Now on Linux

[Joseph Hewitt]

I tried MemCheck and fsck as suggested. Both reported no problem. Argh.

[Burzmali]

Well, that pretty much leaves mechanical failure of the hard drive.  If you want to be sure the rest of the system is stable you can download mprime, decompress and run with /mprime -m and run a torture test on the CPU.  If the system is stable through that, it isolates the problem to the hard drive.

Mechanical hard drive failure is usually accompanied by a clicking noise from the drive during boot.  Has there been any noise from the drive?

[Joseph Hewitt]

No noise from the drive.

[Burzmali]

I'm not very experienced with laptop drives... maybe the anti-shock features deaden that noise.  Typically, when a hard drive is failing, the arm that reads the disk jams in the off position.  Sometimes it can shake itself loose and achieve boot.

[Joseph Hewitt]

The Samsung man came round this morning (yes, they'll make a housecall for a laptop. Woo!), identified the problem as the hard drive, and took the computer away to have it repaired. I should get it back on Monday. As I've said before, the service here in Korea is great.

[Burzmali]

Any luck?

[Joseph Hewitt]

The computer is back, and mostly up and running, but there's a problem with the ATI driver... the proprietary driver is needed to play GH2 in 3D mode, but it causes flickering unless acpi=off is added at boot. Unfortunately, adding acpi=off means that the USB ports stop working.

On the plus side, and I know there are some people who are going to be happy about this, I've added a fully operational 2D isometric interface to cutemap.pp. The graphics for it have mostly been taken from GH1 or screen-captured from 3D mode. What I should do is integrate the 2D and 3D renderers so that you can change the display from the configuration file.



In other news, it's been an extremely busy and stressful end-of-term.

[Burzmali]

Still on an older version of Ubuntu?  Try enabling backports as a software source, you probably need the updated driver.

[Joseph Hewitt]

Sadly, it doesn't seem to be that easy. My graphics card is an ATI Radeon Xpress 200M; the Intrepid driver is the latest driver which supports this card.

[Burzmali]

You can try what his guy did, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7362450#post7362450 , it seemed to work on jaunty.

[Joseph Hewitt]

I think I'll stick with what I have, for the time being. The 3D is the only thing not working, and making the isometric interface reminded me of how much I hate OpenGL. Maybe sometime later I'll try a different distro and see if I can mix/match some components that work on this laptop.