[Wizard] power issues & Driver help?

[Craig Ringer]

>>There are indications that the PSUs they come with are barely adequate 
>>for the draw of the machines in their standard configuration. 
> 
> I really don't think so. They should be drawing 2.1A, with the PSU's capable of 4A.  I think it's just some flakey PSUs...

That's my point, really. A fair number of people have got dud PSUs 
according the the netway guys - often working, but not providing enough 
power to spin up the HDD (this happened on one of mine). It strikes me 
as likely that the general quality of the PSUs may be quite low, and as 
such the rest might not be up to their real rated output.

>>or much above 128mb of RAM (despite the board being rated for 
>>512mb).
> 
> I thought it was only rated to 128MB...
> 
> "2.6.1 Introduction
> You can install anywhere from 16 MB to 128 MB of on-board
> DRAM memory using 16, 32, 64 or 128 MB 144-pin SODIMMs
> (Small Outline Dual In-line Memory Modules)."

Interesting. According to the PDF on the CD (also can be found on the 
'net where the Wafer 5820 board is for sale)

*System memory: One 144-pin SODIMM socket support up
  to 512 MB SDRAM

Bizarre, given that the ICP site:
http://www.icp-electronics.com/products/singleboardcomputers/WAFER-5820-300.htm
mentions "One 144-pin SO-DIMM socket up to 128MB SDRAM" but otherwise 
matches the PDF.

Perhaps the "manual" on the Wafer 5820 that is on the CD, and around the 
'net, is for a different revision or was simply wrong when produced. It 
certainly seems lacking in detail.

Out of interest, where did you find that info that you quote? I'd be 
interested in a more technical manual.

> Has anyone (if not, could someone) upload(ed) the Win311 network drivers from the CD?
> "D:\5820\Ethernet.100\wfw311"
> (I'd like to nab them, if possible)

Full CD contents will be mirrored at 
http://www.postnewspapers.com.au/~craig/wizard/ with username "wizard" 
and password "bios" (that was the original purpose of the archive) 
within 5 mins... waiting for my scp to finish.

BTW, if anybody is interested I've found that the Wizards run XFree86 
4.3 with the 'nsc' driver, though with some problems. I can't make it 
work with the 'cyrix' driver at all. The NSC driver doesn't restore the 
video correctly on exit, so X is sort of a one-way trip, and it needs 
the 'NoAccel' parameter. As far as I can tell so far, it works fine in 
accellerated mode until it has to use the RENDER ext (say, for font 
drawing) whereupon it crashes. It should work OK in accelerated mode on 
Debian 3.0, since AFAIK none of the apps in Debian will use RENDER (it's 
generally called via freetype/xft2 by gtk2/qt3). I'll be emailing 
xfree86(at)xfree86.org once I've done more testing, in the hopes of 
seeing the accel and video restore on exit working in a later version of 
XFree86.

I've had IceWM running with a bunch of xterms, and the XFCE4 about 
dialog (gtk2-based app) with acceleration enabled... so I strongly 
suspect it'll be useable so long as you don't touch RENDER. That'll need 
more testing though, at this point I'm mostly guessing.

Yes I do know VESA works - but it's so /SLOW/ and the BIOS doesn't 
support 1280x960@16bpp through VESA, but with luck it will work natively 
once I increase my shared vram to 4MB. Admittedly 'nsc' with 'NoAccel' 
is not much faster, and is a bit buggy, but hopefully it will be useable 
for accelerated video later. Also, VESA mode seems bugged on 4.3, with 
video corruption on exit, so it's not that much better than 'nsc' 
anyway. I could roll back to 4.1 if needed, though.

Craig Ringer