FGLive CD

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Some FGLive positive feedback ... Tried running FGLive CD in four (4) machines -

Content:
The download of the ISO, and burning a FGLive CD, then running in each machine -
1. Pentium IV, 3 GHz, 1 GB Ram, base OS Windows XP Pro SP2 - FGLive RAN FINE
2. Pentium III, 600 MHz, 256 MB Ram, no base OS - FAILED - no direct rendering!
3. Pentium II, 300 MHz, 64 MB Ram, base OS Windows 98 - FAILED - no direct rendering! Outputs
4. Pentium ?, 133 MHz, 80 MB Ram, base OS Windows 95 - FAILED - no direct rendering! Outputs

Not a particularly good score - 1 out of 4, but the other machines are quite OLD, and have 'strange' video systems, thus maybe the failure in those could have been anticipated. It ran well in the P4 machine, although 'shutdown -h -P now' failed at the end. In fact FGLive FlightGear ran better than my MSVC compiled, windows native FlightGear EXE ;=))

Below are the specific details for each machine ... the complete success with machine 1 ... and some of the gore for the others ... 


Download:

On my modest broadband, just 256MB, the download of the ISO took about 3 hours using FTP ... but that is about normal for my particular setup ... that is about 60 KB/sec throughput ... you can also use BitTorrent ... To burn the ISO to a CD-ROM I used the free BurnCDCC.exe ... from http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/ ... I used a 2004 version, but note the site now has a Version 2.00a Released 3/17/2006 ... it is simple, easy and works great ...

Even though Windows XP has built-in CD burning capability, (by Roxio), it does not seem to include ISO burning, which actually splits up the ISO image into it components, but there is a free 'power toy' from Alex Feinman at - http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm - you can contribute to his efforts using PayPal ... This installs itself into the 'system' and thus only appears on the right mouse button context menu when hovering over an ISO file ... it also adds an ISO ICON to the system ...

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Machine 1: PRO-1 Desktop

Ran FANTASTIC on this P4 3GHz, 1024MB RAM, machine ... tar muchly to Pigeon ... it even exactly enumerated the Hyundai L72S screen attached to that machine's ATI Radeon 9600PRO Sappire 256MB Video card ... using F2 frequently, saw a user mode of 1280x1024 listed, but when I tried this got a 'Video Mode Not Supported' message, but it ran great at 1024x768 ... Mother board is ASUS PAP4800SX, with a single 120 GB hard disk formatted in NTFS ...

The only TINY beef was that it took several runs before I realised I could 'switch' to English (US local), so learnt a bit of German the first few times ... it is a very SHORT delay, about 5 seconds ... At first I thought the left side coloured timer block was just part of an animated display ;=)) and only later realised I should jump on the arrow keys before it reaches the top, if I wanted to change the menu ...

The funny 'downside' is now I am REALLY unhappy with my MSVC build ... the FGLive gave frame rates up to as high as 90, but was usually around 50-60 fps ... With the native windows build I seldom get better than 5, that is FIVE(5)! ... I must try to sort out exactly why, to see if the windows performance can be improved ...

It booted and ran flawlessly in this machine ... absolutely great set of initial FGLive flash screens, that put some of the FlightGear flash screens to shame ;=)) ... tried lots of different aircraft, different FDM, etc ... fell in love with chasing the AI traffic, to see where he was going ;=)) Was able to fly 'normally', and smoothly rather than the stuttering I get in windows native ...

Interestingly enough, although I read that it should NOT touch the hard disk, when I reluctantly took the FGLive CD out, Windows XP loader considered something may be wrong with the single HDD in the machine and proceeded with its 15-20 minutes of CHKDSK-ing the 120 GB disk ... but found nothing wrong ... and eventually booted fine ...

At first I thought it was because I did rather accidentally hit the function key that writes the screen ppm, but have not found exactly where that was written ... in fact, I do not think it was written to the HDD at all ... perhaps to the FGLive RAM disk set up? ... I was in the super T38 at the time trying to find how to raise the flaps ... never did work that out either ... But this CHKDSK happened EACH time I used the FGLive CD, so has nothing to do with the ppm writing ...

Over all a GREAT experience ... at least I now KNOW this machine is capable of much better frame rates that I have ever seen under Windows ...

One other 'warning' I see on the initial F2 is something about PnP BIOS error, with a suggestion that I upgrade the BIOS ... I will try to remember to look into that ... if you look HARD, there are a few other minor warnings given here and there, but nothing particular that I have not see when using the other Live *nixes ...

Although I chose Europe/Paris, the bottom time was 2 hours out ... maybe that is UTC? ... which would be about right ... and as mentioned above, chose the 1024x768 video mode. I used FGRun ... the wizard launcher, since it makes it easy to choose aircraft, and where, etc ... and in the Advanced... you can set the FDM, and hundred of other things ... this worked great ...

There is no doubt this gives new people a quick, easy, beautiful first experience of FlightGear ... thank you once again to the FlightGear developers, and to Pigeon for the FGLive ISO ...

Machine 1 DETAILS or top


Machine 2: UNIKA Desktop

At first, would NOT boot in this older P3 600 MHz machine, with only on-mother-board graphics ... Intel i810 chip set I think ... Other Live distributions - Lycoris and Ubuntu boot fine, so not sure why FGLive failed ... no error message - just 'Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM : Failure', then onto the standard boot ... do not even see the quick flash of 'GRUB' I think it is, that I see on the other machine ... But the Fedora Core boot.iso also fails on that CD-ROM ... so do not see this as a problem that can be 'fixed' ...

I tried a suggestion to download the 'Ultimate Boot CD' - http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/download.html - and installed the boot manager included - 'Smart BootManager' (SBM), but SBM did not show the ATAPI CDROMS - there are 2 on this machine - as boot options ;=(( but the machine's BIOS allows you to configure the CDROM as part of the boot sequence ...

Soooo ... downloaded FreeDOS - http://www.freedos.org/ - actually the Beta9 release - http://freedos.sourceforge.net/freedos/files/ - from - ftp://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/old/beta9sr2/ - among other things, grabbed the fdos1440.img, and although I already had another version of rawrite.exe - to transfer the IMG to a floppy - I downloaded this as well ... Using rawrite.exe, transferred fdos1440.img to a 1.44 floppy, and booted this PC using this floppy ...

Choice 2 allows you to load Smart Boot Manager 3.7.1, and BOTH CDROM drives showed up in the 'Boot Menu' as CD0 and CD1 ... First I tried the Fedora Core Boot in CD0, but got an error - 'Disk error! 0xAA' - But when I put this Fedora Core Boot in CD1, and did <Enter>, THE CDROM BOOTED FINE ;=)) I will now download the rest of the Fedora Core, and try to install this distribution, but that is for later ...

Now it was time to try the FGLive CDROM, which boots fine in machine 1 above, into CD1, and give it a try ... the first time I just got 'GRUB loading, please wait..., but then Error 17, but on subsequent tries ... the usual, nearly forgotten, Ctrl+Alt+Del restarts the machine ;=)) ... IT STARTED TO LOAD ...

It enumerated the monitor correctly - Image Quest P910+, with an 'unknown' video card, supporting only 640x480 ... so that is what I chose ... saw the first flash screen of FGLive, but shortly thereafter got a blank screen with coloured lines, the mouse was frozen, and the machine dead ;=(( but this is some considerable improvement over the earlier 'got nothing, went nowhere' tries ...

You have to be quick after Freedos boots to make this choice 2 to load the Smart Boot Manager, but I have since learned to watch closely and get on the keyboard QUICKLY ;=)) the next run was the GRUB Error 17 message ... so it is not very 'stable' conditions ... there is only 256MB of RAM in that machine ...

I found that if I opened, and close the CDROM after FreeDOS had booted, and waited until the light had gone out, I had a better chance of getting further ... this time I got a FGLive X direct rendering check dialog, saying 'Note: X is currently not running with direct rendering. FlightGear might run very slowly, or might not work properly at all.' ...

As before, I chose the FlightGear Wizard to run (FGRun) ... but it FAILED TO OPEN ... Choosing 'FlightGear Wizard' off the menu, brought it up for part of a second, but it exited again ... it looked like it was having trouble with my 640x480 mode ... it was partially painted off screen ... it looked too large ...

OK, how to try running FlightGear directly? I tried opening the FGLive README from the menu, but this also failed to open ... so I opened a terminal ... but where is fgfs? And where is the scenery? ...

OK, found the binary in /opt/flightgear/bin/fgfs, with fgrun, and there is a data directory ... /opt/flightgear/data ... I first tried to run fgrun -

fglive@FGLive:/opt/flightgear/bin$ ./fgrun

but it aborted with the message -

fgrun: indirect_vertex_array.c:1359: __indirect_glTexCoordPointer: Assertion a != ((void *)0)' failed - Aborted ... that seems clear ;=()

fglive@FGLive:/opt/flightgear/bin$ ./fgfs --fg-root=../data

I am rewarded with the flash screen, mostly off screen, and it trundles for a few moments, but abort with the SAME MESSAGE ...

fgfs: indirect_vertex_array.c:1359: __indirect_glTexCoordPointer: Assertion a != ((void *)0)' failed - Aborted ... that seems even clearer ;=()

The command -

fglive@FGLive:/opt/flightgear/bin$ ./fgfs --fg-root=../data -v --help

runs fine ... but it scrolls off the terminal, and there seems no way to see it all ... and attempt to redirect it to a file also got 'permission denied', until I logged in as root. Below are some of the linux commands used.

Despite some information that the video complex would NOT support 1024x768, on a subsequent boot, I selected this mode, and voila, IT WORKED ...

Remember, the boot process, was to boot FreeDOS in floopy drive A:, choose menu item 2, open and close the CD-ROM, wait for the light to stay off, then boot the FGLive CD, which would sometimes just give me GRUB loading, please wait... Error 17, so would have to start again ... or GRUB would arrive at the Minimal BASH like prompt ... grub > ... and would start again ... lots of patience needed ...

Then other times I would get a message that something failed in the video mode setting, and would be asked to give a mode setting or wait 30 seconds ... I found that 80x50 worked fine (1) ... in addition to just selecting US Local, I also tried 'Expert' mode, but as mentioned, nearly always I would eventually arrive at the FGLive X direct rendering check dialog, advising that 'direct rendering' was 'not running' ...

And sometimes I would get a freeze screen - made up of coloured wavy lines, and the mouse would be frozen ...

EVENTUALLY I HAD TO GIVE UP ON THIS MACHINE, JUST DUE TO THE TIME IT WAS CONSUMING FOR VERY LITTLE RESULTS ;=((

Machine 2 DETAILS or top


Machine 3: COMPAQ Laptop

This is a Compaq Presario laptop, circa 1998, with a P II 300 MHz CPU, and only 64 MB of RAM. During the load I saw a new thing - a swap file request - I accepted this option and FGLive set up a swap file on the single  hard disk ...

But like machine 2, I eventually reached the dialog saying direct rendering was not running, and as in Machine 2 above, FGRun and fgfs failed to run, both exiting with the same error as the above.

fgrun: indirect_vertex_array.c:1359: __indirect_glTexCoordPointer: Assertion a != ((void *)0)' failed - Aborted ...

Output from dmesg - DMESG-03.TXT, glxinfo - GLXI-03.TXT, lspci - LSPCI-03.TXT, set - SET-03.TXT, and Xorg.0.log - xorg-03.txt

GAVE UP QUICKLY ON THIS MACHINE ;=)) since I had not expected even Linux to load ...

Machine 3 DETAILS or top


Machine 4: IPC Dynasty Desktop

It is an IPC machine, with an old Intel 133 MHz CPU ... As with other machines I had to use FreeDOS on the floppy, using option 2 - Boot Manager - to boot from the CD-ROM ... there seems no BIOS option to set the BOOT to the CD-ROM drive ... As usual, I had to open, and close the CD-ROM, and wait, else I would get the 'Error Failed' message ...

Also, due to the low RAM, 80 MB, I allowed a knoppix.swp to be created on /dev/hdd1 and /dev/hdd5, each 60 MB ... and I had to swap the old monitor, since linux was running in a mode NOT supported by the old monitor ... I used the machine 2 ImageQuest P910+ monitor ...

But ran into another problem ... cloop: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 1085644, 84 bytes lost ... and this error just repeated about 5 times, but then it continued on ... of course the whole process was MUCH SLOWER in this 133 MHz machine ...

Also got a modprobe: FATAL: Error running install command for sound_slot_0 ... will this mean NO SOUND? ... I got multiple other media errors, but it usually continued after a number of tries ... maybe I should also swap the CD-ROM for a later device ... I will have to try that, since this last error is just continuing to REPEAT, ad infinitum ;=((

That proved relatively painless ... I did happen to have an 'unattached' LG CD/DVD-ROM DRD-8160B drive, and it was a simple matter of transferring the mounting slider mechanism to the new drive ... and I was on my way again ... this new drive spins a lot faster, and thus makes a lot more noise, but I guess I will have to put up with that ;=))

Hopefully no more read errors, but for some reason it could NOT find the DOS partitions for the SWAP files this time ... but I continued anyway ... I did see the drives appear during the boot, so not sure why this happened ... and was able to mount them later ...

I choose 1024x768 resolution ... but hope I get time to try others ... but again I reach the now DREADED - FGLive X direct rendering check - Note: X is currently not running with direct rendering. FlightGear might run very slowly, or might not work properly at all ;=((

Also, the MOUSE failed to materialise? In this machine, the mouse is connected via a COM port ... and I think it is an 'unusual' port, like COM4 ... I should try to put it back to COM1, where it may be found ... Meantime I learn a little about the linux keyboard navigation ... thankfully it seems Alt+Esc brings up the [Start] menu - I wonder where that key combination came from ;=))

I successfully mount one of the hard drives, /dev/hdd1 to /mnt/d1 as type msdos, so I can write results to a file there, hopefully ... the SAD thing, is that in the first few lines of the glxinfo I can read - 'direct rendering: No' How to change this? What are the rules? ...$ glxinfo -b outputs 37 - what does this mean?

By doing a 'Logout' I end up with no display, except the root shell prompt ... changing to /opt/flightgear/bin and trying to run ./fgrun exit with 'Can't open display' ... ok, how can I create a display? Reading one of the boards emails, I was able to ESC from the FGLive graphic menu, and made a few tries using the 'text' menu system ... but never achieved anything better - always the NO DIRECT RENDERING problem ...

Output from dmesg - DMESG-04.TXT, glxinfo GLXI-04A.TXT, glxinfo -v GLXI-04B.TXT, lspci LSPCI-04.TXT, and from set SET-04.TXT ... and the contents of the first Xorg.o.log xorg-04a.txt, and the contents after the second boot xorg-04b.txt ...

Machine 4 DETAILS or top


Solution, if any!:

Ok, FGLive only functions on ONE(1) machine ... and FAILED on 3 ... Why? It all appeared something to do with the fact that 'direct rendering', DRI, could not be established on those machines. Why, in each case? 

At first I thought it was machine 2's on motherboard video, but casting around the DRI site suggests that the i810 Intel chipset IS SUPPORTED! Also, since I can boot from CD1, using the FreeDOS  Smart Boot Manager, maybe I should/could swap CD0 with CD1, to perhaps shorten the boot process ... then, perhaps some more tries on this machine ...

Unfortunately, the NeoMagic video of machine 3 is NOT mentioned on the DRI site, so that probably means it is NOT supported, and regrettably, the DRI site specifically states the the Matrox chipset Millennium II (2164), which is what appears to be in machine 4, although Astra shows it uses 2064, is NOT supported, so maybe this answers why machines 3 and 4 FAILED.   


Linux Commands:

Some linux commands used:

In Machine 2, which has two hard drives, C: and D:, I was able to mount these two drives, with the following ... they are both FAT (FAT16) formats, so -

...$ cd /mnt
...$ sudo mkdir d4
...$ sudo mount -t msdos /dev/hda4 /mnt/d4

and

...$ sudo mkdir d5
...$ sudo mount -t msdos /dev/hda5 /mnt/d5

And rather than using 'sudo' all the time, which seemed to fail with 'permission denied' on redirection of something to a file on one of the hard disks, so did the following ...

...$ sudo passwd root
password: pass
password 2nd time: pass

then can do

...$ su root
password: pass

and was able to do things not possible before ... ;=)) when done

...# exit

put me back as a user ... When completed all the fun, chose Logout from the menu, then at the root prompt

...# shutdown -h -P now

shuts down the machine, including switching off the power ... but this did NOT always works ... sometimes there was a problem un-mounting the drives I had mounted ... and it seems machine 4 does not support this type of power managements, so had to force the machine to OFF ...

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