Subject:
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Re: NQC and RedHat linux 6 on laptop
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Tue, 22 Jan 2002 17:06:07 GMT
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Original-From:
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Chris 'Xenon' Hanson <xenon@3dnature.com&StopSpam&>
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Reply-To:
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XENON@3DNATURE.COMstopspammers
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Viewed:
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721 times
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I'm quoting my whole original message below with today's info added so
that future searchers might stumble on all this info in one place.
Chris 'Xenon' Hanson wrote:
Hi all. I've been successfully using NQC on an old NEC 486/50 laptop
with only 16MB of RAM for a while. The laptop was running muLinux, a
very limited floppy-based distro. Everything worked ok, other than the fact
that Nqc would segfault after each run, a basically harmless problem. I
can compile and download to the RCX just fine via the IR tower on the
serial port (COM1).
I've since scraped together another old laptop, a 486/100 with 32Mb of RAM
and a 750Mb hard drive, and installed Red Hat 6.1 on it and compiled NQC.
It runs ok, no segfaulting here. Compiles go fine, but I am unable to get
it to download. It fails to communicate with the IR tower. My laptop has
an onboard trackball on COM1, so naturally I need to tell Nqc that the
IR Tower is on a different serial port. RH 6 seems to determine the
serial port is COM3 so I tell it to use /dev/ttyS03 on the command line.
No luck. I see that checking through /proc, the COM3 port is not showing
carrier detect for that port, which I believe is normal for the IR tower.
The muLinux doesn't have /proc, so I can't compare anything here.
I have verified that the tower and cable and tower's battery are ok, as
the setup still works fine with the older laptop. As root, I have given
everyone full permissions to access the serial port.
Seems like this is a software/config sort of trouble. Anyone have any
suggestions? I can disable the trackball and map the outboard serial
connector to COM1 in the BIOS, but I'd like to be able to use the trackball
so I can run under X and make some live graphic displays for data I collect
with the RCX.
In the meantime I'm using the old laptop still, but would really love to
get this working.
(The compile process seemed to go fine on the new laptop, anything I should
have changed in the config before compiling that I might have missed?)
Thanks in advance for any tips. NQC just rocks.
Chris - Xenon
Ok, so in the end, the culprit turned out mostly to be my 3Com PCMCIA 10bT
ethernet card.
I verified that the port itself worked ok by booting from a DOS floppy and
using a freeware DOS terminal program to talk to my GPS over the same port.
So it wasn't hardware, I thought. (Little did I realize at that point that I
had my PCMCIA ethernet card installed, but by booting to a stripped DOS floppy,
not Card Services had loaded and the E-net card was unconfigured and inert.)
I went back to testing under Red Hat Linux 6.x.
I kept playing with seterial /dev/ttyS1 auto_irq skip_test autoconfig (this
is with the port set to COM2 in the BIOS) and it kept reporting that it was
using IRQ 0, which seemed nonsensical, as COM1-3 use IRQ 3 or 4. Since I had
no other accessories hooked up, I couldn't imagine what could be causing an
IRQ conflict. Finally I remembered that I still had the PCMCIA ethernet card
in the bay, though I didn't have it's little cable dongle attached and had the
PCMCIA bay door closed.
I shut down, pulled the card, booted up and ran setserial -g /dev/ttyS*. Now
things looked better, and seterial /dev/ttyS1 auto_irq skip_test autoconfig
came up with a proper IRQ and all.
Hooking up the GPS and doing a cat </dev/ttyS1 produced a nice stream of NMEA
GPS data, so I took the plunge and hooked up the tower and ran NQC. It ran and
downloaded to the RCX just fine.
Thanks for all the tips, everyone, they helped me get on the right track.
BTW: RH6's install kernal's serial driver is compiled with MULTIPLE PORTS and
SHARE INTERRUPTS and all, but I don't think that mattered here.
Next task: Try to figure out if I can bind the ethernet card to a different
IRQ so I can use it simultaneously.
Next Lego task: Setting up a communications link between the RCX running my LIDAR
station ( http://www.arcticus.com/Lego ) and a Linux/svgalib-based graphical display
running on the laptop.
I'll post more about the LIDAR station and remote LIDAR station display when I
get the link and display software done and working.
Chris - Xenon
--
Chris Hanson | Xenon@3DNature.com | I've got friends in low latitudes!
New WCS 5 Demo Version! http://www.3DNature.com/demo/
"There is no Truth. There is only Perception. To Perceive is to Exist." - Xen
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | NQC and RedHat linux 6 on laptop
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| Hi all. I've been successfully using NQC on an old NEC 486/50 laptop with only 16MB of RAM for a while. The laptop was running muLinux, a very limited floppy-based distro. Everything worked ok, other than the fact that Nqc would segfault after each (...) (22 years ago, 14-Jan-02, to lugnet.robotics)
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