Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Douwe01nl]

@RayCtech
in previous setups i had good results capping the powerlines on the board, so i plan to do Alix in (hopefully near) future. I used to use Siemens Sikorel caps combined with small mkp's.
Two questions:
- are oscons better than sikorels for use on Alix?
- what is the reason for the high voltage (in stead of 6v or 16v)?
Thanks!

[wlowes]

Douwe01
CAPSI have just added caps to the Alix board. Things are sounding very nice.

I use a lot of OSCON SEPC caps to good advantage in my DAC. On power supplies I find nothing compares to BlackGates. Organic polymers very close. Both need 100+ hours to really strut their stuff. I had a few BGs in the cap drawer. I added little miniture BG PK 50v .22u as a bypass on the pins of the big 220u electrolytes. Also on right on the pins of the power input. I then put a BG F 100u 50v also on the input pins. No room in the enclosure so I attached it on the upper side near the memory and ran twisted pair over to the input pins.

I must say the sound is quite outstanding.

I have a bunch of oscon surface mount 16v 220u. I might look around on the board for spots that could benefit in the future. Right now can't stop listening.

nrpacks
I am running with nrpacks=20. I too think it adds clarity and space around instruments. There is a fair discussion on my tunning thread on AA. The net is I added the line
options snd-usb-audio nrpacks=20
to the end of the file alsa-base.conf
It is found in /etc/modprobe.d
I believe that this sets the option for the driver at the time it is loaded. Otherwise (as you have discovered) you have to disconnect the USB, reboot and issue the modprobe command to load the driver with nrpacks=20. Then when you connect the usb, the driver is already there with the option set.

Bios
I picked up the USB->serial converter, figured out how to get it going and then discovered as you point out that tinybios does not control much of anything. I followed the recommendations of another site and set serial speed to 115000, and enabled UDMA. I have no idea if this helps anything.

Very cool that you did a videochipectomy. I think the fact that it helped tends to suggest that the optimal boards for SQ are those that have no extra hardware. My 3d2 is pretty good. the 1d? may be even better in that it has connectors on one end and leds on the other, and no extra chips. You likely have the best of all now in that you have Award bios and thanks to your hot air gun, no video chip. I also read that on boards like mine that have no battery you can simply solder one in where indicated in the mask. It would be nice if it remembered the date and time between boots if not connected to the net to find an ntp server.

Thanks for sharing your research.

[wlowes]

[wlowes]

[quote="ldolse@Douwe01nl, I've been watching the discussion between wlowes & phofman regarding this USB setting over on Audioasylum, and I'm not positive that wlowes entered the command in a way that would do anything. Based on what I've read thus far, in order for it to work you would need to kill mpd (because it has the sound device open), unload the existing alsa USB driver, reload it with the nrpacks setting, then re-start mpd. These should be the lines to paste into the CLI:

[ldolse]

[RayCtech]

[ldolse]

It does sound i915/bios related then - you might go into the Bios and see if there are any settings where you can dumb down/simplify the system's behavior and see if that helps. I'll do some more research on my side, but odds are I won't be able to get to the bottom of this one for the next release - X isn't particularly critical for mpdPup, and it's probably going to require some changes to the foundation of the system, which I wasn't planning to mess with on the next release.

Regarding mpd not starting, I do see that as more critical and want to resolve it before I get the next version out. After re-reading the startup script I see I'm executing mpd by calling it from nice, you could try deleting 'nice -15' to see if that helps any on your system. In the meantime I've been meaning to rewrite the startup script to use start-stop-daemon, use nice a bit differently, etc, I'll pm you with a re-written version of the script, probably tomorrow.

[RayCtech]

[wlowes]

RayCtec
I'm sure you've seen in this thread, we're having very good success with mpdpup on the ALIX 3D2. $90 direct from PC Engines. Another $25 for case and CF card. Any old walwort PS from 7-18V and you are in business. For bit perfect playback only however. No high quality resampling possible. Bit of a change in direction. You could free up the current rig for other duties. Or use it as your music NAS.

[RayCtech]

[ldolse]

@ RayCtech, Awesome, glad removing nice fixed the problem - I'll still run the edited script by you later, since there seems to be something special about your system - I'm starting to wonder if the problems are unique to your board, but it might still be worth the effort.

Regarding the static IP and tunes.local, it should have worked - I've always use static IPs at home and have never seen this issue - I actually just tested it on a VM since I'm away from home and it worked fine. I'm starting to think your motherboard has a real hatred of Linux (nice, avahi, and X all not working properly), not really sure what's going on.

As to board recommendations, I agree with wlowes - mpdPup 'should' run with just about any board, but there are a high percentage of happy Alix users on this thread, and the Alix is a long life board targeted at embedded applications. If you still want to have VGA then use the Alix1d or 3d3. My own personal board is the Intel D945GSEJT, but it's a bit harder to come by these days as it's no longer in production - still some stock here and there. I would say generally speaking that Atom should still be a good choice, I prefer the processor in general vs the Geode on the Alix. Definitely worth some due diligence with Google on the Linux stability - there do seem to be a variety of issues with the DN2800MT, some of which match your own experiences on this thread (Logic Supply had some general Linux warnings relating to the graphics chipset). The Fitpc box looks good on the surface, and they seem be back Linux in general, so that's all good.

Regarding performance, I think you're over-estimating the CPU requirements - even though you have a lot of high res content you needn't worry about CPU, it really only comes into play if you wanted to do resampling/upsampling, and with the bit rates you're talking about for source material that's definitely not neccessary.

[RayCtech]

[ldolse]

So to confirm, are you saying all the following are still true on the Gigabyte board:

• Won't boot from USB Flash
  
• Needed to delete nice -15 from the mpd startup script
  
• tunes.local won't work with a static IP

Regarding tunes.local, the hostname tunes comes from /etc/hostname

.local comes from successfully starting avahi - check to see if it's still running on your system after you configure the static IP.

[RayCtech]

[wlowes]

Slightly off topic, but for the ALIX crowd.. get out your soldering iron. Replaced the stock 220u electrolytics with Nichocon 270u 16v organic polymers.