4 ms·

This reminds me of a sound card I bought way back when (22 years ago or so); it was a wavetable-supporting, Soundblaster Pro-compatible card that I got on sale

This reminds me of a sound card I bought way back when (22 years ago or so); it was a wavetable-supporting, Soundblaster Pro-compatible card that I got on sale for 50% off without making any effort at all to look it up online or even check the kernel for Linux support. It worked and sounded great in Windows; it also worked and sounded great in Linux, with one exception: the card supported ISA PNP, which was great, but the kernel module for the sound card wouldn't load unless I did `cat /proc/isapnp` first. I had no idea why, and it took a few reboots and trial-and-error to narrow it down to this janky workaround, but it worked so I just configured modprobe to run `cat /proc/isapnp > /dev/null` before trying to load the module and I never had to worry about it again. Technology sure is weird sometimes.

theevilsharpie 4y ago
Many years ago, I had an Athlon 64 workstation paired with some type of 3Ware SATA RAID controller (a 9650SE, I think). Every other boot, the BIOS would fail to initialize the controller, leaving the computer stuck at a "non-bootable device" error until I could manually reboot it. My solution? A perpetually plugged-in USB flash drive with a small boot loader that would simply reboot the machine again, set to a lower boot priority than the SATA RAID controller. It was pretty stupid, but if it's stupid and it works...
- bombcar 4y ago
  I had something similar and just used the USB to hold ... LILO at the time? Can't recall.
goosedragons 4y ago
My ThinkPad has something similar with the microSD card slot. You have to type "lspci" for it to notice there's an SD card inserted. I don't use the slot much so it's not a big deal but it's literally the only thing that doesn't play nice with Linux.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  If there's a udev event generated when you insert the SD card, you could write a udev rule to exec `lspci` when it happens.
cwillu 4y ago
I keep a hacks file in my home directory so that when a random thing breaks after an upgrade or a new system, I can quickly review the fixes that I needed three years ago but that upstream couldn't be bothered to fix. Open-source is the best worst-thing ever.

theevilsharpie 4y ago

Many years ago, I had an Athlon 64 workstation paired with some type of 3Ware SATA RAID controller (a 9650SE, I think). Every other boot, the BIOS would fail to initialize the controller, leaving the computer stuck at a "non-bootable device" error until I could manually reboot it. My solution? A perpetually plugged-in USB flash drive with a small boot loader that would simply reboot the machine again, set to a lower boot priority than the SATA RAID controller. It was pretty stupid, but if it's stupid and it works...

bombcar 4y ago
I had something similar and just used the USB to hold ... LILO at the time? Can't recall.

goosedragons 4y ago

My ThinkPad has something similar with the microSD card slot. You have to type "lspci" for it to notice there's an SD card inserted. I don't use the slot much so it's not a big deal but it's literally the only thing that doesn't play nice with Linux.

Arnavion 4y ago
If there's a udev event generated when you insert the SD card, you could write a udev rule to exec `lspci` when it happens.

cwillu 4y ago

I keep a hacks file in my home directory so that when a random thing breaks after an upgrade or a new system, I can quickly review the fixes that I needed three years ago but that upstream couldn't be bothered to fix. Open-source is the best worst-thing ever.