EPIA - mini itx - chipset - Linux

Recently I've found this rather complete looking HOWTO which could be helpful http://www3.sympatico.ca/howlettfamily/epia/epia_howto/t1.html

It has came to my attention that there's a lack of information on the Internet about getting the best from your VIA EPIA chipset. The following links will give you an idea of what this page is refering to:

Are you having the following problems with your Eden Chipset:

First things up. I had problems with the mouse cursor in X not being lined up right. I would click about an inch to the left of where the mouse cursor was. I fixed that with adding this to my XF86Config-4 X config file:

Section "Device"
Option "SWCursor"
EndSection

Next I had problems getting my webcam to work. When I ran the webcam software the processes would tend to go into an iowait state. This would mean I would get a load average of 2, whilst the CPU was idling. The two processes couldn't be killed even with a signal 9. Only a reboot would sort the system out. I also never got my usb printer to work, although on another system there was no problems. A hp640c. Richard Skeen helped solve this problem. It's down to the amount of bandwidth of the pci bus. Being that both usb and video share the bus. The X server hogs the bandwidth and as the webcam doesn't have enough of a buffer to hold data thus times out and gives up. Then the system processes are waiting for data that never gets sent. Also as the sound card is on the pci bus, when say moving windows around in X, the sound output stops. Again for the same reason. Anyway here is the solution:

Section "Device"
Option "PciRetry" "true"
EndSection

Now those two example may be a little confusing, so I'll add my complete section from XF86Config-4. Although if you have a different Eden chipset or revision to mine it may not work.

Section "Device"
Identifier "Generic Video Card"
Driver "trident"
Option "SWCursor"
Option "DPMS"
Option "PciRetry" "true"
EndSection

If you can think of anything that belongs on this page then please e-mail me. My address is the link at the bottom.


Dan Walrond