Strawberryland Forum

I have finished restoring the 2009 White Macbook, aka Bluebell. I have updated the thread in the Computer subforum.

Okay. Dell's support website kinda sucks.

I was on my iMac and decided to start downloading Rusty's drivers. You can access information specific to your Dell, but if you are on an OS other than Windows, it won't let you download drivers. I disabled the adblocker to make sure it wasn't a fluke, but still got an error that basically says "Please use Windows to download drivers". No other PC support site I've used has imposed such a ridiculous restriction.

And when you download those drivers, you can just get one at a time. I prefer to download multiple files at once if say I'm getting a 200mb+ audio driver and one or two other drivers that aren't that large. But the Dell download server won't connect to a second file if you are downloading another driver from the same server, giving a timeout error until the other file finishes downloading.

No wonder people hate Dell so much.

(08-03-2020, 06:19 AM)cpd2009 Wrote: [ -> ]Okay. Dell's support website kinda sucks.

I was on my iMac and decided to start downloading Rusty's drivers. You can access information specific to your Dell, but if you are on an OS other than Windows, it won't let you download drivers. I disabled the adblocker to make sure it wasn't a fluke, but still got an error that basically says "Please use Windows to download drivers". No other PC support site I've used has imposed such a ridiculous restriction.

And when you download those drivers, you can just get one at a time. I prefer to download multiple files at once if say I'm getting a 200mb+ audio driver and one or two other drivers that aren't that large. But the Dell download server won't connect to a second file if you are downloading another driver from the same server, giving a timeout error until the other file finishes downloading.

No wonder people hate Dell so much.

On top of underhanded business practices like using non-standard pinouts on their ATX power supplies to enforce vendor lock-in (though of course there are adapters to circumvent this) amongst other things. Michael Dell's Jewish heritage may have also made him an easy scapegoat unfortunately.

Rusty is now running vanilla Windows 10. Activation was automatic, using the OEM key I presume.

Let's see if those odd issues either go away or keep happening.

I also ordered another one of those HDMI capture devices since they are so inexpensive. I won't have to have both the Macbook and the Dell sharing the one device, and I can use one to record TV shows while the other is used for VHS conversions.

(08-04-2020, 08:54 AM)cpd2009 Wrote: [ -> ]Rusty is now running vanilla Windows 10. Activation was automatic, using the OEM key I presume.

Let's see if those odd issues either go away or keep happening.

I also ordered another one of those HDMI capture devices since they are so inexpensive. I won't have to have both the Macbook and the Dell sharing the one device, and I can use one to record TV shows while the other is used for VHS conversions.

I hope that'll get rid of those issues plaguing your rig.

Phase 2. Finding a new Linux distro that will be friendly to the RX 580.

I tried OpenSUSE again, but unlike Ubuntu, the kernel has issues with the HDMI device. I checked dmesg, and sometimes it loads the proper kernel driver and other times not. And when the driver is active, the video device isn't detected by any capture application. The audio capture shows up, oddly enough.

Next, I'll try Debian. If that doesn't work, then I'll try my old distro of choice, PCLinuxOS. That distro rarely has given me problems in the past, but the downside is that their software repo is a bit lacking in game selection.

Not sure how them spammers get past the cracks, but they might have caught wind of the Q&A stuff I added and was able to scrape answers to something a non-SSC fan wouldn't be aware of.

(08-05-2020, 11:50 AM)huckleberrypie Wrote: [ -> ]Not sure how them spammers get past the cracks, but they might have caught wind of the Q&A stuff I added and was able to scrape answers to something a non-SSC fan wouldn't be aware of.

Spammers were here? I never noticed any myself, but I mostly just post here in this specific thread. Good thing you got rid of them.

And Debian is a strikeout. Rusty's Wifi chip requires non-free firmware blobs along with my cheapo USB Wifi dongle. I can't get the blobs without an active internet connection and I'm too lazy to hunt down the individual blobs. I don't have an ethernet cable long enough to run from the bedroom router.

Trying another distro instead, but rather than PCLinuxOS, I went for Mageia again. It's getting late so I won't be able to install it tonight but it is downloading right now.

(08-05-2020, 12:15 PM)cpd2009 Wrote: [ -> ]

(08-05-2020, 11:50 AM)huckleberrypie Wrote: [ -> ]Not sure how them spammers get past the cracks, but they might have caught wind of the Q&A stuff I added and was able to scrape answers to something a non-SSC fan wouldn't be aware of.

Spammers were here? I never noticed any myself, but I mostly just post here in this specific thread. Good thing you got rid of them.

And Debian is a strikeout. Rusty's Wifi chip requires non-free firmware blobs along with my cheapo USB Wifi dongle. I can't get the blobs without an active internet connection and I'm too lazy to hunt down the individual blobs. I don't have an ethernet cable long enough to run from the bedroom router.

Trying another distro instead, but rather than PCLinuxOS, I went for Mageia again. It's getting late so I won't be able to install it tonight but it is downloading right now.

It does happen on occasion, usually posting a reply on one of the firmware flashing threads with links to some shady website. I might as well change the questions if this shit still goes through.

Mageia was a strikeout as well. The desktop worked fine, but once I tried to use OBS, I got the dreaded screen corruption and hard freeze. After searching for my issue a bit more, it appears that the RX 580 card tends to have some issues with newer kernels.

Alas, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It's supported until 2023, has a slightly older kernel, and so far, hasn't crashed or had graphics problems. The HDMI capture card is detected and I'm making a test recording now. I'll see if the audio sync issues still occur.