Hi Devs and community,

I'm reporting several bugs i saw.

1) I encountered an invisible tycorp when botting in serco space. Graig daOne also saw the same invisible tycorp. First that bot was after me, i could see his lasers, i jumped out of the system and then back in. that bot started to go after graig who was botting with me and i got rid of the invisible tycorp. when graig went for repairs the bot returned to attack me. when we both jumped out and i returned to the same sector i couldnt find the bot again.

2) Guild chat seems broken. I belong to IDF guild and i have problems talking to Bojan Itani. He can't see his own text when he types into guild chat. I cant see his text but another member was able to see his chat.

3) Linux weird sound. regarding that known linux problematic sound (cracky sound) i think that must be related to irq assigned to sound card and settings of hard drive. I read in a forum that higher IRQs are faster and should be assigned to sound card. Also read that hard drive should have dma use enabled, 32 bit transfers enabled, readahead enabled and multiple sector enabled.

Although i have this optimizations made i couldnt get rid of the sound problem. I also tried the latest development alsa rpm packages but with no success.

Also tried to play with the accoustic setting of my hard drive but my particular laptop hardrive doesnt seem to support it.

What I have is a cracky sound that gets worse when there is HD activity.

Moriel Gilman

updating information:

1) relative to bug 1 i saw other posts reporting the same thing. invisible bots.

2) bug 2 still happens. only thing that is different is that i now can see Bojan Itani chat. All other members of guild can see his chat too. Only him can't see his own chat or the other members chat.

3) i seemed to improve the quality of sound so almost surely that the sound problem in linux is related to irq assigned to sound card, latency settings of compiled kernel and tuning of hard drive.

I leave here some tips on how to improve your hard drive. (I'm using fedora core 3)

vi /etc/sysconfig/harddisks

EIDE_32BIT=1
USE_DMA=1
MULTIPLE_IO=16

Set the options as referred above. they are already there so just uncoment them out.

EIDE_32BIT=1 is faster than setting this option to 3 which does an additional sync. 3 is a safer bet but 1 is a faster one.

This improved my sound quality by reducing disk IO.

There's an extra setting that some several hardisks support but unfortunately that's not the case of my laptop.

The accoustic setting of hard drives, in recent hard drives we can set this value. I'll resume a description but if you want full details just google for it:

0=off
128=slower but quiet
254=faster but louder

these settings control the movement of the heads of the disk, setting for example to 128 would tell the hard drive to move its heads slower but reducing the noise that the harddrive could sent to the electromagnetic sensitive parts on the computer, 254 makes the hardrive perform faster but producing more noise that way.

Other hard drives might have extra values for this.

you can set this by issue the hdparm command,
eg: /usr/bin/hdparm -M 254 /dev/hda3 (this is just an example and the device for the hard drive might be different for you)

If you want to transform your redhat or fedora into an audio workstation you can try follow this guys info:
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

They even provide pre-compiled kernels for low latency audio performance.

Finally, if you know how to play with irq assignment and are willing to do so you must first learn about IRQ priority for single processor non-APIC machines. You can do it by reading the following forum:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1079993&forum_id=7073

After reading, try setting your audio card to a higher priority IRQ and see if you get better audio. This also works for any OS on a PC machine.

Hope this info helps you.
Moriel Gilman
Council Member of the Itani Defense Force - Channer Squadron

Have you tried hdparm -u1 /dev/bla? Might help with your audioproblems.

Somehow I get the feeling this will be moved to the Linux forum even though only 1 of the 3 bugs are Linux related.

For the record, I have never had problems with my sound in Linux with either a SB Audigy or my old Cmedia 8738. You didn't say what sound card you have, or whether you tried using OSS drivers instead of alsa, or even a different Linux distro. Good info to know.

Ya, never had sound issues under my lame CMI8738 or my even lamer VIA Ac97, but the first thing i do to a linux system (after installing a base) is tune my hard drives, the default is just supposed to work...

Hi ppl. thx for replying.

I've seen posts here in vendetta of other people complaining about the same problem.

Devs said that theire sound system is very bad and they will improve it when they have the time.

I read all that existed about hdparm and tweaked my HD to its fullest. Unfortunately sometimes the sound is choppy, mainly when i turbo.

Other times seems to be better.

Im using a laptop with AC97.

I can't change distro and not willing to. going to OSS from Alsa doesn't seem a smart move since alsa is far more advanced. The thing is i wanna get this solved but i don't wanna go back in tech.

Perhaps the devs have a word to say.

But thx for your replies ppl.

(I read in this forum that going to OSS solves the problem but I don't wanna do it)

PS: Devs, plz fix sound after releasing frig :)