Hi, I try to boot my USB-Stick (which is a TWINMOS T4 with 1GB capacity, USB2.0) on my efika.

First, the usb stick was formatted with FAT32. I copied the debian installer and other files from efika.info into it. When I type show-scsi, it is there and shown in the list. But when I type devalias, I see there is no hd0, unfortunately.

I tried the same again, this time with FAT formatted. No luck either.

I can't boot from the stick no matter if I have a 2.5" connected or not. When the drive is connected, it gets the hd0 alias, but I simply can't boot from the usb stick.

Is there a capacity limit?

Any ideas?

And for your information, I later tried to boot from a SONY PSP, using its memory stick as a storage device, had no luck. Does not even show in show-scsi :(

I set up a TFTP server for Windows (Solarwinds TFTP server, which is free)

http://www.solarwinds.net/products/freetools/index.aspx

and tried a network boot

boot eth:10.0.0.7 di_image

worked flawlessly, right now debian is installing.

But I'd really like to know why my usb stick did not boot!

@Leon

i can't give you an explanation, all i can tell from my experience is that i have 5 usb sticks here and none of them worked with the Efika. I found an old cheap mp3 usb player that worked. Weird.

Maybe we should build a USB stick incompatibility list for Efika? Or better a compatibility one, it looks like it will be a shorter list :)

I managed to install and boot Efika using TFTP. By default my debian installation opened up Gnome in a very high resolution and it is slow like hell. This reminded me the PCTask or PCX days while emulating Windows 3.1 on my Amiga 1200. Not a good first impression but Efika is not designed to be a production machine anyway. I'll have to look for lighter solutions. I doubt how Efika will run movies in full screen.

GNOME is slow even on the best of machines these days.

Use Xfce or something even lighter and you'll notice a huge difference.

Efika IS a production machine. We produce it, we expect people to run things on it. However it is NOT a dual core Pentium 4GHz with 16GB of RAM. Please treat it with a little caution when picking things to run on it :)

_________________
Matt Sealey

xfce4 works quite well (check the forum posts)

Oh, but it does :-)


Best regards,
Johan

_________________
Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

not quite true. Gnome performs well and fast on my old Athlon XP 2400+ with AIXGL enabled.
But i agree that Gnome is slow on the best PPC machines these days.

now for the Efika, Fluxbox is still the best choice IMO, XFCE4 is quite slow as well, not as bad as Gnome, but if you need to do things quickly this is not the best choice.

runs very smooth on my 1Ghz Powerbook and my Dual G5. Gnome is not as fast as fluxbox or dwm and such, but it is not a slow piece of software!
agreed.

-corsair

Hi,

I switched to xfce and yes there is a speed difference.
Neko, I just made a default debian installation and x with gnome was very slow. It took me ages to open a terminal, apt-get xfce and install it. That was my first impression before I switched to xfce at acceptable speed. Under production machine, I ment a machine that we do EVERYTHING on it. And here we agree anyway :)
Johan, can you tell me how? Which kind of movies? Has anyone tried to connect a USB DVD and watch them? I will try this week.

Unfortunate that GNOME is the default; however now that Xfce 4.4 is out, and it is pretty decent at replacing everything people do with GNOME to a point (previous releases didn't have a decent filemanagers or desktop with icons..!)

I had a word with Sven and Xfce is in the dselect portion of the installer so you can pick out an Xfce install set rather than a GNOME one from the same Debian installer, however it probably isn't as current as last week's release.

Looking to resolve that somehow; given the delay in releasing Debian Etch, it may be being done for us anyway, and we will have an Etch-for-Efika installer kernel which will drag down the correct packages and use Xfce by default.
[/quote]

A USB DVD drive may be just a little too slow - DVD quality MPEG2 bitrates top out at 15Mbit/s which is far more than a USB "Full Speed" port can manage. Don't forget audio and bitstream metadata and so on adds on top. For the usual crop of movies the bitrate hangs around 5-7Mbit/s except in heavy action scenes.

I would use the USB DVD drive to extract the movie to disk first if you legally can, and play it from there.

Using the XGI HWMC drivers and the correct media player, CPU usage will go down dramatically for DVD. This might let people run GNOME and play a movie. But we don't think GNOME is well suited to such a device. The bottleneck under most circumstances be the drive speed.

MPEG4/DivX files of DVD-resolution (standard definition media) should play just fine, too.

_________________
Matt Sealey

I reinstalled Debian on my Efika yesterday and apt-getted XFCE4, i was surprised to get XFCE4.4 with nice icons on my desktop ! It's still a bit slow though, even if truly usable. A 256Mb/512Mb Efika would make sense in this situation. The memory load is just too high. (No i'm not relaunching the efika memory topic :-) It's still nice for a machine that is not supposed to be a desktop station)
sounds like a plan, thanks Matt and Sven!

Exactly. I would die for a notebook type memory slot :P