Nokia

Sorry--I'm not a big PC hardware expert, I'm afraid. When I need a new box I call up Aleksandr at Alvio and give him my credit card number. Two machines for me and one for a client so far, no worries.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

LOL! I can't imagine doing that. You learn so much more by putting a machine together yourself. Learning to solve the problems that occur makes you independant of outside consultants who many not be available on a Saturday night at midnight when you are pursuing the latest fantastic idea.

Anyway, I solved my problem. Moving off Ubuntu was the solution. I went to Linux Mint and was able to reconstuct the same pulldown menus that Ubuntu had. This means I now can stay current with all the updates and changes that occur with the hardware and software. And it's all free!

Thanks to all those who work hard to make this possible.

JK

Well, different strokes and all that. I'm not very interested in PCs per se, so I invest in all the power I need, up front, and then press on to the (to me) interesting stuff--electro-optics and advanced analogue, mostly. My office machine is about 150 Gflops.

I installed CentOS 6 on that machine, and it took me a completely unproductive half day to figure out how to get it to boot from the Adaptec RAID 5 array controller. Getting the sound card working was only about half an hour's worth of pain, and it was a year later anyway.

Over the years I've spent a fair amount of time debugging driver incompatibilities and so forth in four or five OSes. Unlike the rest of what I do, that puts me on the learning curve of Sisyphus. That isn't very productive even for a wage slave, and for a consultant, it's idiotic.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Golly, what kind of cpu gives 150 Gflops?

I agree. Your time is much better spent creating new stuff. My case is a bit different. I am have legacy software requirements to maintain. If I went to a PC shop and told them what I need, they would have no clue what I was talking about.

Slapping a new motherboard in a case along with a power supply is trivial. The problem is keeping compatible software. This is now a serious problem with the Microsoft/Intel EUFI boot that is in most of the new motherboards. It can really screw you if you need to maintain legacy code.

Until I have time to sit down and learn the Win32 API, I am stuck with code I started writing in the 1980's. This means running DOS for the compiler, which means XP or Win7 since Win8 won't run DOS. I also rely on an excellent program from Win98 for security, but it won't run on Win7. This leaves XP as the only solution.

It is impossible to make backups of the entire XP system, so I run in VirtualBox. This means using VBox version 3.2 to create new vdi's, and operating in version 4.0 to run the vdi. Later versions do funny things with LTspice.

This means I am stuck with Ubuntu 10.04, which is no longer supported. It also means finding a motherboard that will boot in non-EUFI mode, which turns out to be quite difficult. I already wasted $140 on an Asus board which claims to be non-EUFI compliant, but it won't boot Ubuntu 10.04 so it is now scrap.

The Asrock Z77 will boot Ubuntu 10.04, but it will not install 10.04 on a new disk drive. It won't boot. This means I have to figure out how to clone my 10.04 installation so it will run on the Asrock.

It also means I have to get multiple Asrock motherboards to install in all my computers, plus some spares before they obsolete it and it is no longer available. I am also planning on running RAID5 in software for reliability, but I have to solve the boot problems and figure how to clone an existing Ubuntu installation over to the RAID array.

So in this case, the hardware part is trivial. The problem is meeting all the software requirements, which an outside shop simply could not do.

I was a bit premature with the comments on Linux Mint. It has so many bugs and really silly modifications to the existing Ubuntu programs that make it harder to use. I quickly gave up and went back to 10.04.

So if you need to stay on XP, your work is cut out for you.

Thanks,

JK

FWIW, I've had great success using Acronis True Image to backup and restore the OS partitions on XP machines. Used it to "move" the whole system to a larger drive and, later, to put it all onto a new drive when that one failed. What's worked for me is to boot from the Acronis-created boot CD (which is some flavor of Linux) to create the system backups, so that the XP OS isn't "alive" while it is being backed up, and to restore the image to the new disk.

Dual 8-core Magny Cours Opterons. The specs are on my equipment page,

I have a bunch of old S/W that I'm pretty attached to as well, particularly old Mathcads, WordPerfect 5.1+ for DOS, and Freelance 4.0 for DOS. I use Qemu/KVM virtual machines running XP and Win 7 to look after that. As long as the facility is still there, I'm pretty much future-proof. (The horror that is Win 8 got me motivated to make sure that there'll be classical Win32 available as long as I'm likely to need it.)

I'll probably put VirtualBox on my i7 system so that I can run OS/2, which is the best DOS platform ever.

I'm a fan. Microsoft C 6.0ax lives!

LTspice runs very well in Wine on my CentOS 6.4 box. It also runs fine in all my VMs.

Blech.

I haven't found it that hard, but maybe I'm just lucky.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

NVIDIA Tesla K20 is 800 times faster if their website is correct only 3 and a half grand, but probaly more than 4 after you upgrade the power supply.

Cuda and Co. have impressive peak speeds, but good luck running Windows on one. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

How do you stop the DOS code from taking 100% of the cpu due to the keyboard reader?

I use Tame 4.5 which seems to work very well most of the time. But I'd be interested to find if something better was available. Here's their url:

I paid for the license but the author never responded to my emails about problems with his code.

Yes, LTspice works great in Wine. Unfortunately, Wine will not run the DOS code that I depend on so much.

However, I am very interested in your VMs and will comment below.

Phil, I want to thank you very much for responding to this thread. You have helped me a great deal.

First problem: the Asrock motherboard is very buggy. For reference here are some of the problems:

Defective AsRock Motherboard ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. It often has random system crashes to a black screen. This causes loss of all the work I have done to that point.

1. It often repeats last key that was pressed all by itself. This is a disaster when you are editing files or switching from one window to the next to purchase items online. I can often tell when it is going to start doing it. If I press a key and nothing happens, then I press it again, it will start giving multiple keypresses even though the key is no longer being pressed. My keyboard cannot do this. There is nothing wrong with the keyboard. It works fine on other computers. This is a system problem with the Asrock.

2. The Asrock will boot Ubuntu 10.04 if it was installed by another pre-UEFI computer, but it will not boot if it installed the software on a hard disk.

1. Filesystem errors - Windows boots to safe mode and does a chkdsk by itself. It goes too fast to see what files are corrupted and there is no log so I don't know which files I am losing.

2. It often claims a file is in use when it is not being used anywhere. This makes it impossible to update or move it.

1. For some unknown reason, the system does not like my editor. It terminates the process whenever it can so I have to reload the editor and start over.

2. My files are getting corrupted due to cross-linked clusters when the system crashes. I have seen this often on Win98 with a FAT32 filesystem but never on a NTFS file system. It is a catastrophe.

1. The system is unusable due to file corruption. I don't dare backup anything since I don't know which files ones are corrupted.

The motherboards are going back to Newegg for a full refund, including shipping.

I looked at your Equipment page (very impressive!) and see you are using a Supermicro H8DGI motherboard. I downloaded the manual and found it uses the plain ascii AMI BIOS, and not the UEFI GUI bios that is so horrible to use and causes so many problems.

I searched Supermicro for a LGA1155-compatible motherboard and found the C7H61 is about the only one that is listed in most online shopping sites such as NCIX. The manual shows the same AMI BIOS is used on this motherboard also.

This is fantastic. It is the first time I have seen a non-UEFI LGA1155 motherboard with the plain ascii AMI bios that is so easy to work with.

It uses the H61 chipset, which is the bottom rank of all that Intel makes. However I found a review that shows it is as fast as the H67, so it is fine for my needs.

Unfortunately, it is the most expensive motherboard I have considered. At $217.58 including shipping and taxes it is about double the cost of the other boards I was considering. Also, nobody stocks it. Delivery takes 1 to 2 weeks, and no returns are allowed.

However, if it bypasses the silly Microsoft/Intel UEFI problems, it is worth its weight in gold to me.

For VMs, I looked at QEMU very early in the process. I could not get it to work, and of all the other choices, VirtualBox was the only viable option.

However, it is becoming difficult to use. VBox 3.2 is the last version that allows you to install XP and add a printer. Later versions refuse to allow a printer. I have wasted much time and effort finding this out.

However, VBox 3.2 loads too slow, so the next version is 4.2. This version will not work with later versions of Ubuntu due to library incompatibility. So you are boxed in on Ubuntu 10.04 with all the problems finding a motherboard that will install it.

But I think you have solved the problem. You have shown that QEMU will work on the Supermicro bios, and that you have no problems running XP and Win7.

This is fantastic news. It gives me hope I can finally break free of the UEFI bios loop with all the wasted money, time and effort.

I thank you very much for all your help, and anxiously await delivery of the Supermicro so I can start doing real work again!

Many Thanks,

JK

Sorry, make that 4.04. 4.2 does funny things with LTspice and generates tons of log files in the VirtualBox folder that I have to go in and delete.

JK

It occurs to me that the plain old AMI bios took decades to debug and get working correctly. And it was pretty simple.

The Microsoft/Intel UEFI bios is completely new and has an impossibly- complicated specification. I don't think anyone can understand it completely.

It is pretty clear to me that many of the problems I ran into on the Asrock could be related to the new bios. It is certain the programmers never checked for compatibility problems with Ubuntu 10.04 running VirtualBox 4.04 and XP. The management states clearly they do not support Linux.

These problems never occurred with the plain ascii bios in my old Asus MV-AM motherboards. These came out before the move to UEFI, which of course was triggered by Microsoft. I'll bet they knew what kind of problems this would give for Linux.

I am so pleased to be able to get away from this idiotic EUFI bios. I think it has the potential to give years of headaches for anyone running oddball combinations of Linux and XP.

Thanks,

JK

Qemu/KVM doesn't run DOS or OS/2, iirc because they start out in real (8086) ode.

Bummer. I use ExpanDrive to let my VMs mount my ~ directory via SSH, and then print stuff manually from Linux. I think Netbios to a cups printer works as well.

Glad to be of use. Also glad to know that I dodged a bullet without even knowing about it!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I've yet to find a DOS application that won't run under Dosemu/Freedos.

Yes, but how do you get dos and LTspice to run at the same time?

And when you are running a dos app, how to you prevent it from hogging the cpu?

JK

I think you did. And you showed the rest of us how to do the same!

To repeat, how do you stop a DOS program from taking 100% of the cpu due to the keyboard reader?

Thanks,

JK

I don't remember the details, but I seem to remember you loop on read of the keyboard status until a character is detected, then read the character. If you don't want to loop waiting, you could hook the keyboard interrupt and decode the keystroke (and unstroke) yourself. If you didn't like the key, pass it thru.

It's been thirty years since I've done it, though, so my memory could be a little rusty.

linux...

that depends on the app.

DOS is 100% of its CPU, 100% of the time. Just how would you propose it to stop, at any point in general, let alone the keyboard reader?

I seem to recall, in Win98SE, certain operations would yield to Windows (dropping process CPU usage from >98% to 0%). These would have to be internal DOS operations (e.g., INT 21h "enter a string from the keyboard" call might've done it), since there's no possible way for Windows to snoop at any arbitrary program and see it wasting time. I recall using the PAUSE key frequently (which has activity in DOS, but Windows might even trap it before it gets there). DOS calls are nice, because even though the code exists in the virtual machine (you can open good old-fashioned DEBUG and inspect it), interrupts are handled at the discretion of the OS, not the VM.

If nothing else, you can set priorities in Task Manager, so the DOS program uses whatever cycles are leftover from more important applications. (Actually, I forget if 98 had this, but XP certainly does.) If another application is chewing >95% and you try playing in your DOS program, it may or may not be useful (Windows knows to give some concentration when a window is focused and the user is applying input, but, priority is priority).

With multicore computers so vastly common these days, the chances of DOS programs (when they even still run natively) taking more than 50% of CPU are pretty well gone. That doesn't solve the problem, but it does conveniently bypass it.

With the dominance of virtualized OSs (e.g., WinNT+) and native 64 bit operation these days, DOS programs can't even run natively. Emulation is then required. WinXP's NTVDM is passable but crunchy. DOSBox is good, at least for a lot of games (YMMV with general programs). An emulator has complete control over when code is run, so you can dial the effective clock frequency anywhere you like (last time I downloaded DOSBox, it came preset with an emulation rate equivalent to an XT, a handy baseline), freeing up the remaining power for other programs. Cycles are freed indiscriminately, so if you need it to run fast, you'll have to set the dial yourself, then remember to dial it back. (There might be shortcuts or scripts for setting these automatically, e.g., on window focus and etc.)

If none of these are options to you, I don't know what else to say; a more-than-capable computer of 5-10 years age can be pulled from the junk for free, or at worst, bought for under $100 (although it'll probably be single core at that age), and refusing such a bargain is only your fault.

Disclaimer: if your program is supporting aged hardware, you're probably SOL. For example, perhaps a parallel port printer can be migrated to a USB-parallel dongle, but a custom bit-banger isn't going to fly (at least not without a lot of work). And even if you have a compatible port, a virtual OS (or emulator) won't let DOS diddle with it. For these cases, it's better to keep, say, an old Pentium hanging around, where you can program the "bare metal" without worry of drivers and multitasking. If it's being that much of a pain, dump the whole thing and find a better replacement!

Tim

Dosemu looks after that. Forget about it, it won't happen.