[GRLUG] Meeting agenda?

[Tim Schmidt]

On 10/11/06, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
> Last I checked, you still can't run SMART tools over SATA on most
> distros.  I'm not even sure the passthrough ioctls have been added to
> the main kernel tree yet.

Hmmm...  I'd wager they have been, or will be soon.  Allan Cox has
been working on moving all support for IDEish drives over to the SATA
code, which has either been comitted, or is being planned for comit in
the next release or two.  The old IDE code will still stick around
(like OSS), but be formally deprecated.

> On some distros, like stock Debian, module loading isn't always
> automatic...I remember one configuration I had where I had two sound
> cards, and always had to manually load the driver for the second card.
> (One was onboard AC97, the other was my then-new Sound Blaster Live)

Sure.  Module loading is never guarenteed to be automatic, even
hotplug and udev have blacklists.  In your case (stock Debian), adding
the module name to /etc/modules would have done the trick.

> Very true.  I never, ever thought I'd use USB.  But that was when I
> was on a K6-200 desktop system where you had to plug the USB ports
> into headers on the motherboard. (No, I don't miss the AT form factor.
>  Not one measly bit.)  Once I switched to a box with a USB keyboard, I
> found I had no choice. (There weren't any PS/2 keyboards in the house.
>  Just a bunch of AT keyboard and a PC/XT keyboard.)

No one misses AT.  No one.  Some folks may miss a simple hard on/off
switch, no one misses AT.  (and it shall never be spoken of again)

--tim