Ultimate questions on Linux, the Universe and everything

Sometimes you will find that your hard disk is slow, or there are some other issues with disk performance. If you are lucky, the disk is not broken. It could have some firmware bugs, and if you are even more lucky, the manufacturer could have issued a firmware update. I've updated several hard disk firmwares in the past. Usually you have to use a boot disk with DOS or something to update the firmware. Why updating firmware? One of my hard disks in the past needed a new firmware because it was dropping out from a RAID controller. It began working fine after the firmware update. The latest hard disk that needed firmware update was Seagate 15k.7 ST3450857SS SAS. I noticed that the disks sometimes slowed down during writes and even stalled. I use two 450GB disks in software RAID 1. By googling I found that there were other people having similar problems with the same disk and that there were actually a firmware update available from Seagate. Also Dell, HP and IBM seems to ha...

The FusionMPT SAS2 based cards by LSI are cheap RAID cards that perform well in RAID 0 and 1 under Linux with SSDs and ZFS arrays. They are used in many 1U servers with one or two disks. They are also a popular SAS 6.0 / SATA III controllers for enthusiasts. You can get them cheap on ebay. Before SATA III was common on motherboards, this was THE card to get. It can still be useful if you need SAS disks or additional disks or have a need for disk enclosures. It is identical to the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9220-8i. The same hardware is also used in LSI 9240 and LSI 9211. It is possible to use the BIOS from another card (crossflashing) to change the features of the card. There are a few different BIOS files you can use. Specifications:  Official LSI information 8-lane, 5 GT/s PCI Express 2.0 Identical to LSI 9240-8i card 6 Gb/s per port Two x4 internal SFF-8087 connectors Controller LSISAS2008 Low cost SATA+SAS RAID solution RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and JBOD mode >...

Tablets usually have only a few USB ports. The Viewsonic Viewpad 10pi has two. I'll show later that this makes things a bit complicated. Because of the badly supported hardware in Z670 tablets, you have to improvise a few things. The graphics chip doesn't necessary let the installer run in grahical mode and the Wi-fi chip is not detected automatically by the installer. I first tried installing Fedora 20. It failed, because the Wi-fi chip was not detected and the installer refused to continue without a configured network device (at least the text mode installer, because the graphical installer refused to run). Using an external USB Wi-fi device helped, but Fedora fails to start X-windows on this graphics chip. I'm not sure what the problem is. It doesn't load the required module, gma500_gfx, automatically. Loading it manually doesn't help. Then I tried Debian. It turned out that Debian automatically loads the graphical driver and it is possible to start X. This...

I've for a long time wanted to run Linux on a tablet. Why, because I use Linux on all of my computers. Why not on a tablet? I dislike Android with its app store model. I need a terminal where I can tell the system what to do, select repositories and download the software I want. Even more important: to be able to create my own software and modify the applications and the system. There are a number of x86 tablets that came on the market around 2011. Most of them were running Windows 7, but some had even x86 Android. Many of them were based on Intel Atom Z670 with GMA600 graphics ( Oak Trail tablet platform). I list a couple here in no specific order: Viewsonic Viewpad 10 and variants Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 CTFPAD2 Motion CL900 HP Slate 2 Dell Latitude ST-LST01 WeTab The problem with all of these is the dreaded PowerVR graphics chip. Some binary drivers were released at the time, but they don't work anymore with modern linux systems. There is work ongoing to sup...