asm/thread_info.h:16,
                 from include/linux/thread_info.h:21,
                 from include/linux/preempt.h:9,
                 from include/linux/spinlock.h:49,
                 from include/linux/module.h:9,
                 from /root/r8168-8.008.00/src/r8168_n.c:30:
include/linux/kernel.h:126: warning: conflicting types for built-in function 'snprintf'
include/linux/kernel.h:128: warning: conflicting types for built-in function 'vsnprintf'

and eventually craps out with:

Code: [Select]
from /root/r8168-8.008.00/src/r8168_n.c:33:
include/asm/irq.h:15:25: error: irq_vectors.h: No such file or directory
In file included from include/asm/hardirq.h:5,
                 from include/linux/hardirq.h:7,
                 from include/linux/interrupt.h:11,
                 from include/linux/netdevice.h:576,
                 from /root/r8168-8.008.00/src/r8168_n.c:33:
include/linux/irq.h: At top level:
include/linux/irq.h:178: error: 'NR_IRQS' undeclared here (not in a function)
In file included from include/linux/interrupt.h:11,
                 from include/linux/netdevice.h:576,
                 from /root/r8168-8.008.00/src/r8168_n.c:33:
include/linux/hardirq.h:40:27: warning: "NR_IRQS" is not defined
/root/r8168-8.008.00/src/r8168_n.c: In function 'rtl8168_poll':
/root/r8168-8.008.00/src/r8168_n.c:4467: warning: cast from pointer to integer of different size
make[3]: *** [/root/r8168-8.008.00/src/r8168_n.o] Error 1
make[2]: *** [_module_/root/r8168-8.008.00/src] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.22-14-generic'
make[1]: *** [modules] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/r8168-8.008.00/src'
make: *** [modules] Error 2

 I'm kinda lost with this one. I expect if I even managed to get it to boot my next problem would be the video drivers, and if that goes anything like this I dunno.

 I can boot XMBC off a USB stick (a current version) and it has no issues with the video or network card... so I guess if I can wait for the next release of LMCE things may 'just work'?


Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: seth on December 11, 2008, 08:11:07 pm
Hey freymann,

When you see the PXE client banner, when you first turn on the MD, before it fails to boot, what does it say the card is:

For example, mine says "Realtek 8111B/8111C"
And ends up using the r8168 module. I have this built for i386, for version 710. I would be glad to post the module for you to try to download, you would have to follow the steps I added to the wiki here:
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168#Asus_M3A78-EM (http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168#Asus_M3A78-EM)

You just let me know , and when I get home this evening, I can send you the file, or post a download link in this thread.

Regards,

Seth

Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: freymann on December 11, 2008, 08:27:41 pm
When you see the PXE client banner, when you first turn on the MD, before it fails to boot, what does it say the card is:
For example, mine says "Realtek 8111B/8111C"

 Yes, that looks familiar.

 I do get past the initial boot now, to the point where it announced itself to the core and the core went ahead and created the diskless directory. When I looked in pluto-admin it said it was a AMD64, so I changed it to i386 and rebuilt the MD image.

 Now when it boots, I get past the part where the screen font changes and it bombs at the eth0- part.

Quote
I have this built for i386, for version 710. I would be glad to post the module for you to try to download, you would have to follow the steps I added to the wiki here:
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168#Asus_M3A78-EM (http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168#Asus_M3A78-EM)
You just let me know , and when I get home this evening, I can send you the file, or post a download link in this thread.

 Well thanks Seth, yes that would be awesome! You can PM me for my email address or just post a link.
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: freymann on December 12, 2008, 02:35:44 am
I would be glad to post the module for you to try to download, you would have to follow the steps I added to the wiki here:
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168#Asus_M3A78-EM (http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Realtek_8168#Asus_M3A78-EM)

Seth saved my day! With his copy of the driver and after following some of the instructions on the MD directory layout, my new machine is now sitting at UI1!

Next up!? Let's make full use of that video card, which I assume (cough) I have to follow the instructions here?

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Display_Drivers

for Intel chips?

Again, thanks seth and the rest of you for documenting and talking about this neat machine!
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: jeangot on January 02, 2009, 10:44:08 pm
Hello Guys,

I just wanted to thank you Colin for your persistance in getting this to work. This is what finally convinced me to buy a Wind box. Thank you also Andrew for all your help.

I ran into exactly the same issue as you Colin in the end, and I can tell you that the solution was the depmod, since we are adding a new driver r8168 and the box will not use it unless a depmod has been issued to update the availabel modules I guess.
I took the liberty to update the wiki, although this command is only relevant in case we add a new driver (which does not happen for everyone, just for this particular box) but I thought it can't hurt. I would never have found this solution without your last post Colin.

Now off to enjoying 720p TV on my monitors throughout the house...

Jean

EDIT: I now see that this post is much longer than I initially thought. The problem I am referring to is the one with the network card.
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on January 03, 2009, 03:01:00 am
Good news Jean, glad it helped... thx for updating the wiki because I'm certain I will not be able to reproduce this again when i come to rebuild... in the meantime, per my PM to you, my Wind PC no longer PXE boots. It gets an IP and appears to start the boot, but then immediately fails out of the PXE boot code and says that there isn't any boot media, insert boot media and restart... no idea what changed.... damn!
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on January 03, 2009, 03:49:46 am
Fixed, it seems!

I tried double checking that the tftp was working fine by installing a tftp client on my PC and trying to pull down the file that the PXE ROM is trying to access before it exists (without any error). This is the initial config file that points to the linuz ramdisk image:

DEFAULT Pluto
LABEL Pluto
LOCALBOOT 0 KERNEL 56/vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=56/initrd.img ramdisk=10240 rw root=/dev/nfs boot=nfs nfsroot=192.168.80.1:/usr/pluto/diskless/56

I noticed that on the third line "KERNEL" was actually "#ERNEL" - I have certainly never edited this file, and it seemed strange is it looked clear it was really supposed to be KERNEL. So I edited it, and bingo, now it all works again! Guess it must have gotten corrupted... but just one character...

Anyway, as I have noted before in various posts, the actual DHCP component of the boot seems to vary between getting an IP almost instantly, and it taking at least 60 seconds before the PXE boot can continue... In the past, when battling the driver issue, whenever it booted fast, I seemed to end up with driver problems later in the boot sequence. When it took 60 seconds seemed to be a good omen :)

Ever since this most recent problem occurred, it has been getting the IP instantly, but then bombing out of the PXE ROM and looking for a HDD. As soon as I changed the # to K and rebooted, it takes 60 seconds again, but works. The thing is, at the point it is getting the IP address, it is still in the PXE with no software downloaded, no part of LMCE even touched, much less this config file above, so I don't see how it can influence how quickly it gets an IP address. My networking tells me it can't.... oh well, one more mystery :)
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on January 03, 2009, 04:43:45 am
Curiouser and curiouser! It was definitely the # that was screwing things up, but after a little while the MD stopped booting again. So I checked the same file again, and there it was, back again! No idea what put it back. So I edited it again and rebooted the MD, and it works again!

Anyone any idea why this is happening? Or what might be doing it, as it will be very inconvenient if I have to edit a text file everytime I want to reboot :)
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: Zaerc on January 03, 2009, 12:51:05 pm
Curiouser and curiouser! It was definitely the # that was screwing things up, but after a little while the MD stopped booting again. So I checked the same file again, and there it was, back again! No idea what put it back. So I edited it again and rebooted the MD, and it works again!

Anyone any idea why this is happening? Or what might be doing it, as it will be very inconvenient if I have to edit a text file everytime I want to reboot :)
Try going to the web-admin's restart page and click the "Net" checkbox (under "boot from") for that particular Media Director.  I think what you're seeing is that it is trying to boot locally (from the Hdd) which only works if there actually is a native OS installed.
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: jeangot on January 03, 2009, 06:34:10 pm
Colin,

the same thing happened to me once on a different MD after a reboot of the Core I believe. Now with Zaerc's comment,it could be that I simply mistakently did something to tell the MD to boot from the disk on reboot...

Jean
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on January 03, 2009, 09:07:10 pm
That's entirely possible, I will look into it shortly. Zaerc - does the # in place of K in KERNEL in that file mean anything to you? Seems a bit random, but it definitely got re-written after I modified it....
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: Zaerc on January 04, 2009, 02:03:38 pm
That's entirely possible, I will look into it shortly. Zaerc - does the # in place of K in KERNEL in that file mean anything to you? Seems a bit random, but it definitely got re-written after I modified it....
When I looked I saw the same thing in one of the config files too, I think it is intentional and used to boot the the system with its locally installed OS instead of netbooting it.
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: colinjones on January 04, 2009, 11:07:49 pm
Strange way of doing it... cause an error in the net boot so that it fails through!

I definitely didn't accidentally choose boot from HDD before rebooting as I didn't even use that interface to reboot the box. And when I look now, it doesn't indicate which it will use if I hit reboot (both radio buttons are empty), perhaps that was the default for the first time. And I note that the # has not subsequently come back again... so I guess keep monitoring it for a while, or perhaps even deliberately choose "from HDD" to see if the # reappears, then report back again...

Col.
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: jeangot on January 23, 2009, 06:30:36 am
To Andrew:

I am experiencing some stuttering when watching high definition TV content in MythTV on my MSI Wind PC (depending on how much movement there is, some programs are fine, but with lots of movement it stutters every few seconds).

So I wanted to try to upgrade the intel video driver which is version 2.1.1 by default on my MD since you said that results vary by driver version. I haven't had much success though. I could find plenty of packages or sources for newer version, but they all want a newer xorg to be installed, and dozens of other packages depend on xorg etc...
I even tried to upgrade this MD to Ubuntu 8.10 via "apt-get dist-upgrade" which, as expected, trashed the whole box.

So is there an easy way to update this video driver, or am I better off to wait for LMCE 810 which is hopefully around the corner?

Jean
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on January 25, 2009, 03:35:36 pm
To Andrew:

I am experiencing some stuttering when watching high definition TV content in MythTV on my MSI Wind PC (depending on how much movement there is, some programs are fine, but with lots of movement it stutters every few seconds).

So I wanted to try to upgrade the intel video driver which is version 2.1.1 by default on my MD since you said that results vary by driver version. I haven't had much success though. I could find plenty of packages or sources for newer version, but they all want a newer xorg to be installed, and dozens of other packages depend on xorg etc...
I even tried to upgrade this MD to Ubuntu 8.10 via "apt-get dist-upgrade" which, as expected, trashed the whole box.

So is there an easy way to update this video driver, or am I better off to wait for LMCE 810 which is hopefully around the corner?

Jean

Hi,

Well depending on what type of 'HD' content you are trying to play you will see different results. The MSI Wind PC uses the GMA950 GPU which does not have any support in hardware for accelerating playback/decoding of h.264 content so if that is the type of content you are trying to playback then I am afraid no matter what driver upgrades you apply you will not see any significant performance improvements. On the MSI Wind PC you might get away with 720p h.264 content...but I very much doubt it (we have not tested your hardware so I am only extrapolating the performance we see on other similar hardware).

If the 'HD' content you are trying to play is mpeg2 encoded then you may be more fortunate as the GMA950 copes better with this.

All the best

Andrew
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: jeangot on January 25, 2009, 08:45:23 pm
Andrew,

yes the content I'm trying to play is Mpeg2, recorded in Myth TV. H264 I will try after Mpeg2 works decently.

The question is: how do I uprade the intel video driver? As explained above, I was unsuccessfull doing so either using the sources or with a package, as in both cases, it was requiring a more recent xorg version.

Jean
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: schaferj on April 11, 2009, 07:25:36 am
When "MD no longer PXE boots"

It can be fixed by clicking on the "setup diskless MD" button which is at the bottom of the web admin / media directors page.

joseph
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on April 11, 2009, 11:50:14 am
When "MD no longer PXE boots"

It can be fixed by clicking on the "setup diskless MD" button which is at the bottom of the web admin / media directors page.

joseph


I would not recommend using 'Setup Diskless' at all as this is a hangover from before MD's would PnP. Use the 'Rebuild Image' button on the right hand side of the page for the MD in question - this will give you a 'fresh' boot image for the MD (as if you had just added using PnP).

Andrew
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: schaferj on April 11, 2009, 07:01:57 pm
Andrew,
Thanks.  I understand it's a legacy button.  I've found in hte past that when things get messed up and the MD no longer starts, hitting that button often clears it up.  And I've used that for a quick fix when I didn't want to devote time to finding the route cause.

I believe the setup diskless script calls the build image script.  Is that right?

thanks,
joseph
Title: Re: MSI WIND PC, has anybody tried this yet??
Post by: totallymaxed on April 11, 2009, 07:14:43 pm
Andrew,
Thanks.  I understand it's a legacy button.  I've found in hte past that when things get messed up and the MD no longer starts, hitting that button often clears it up.  And I've used that for a quick fix when I didn't want to devote time to finding the route cause.

I believe the setup diskless script calls the build image script.  Is that right?

thanks,
joseph

Yes. but is is broken and you will get some broken functionality. Rebuild Image is the better option or just delete the MD and re discover it.

Andrew