24 replies to this topic

[alphaomega]

Qimo2.0 / OldPC / Multiple ?s

Installed Qimo 2.0 (based on Ubuntu 9.04) on this old hardware:

Quote

Dell Dimension L700CXE
Intel Celerom 700 MHz
256 MB RAM
04 GB HD

It is working okay just a little bit slow.
Not too bad for old hardware.

In addition to what is already available...
at a minimum I would also like to:

A. Play online games like those available at pbskids.
B. Play audio cds.
  
Considerring how old this machine is (low-end specs)...
I have multiple questions:

1. There are 400+ updates (including Firefox 13) should I update?

2. How do you play audio cds.
Todem currently says there is no audio cd in the drive.

3. Flash/Java.
Considerring the system specs should I use an older version?
Where would I get them?

4. The machine has a 4GB drive while 6GB is recommended.
If I remove some apps their dependencies would also be removed
and may break something. Any obvious apps that could be removed
to recoup some space without breaking stuff?

I'm setting the machine up for my cousin's grandkids
who are not allowed to use their parents' machine.

I figure even though the machine is old at least they
will be able to play gcompris and kidsplay and possibly
the online games at pbskids.

Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance...
Cheers

Edited by alphaomega, 20 June 2012 - 12:03 PM.

[abarbarian]

Quote

The minimal recommended configuration to run DoudouLinux is:

• 256 MB memory
  
• 800 MHz processor
  
• 800×600 dots display

DoudouLinux can easily work with a slower processor [2], but not for 3D games which are more computation-greedy [3]. Moreover it is possible to use less than 256 MB memory, positive trials were conducted with 128 MB memory. Finally concerning screen resolution, some applications are designed to work with a minimal size of 800×600 dots. This is why it is better to opt for a screen and a video card that accept this mode.
Globally any machine dating from early 2000’s should be adequate concerning PC’s.

http://www.doudoulin...lish/index.html

Quote

Finally an aspect that may be interesting to configure if you intend to use DoudouLinux regularly is data persistence. In this case it is obviously better to find your work after rebooting the computer. Persistence makes it possible by using either the internal computer disk or an USB data storage device (external key or hard drive).

Can not advise on your Q. However the above should fly on your pc.

[alphaomega]

abarbarian, on 20 June 2012 - 01:05 PM, said:

http://www.doudoulin...lish/index.html
Can not advise on your Q. However the above should fly on your pc.

Posting this from Qimo.
Thanks for the info.
I will give it a try as it comes with more games than Qimo by default.

Cheers

  Maybe not...
The procedure for installing to the drive requires a usb stick with 700+MB.
I would prefer that it be installed vs running from the cd.
I don't have a usb stick capable of holding that much.
There is almost that amount of free space on the mp3 player
so I am going to see if I can delete some stuff and use that to install.

It looks like I should be able to temporarily move /usr/share off the mp3 player
which would give me an additional 450MB to work with (600MB already free).

Edited by alphaomega, 20 June 2012 - 04:30 PM.

[burninbush]

It is working okay just a little bit slow.
Not too bad for old hardware. >alphaomega

+++++++++++++++++

At the risk of being charged with heresy on a linux board -- put a copy of win98se on it, your older puter has plenty of power to run that system.  Use WinAmp to play music, PowerDVD to watch movies, etc.  There are thousands of games that were written to run on that OS.  It's just not a very good fit for linux -- why struggle?

[Cookie]

That's probably pretty good advice, bro.

[alphaomega]

Pretty much close to being all done. Decided to stick with Qimo.
No way would I install win98 on a machine that may access the internet.

Did not update firefox as the newer version needs more memory than the machine has.
Got flash working by tracking down an old copy of flash 9.
It currently works at pbskids.org.
It does not work at nickjr.com or sesamestreet.org as they both
want a more up to date version of flash.

Decided against installing java.

Now only a couple of more things to do (fingers crossed).

1. Figure out the issue with playing an audio cd.

There is an app that plays audio cds (exaile)
but it only plays the first couple of seconds of the song.

2. Configure the browser to only allow access
to certain sites like pbskids.

Currently testing ProCon Latte extension.

Edited by alphaomega, 21 June 2012 - 01:09 AM.

[abarbarian]

The kids will like Qimo. I tried it along with DoudouLinux a few months ago. Out of the two I prefer DoudouLinux but the eskimos in Qimo are very neat.

Enjoy.

[securitybreach]

alphaomega, on 20 June 2012 - 11:12 PM, said:

2. Configure the browser to only allow access
to certain sites like pbskids.

Currently testing ProCon Latte extension.

Well I was going to suggest Squid for content filtering https://wiki.archlin...index.php/Squid but the firefox addon may be easier to install and setup.

[alphaomega]

It looked like flash player 9 was going to work.
It showed up when checking the about flash page.
It showed up in the add on list.
Games on pbskids.org would load but would not play correctly and there was not sound.
Upgrading to the latest 10 version fixed the issues.

The ProCon Latte plugin works to restrict the user to:
pbskids.org, nickjr.com, and sesamestreet.org.

Now the only issue is:
Why audio cd tracks only play for a couple of seconds in Exaile.

parent@kids-desktop:~$ exaile
INFO	: Loading Exaile 0.3.1.1...
INFO	: Loading settings...
INFO	: Setting up deferred idle manager function...
INFO	: Loading plugins...
INFO	: Loading collection...
INFO	: Loading devices...
INFO	: Loading interface...
INFO	: HAL Providers: [<cd.CDHandler object at 0xa9cbb0c>]
INFO	: Loading main window...
INFO	: Connecting main window events...
INFO	: Loading panels...
INFO	: Connecting panel events...
INFO	: Done loading main window...
INFO	: Playing cdda://1/#/dev/sr0
http://lyricsfly.com/api/api.php?i=46102e76dde1a145b-exaile.org&a=Seal&t=Don%t Cry %Radio Edit%
'<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?><start>\n\t<status>200</status><sg><cs>0000000000</cs><id>00000</id><ar>N/A</ar><tt>N/A</tt><al>N/A</al><tx><![CDATA[<a href=http://lyricsfly.com>Find lyrics on LyricsFly.com</a>]]></tx></sg></start>\t'
scsi_read error: sector=767 length=15 retry=0
				 Sense key: 3 ASC: 2 ASCQ: 0
				 Transport error: Medium reading data from medium
				 System error: Input/output error
scsi_read error: sector=767 length=7 retry=1
				 Sense key: 3 ASC: 2 ASCQ: 0
				 Transport error: Medium reading data from medium
				 System error: Input/output error
INFO	: Exaile is shutting down...
INFO	: Disabling plugins...
INFO	: Saving state...
INFO	: Bye!

Edited by alphaomega, 21 June 2012 - 11:03 AM.

[securitybreach]

It looks like your disc may have scratches or something. Try playing another track or another disc:

Quote

scsi_read error: sector=767 length=15 retry=0
Sense key: 3 ASC: 2 ASCQ: 0
Transport error: Medium reading data from medium
System error: Input/output error

scsi_read error: sector=767 length=7 retry=1
Sense key: 3 ASC: 2 ASCQ: 0
Transport error: Medium reading data from medium
System error: Input/output error

The errors are pretty much saying that the drive cannot read sector 767 on the disc.

[alphaomega]

securitybreach, on 21 June 2012 - 11:51 AM, said:

It looks like your disc may have scratches or something. Try playing another track or another disc:
[/color]
The errors are pretty much saying that the drive cannot read sector 767 on the disc.

It happens with every audio cd I have tried.
It only plays the first couple of seconds on a track.
The audio cds played without issue in the same cdrom
in the previous installed os (slackware) and they
play without issue on my main machine and in a
portable cd player.

[securitybreach]

Hmm that is kind of odd. I wonder why the error messages state that one of the sectors cannot be read

[alphaomega]

securitybreach, on 21 June 2012 - 02:03 PM, said:

Hmm that is kind of odd. I wonder why the error messages state that one of the sectors cannot be read

I've dealt with similar errors where in the logs "sense key" was mentioned.
It's been a while...I'll have to go searching cause I'm sure there are a few
old posts on here when I encountered the error.

It happened around the time they switched over...
if I remember correctly...from one driver to the scsi one.

Did a search on the forum and did not find the old messages.
The oldest post was back in 2011.
I wonder if the older messages got lost in the switch over to
the new forum software.

Looking at older posts on another board...
the issue happened back around 3/2010.

Edited by alphaomega, 21 June 2012 - 02:38 PM.

[burninbush]

Suggest that you try reading a disk or two using dd -- just to see if it errors at the same place.  It sounds like you have a damaged drive, maybe the head assy won't move outward past a certain point.  Using dd avoids issues about what type of content or which player you are using, only cares about copying sectors.  Fix the name of the device, where I wrote 'sr0' to be whatever is correct for your machine.   If dd goes all the way to the end without errors, you'll know it is unlikely to be a hardware issue.  

#dd if=/dev/sr0 bs=2048 |md5sum

[securitybreach]

Good suggestion burninbush!!

[alphaomega]

burninbush, on 21 June 2012 - 02:29 PM, said:

Suggest that you try reading a disk or two using dd -- just to see if it errors at the same place.  It sounds like you have a damaged drive, maybe the head assy won't move outward past a certain point.  Using dd avoids issues about what type of content or which player you are using, only cares about copying sectors.  Fix the name of the device, where I wrote 'sr0' to be whatever is correct for your machine.   If dd goes all the way to the end without errors, you'll know it is unlikely to be a hardware issue.  

#dd if=/dev/sr0 bs=2048 |md5sum

Will give it a try and post back although I do not think the issue is the drive
or I would have run into problems installing Qimo.

Here are the results from running the command on the burned Qimo cd.
going to test the audio cd next.

parent@desktop:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sr0 bs=2048 | md5sum
[sudo] password for parent:
358080+0 records in
358080+0 records out
fcc629f107e8ca8766b15bc6e5c32e5c  -
733347840 bytes (733 MB) copied, 595.719 s, 1.2 MB/s

Here are the results from running the command on the audio cd:

parent@desktop:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sr0 bs=2048 | md5sum
dd: reading `/dev/sr0': Input/output error
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e  -
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 1.27538 s, 0.0 kB/s

Edited by alphaomega, 21 June 2012 - 03:01 PM.

[alphaomega]

This is what I get when using cdparanoia:

parent@desktop:~$ cdparanoia -vsQ
cdparanoia III release 10.2 (September 11, 2008)

Using cdda library version: 10.2
Using paranoia library version: 10.2
Checking /dev/cdrom for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/cdrom: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/cdroms/cdrom0 for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/cdroms/cdrom0: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/cdroms/cdroma for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/cdroms/cdroma: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/cdroms/cdrom1 for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/cdroms/cdrom1: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/cdroms/cdromb for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/cdroms/cdromb: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/cdroms/cdrom2 for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/cdroms/cdrom2: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/cdroms/cdromc for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/cdroms/cdromc: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/cdroms/cdrom3 for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/cdroms/cdrom3: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/cdroms/cdromd for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/cdroms/cdromd: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/hd0 for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/hd0: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/hda for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/hda: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/hd1 for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/hd1: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/hdb for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/hdb: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/hd2 for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/hd2: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/hdc for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/hdc: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/hd3 for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/hd3: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/hdd for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/hdd: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/sg0 for cdrom...
	Testing /dev/sg0 for SCSI/MMC interface
		Could not access device /dev/sg0 to test for SG_IO support: Permission denied
		no SG_IO support for device: /dev/sg0
		Could not access device /dev/sg0: Permission denied
		generic device: /dev/sg0
		ioctl device: not found
		Could not open generic SCSI device /dev/sg0: Permission denied
	Testing /dev/sg0 for cooked ioctl() interface
		/dev/sg0 is not a cooked ioctl CDROM.

Checking /dev/sga for cdrom...
	Could not stat /dev/sga: No such file or directory

Checking /dev/sg1 for cdrom...
	Testing /dev/sg1 for SCSI/MMC interface
		SG_IO device: /dev/sg1

CDROM model sensed sensed: MAT****A CD-ROM CR-583 1.05

Checking for SCSI emulation...
	Drive is ATAPI (using SG_IO host adaptor emulation)

Checking for MMC style command set...
	Drive is MMC style
	DMA scatter/gather table entries: 127
	table entry size: 131072 bytes
	maximum theoretical transfer: 6985 sectors
	Setting default read size to 27 sectors (63504 bytes).

Verifying CDDA command set...
	Expected command set reads OK.

Attempting to set cdrom to full speed...
	drive returned OK.

Table of contents (audio tracks only):
track		length			   begin		copy pre ch
===========================================================
  1.	20400 [04:32.00]	   32 [00:00.32]	no   no  2
  2.	25583 [05:41.08]	20432 [04:32.32]	no   no  2
TOTAL   45983 [10:13.08]	(audio only)

[amenditman]

So when you test the cdrom drive with the qimo cd

parent@desktop:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sr0 bs=2048 | md5sum

it finds the disc at /dev/sr0.

When you test it with an audio CD (same code) it is not finding the drive.

When you test with cdparanoia

parent@desktop:~$ cdparanoia -vsQ

it finds the CDROM at /dev/sg1.

Have you thought about the fact that those two discs are different types of media. One is a data CD and the other is audio. I have heard of this somewhere before.

Can you show us your /etc/fstab please?

[alphaomega]

amenditman, on 21 June 2012 - 09:49 PM, said:

So when you test the cdrom drive with the qimo cd

parent@desktop:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/sr0 bs=2048 | md5sum

it finds the disc at /dev/sr0.

When you test it with an audio CD (same code) it is not finding the drive.

When you test with cdparanoia

parent@desktop:~$ cdparanoia -vsQ

it finds the CDROM at /dev/sg1.

Have you thought about the fact that those two discs are different types of media. One is a data CD and the other is audio. I have heard of this somewhere before.

Can you show us your /etc/fstab please?

Yes. But it makes me think that the drive is okay.
And I have encountered something very similar on my other machine back in 2010
but instead of the problem occurring with audio cds it was happening with burned cds.

What comes to mind is some switch over regarding "scsi emulation".

There is a bug (533643) at red hat bugzilla that I am reading through now...
one person there mentioned he downgraded udev to 151-9 (this system has udev 151-12).

There is also mention of a kernel bug 15757 which I am reading through...
it discusses making some changes in 60-cdrom_id.rules and 80-udisks.rules.
But those changes already appear to be applied here.

Also mentioned in the red hat bug is the same manufacturer mat****a (gotta love the censor).

Here is my /etc/fstab:

proc   /proc   proc   nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0
/dev/sda2   /   ext3   errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sda1   none   swap   sw 0 0
/dev/fd0   /media/floppy0  auto   rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

Edited by alphaomega, 21 June 2012 - 11:43 PM.

[amenditman]

Qimo is based on Ubuntu and I know there are a lot of bugs files about similar (but not exactly the same) issues you are having. I was reading through some of them earlier tonight after reading your adventures. Haven't found what I'm looking for yet, but will keep looking tomorrow.

[alphaomega]

amenditman, on 22 June 2012 - 04:00 AM, said:

Qimo is based on Ubuntu and I know there are a lot of bugs files about similar (but not exactly the same) issues you are having. I was reading through some of them earlier tonight after reading your adventures. Haven't found what I'm looking for yet, but will keep looking tomorrow.

Please don't waste your time.

@everyone who offered assistance: Thank you so much.

I gave up fighting with this issue and not finding a fix or work around.
So I went digging  through my closet (a chore in itself) and pulled out another old cdrom drive.

Audio cds are working now.

I just do not understand.

The drive worked to boot the Qimo cd.
The drive worked to install Qimo.
But the drive gave me problems reading audio cds (not burned audio cds).

I would think...
If the drive is bad then none of them would have worked.

Am I missing something?
Why would one work and the other not work?

Cheers

It will be interesting to see what happens when I pull out the other Dell Dimension L700CXE.

Edited by alphaomega, 22 June 2012 - 10:40 AM.

[alphaomega]

Notes (to self) to document the strange happenings on the 2nd Dell Dimension L700CXE.
I do not quite understand some of them so I'm writing them off to "ghosts in the machine".
If anyone can shed some light on these strange happenings please chime in. Thanks.

1. booted slackware and checked if an audio cd would play: Worked

2. put in the burned Qimo cd to see if I could access the files: Worked

3. removed the hard drive and put in another: Worked

4. booted with the Qimo cd and attempted an install: Did not work

around 90% into the install it started having problems reading the cd.
this cd tested okay using the Qimo boot option "check disk for defects"
on the 1st Dell Dimension L700CXE with the problem cdrom: Strange

5. removed the cdrom and put in the cdrom which gave me issues
playing audio cds and installed Qimo: Worked

6. booted Qimo off the hard drive: Worked

7. went to add a new account and adjust some settings and the hard
drive started thrashing and the system became slow to respond: Strange

8. ran fsck (fsck.ext3 -c -f -p /dev/hda2) on the drive from
within tinycore and did not notice any errors in the output.

converted the swap partition to an ext2 partition and checked
it using fsck and did not notice any errors in the output.

converted the ext2 partition back to a swap partition

now when booting Qimo from the hard drive I'm seeing
a message about running repair: Strange


To be continued...

Edited by alphaomega, 22 June 2012 - 05:05 PM.

[burninbush]

now when booting Qimo from the hard drive I'm seeing
a message about running repair: Strange

To be continued >alpha&omega

++++++++++++

Here's an old computer truism:  when the symptoms make no sense, then it's probably the power supply that's bad.

[alphaomega]

@burningbush, Thanks for the info.
The machine appears to be working now.
I'll see how it goes from this point on.

Notes (to self) continued.

fsck did not indicate a problem with the partition.
there is plenty of free space (1.7gb).
checked fstab and noticed that it had entries using uuids.
changed fstab so that it did not use uuids and updated grub.

the first machine did not use uuids.
I think that happened because the first install did not finish
(as fstab noted / previously on /dev/sda2).

I have not seen the message regarding manual repair since.
And I have not had the issue with the drive thrashing.

Have spent the last couple of hours installing games and configuring.

Cheers

[amenditman]

Great that you got it working and it was something simple afterall.