USB and Linux, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Labor for Refugees

[tcpip]

This weekend, I have discovered the hell that is trying to get USB devices to talk to Linux. This is not a pleasant experience. Any insights greatly appreciated. I'm using Mandrake 10.1 if that helps.

Remembering Hirsohima from those who
experienced it. Melbourne Unitarian Church had Ian Maddocks from the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, providing a careful and insightful discussion on the subject. We all went to the Remembrance Rally in the city afterwards. I found the first speaker to be so obnoxious and sectarian that I left within five minutes.

RuneQuest IV is now up to version 3. Playtest on Sunday indicated that the radical changes to the parry and hit points system simply do not work. New player (Michael) is showing his design skills, but he does software engineering so he should.

Caught up with Greg T for the first time in a year last week. He's returned from a four week holiday in northern Europe which turned out to be six months. He has a long-term plan to get an graduate environmental engineering degree and engage in a process of reforestation of desert land. A noble pursuit. Other major social activity was great birthday drinks at the Sahara club for devilgirly, many people, lots of laughter, great food.

Oh, and I had another letter published in The Age. On land tax of course.

EDIT

How did I forget? Labor for Refugees quarterly meeting on Saturday. FEA elections have been deferred, national Tampa anniversary rally coming up. Announced my intention to resign as President. Been there long enough, about time someone else had a go.

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Bleh. The Japanese deserved it!
I heard it on the radio!
American lives were saved by bombing the heart of their evil empire!

You know, as opposed to, a warning shot.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

You know, as opposed to, a warning shot.

Like on one of the many unihabited islands near enough to Japan to make them say "goodness, that was a very big bang wan't it?"

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Well, that would be preferable.
Of course, being the idealist I am, I would have prefered they did not develop the bomb after all.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I would have prefered they did not develop the bomb after all.

Well, yes. That would have been the better option. But given the fact that they did develop it it's use would have been just as effective at scaring the Japanese into surrender rather than the killing of innocents...

[greylock.livejournal.com]

And then there's the entire argument that the Japanese might well have surrendered before long anyway.

[zey.livejournal.com]

Everything I've seen and read indicates the Japanese had offered a number of times to surrender with barely any conditions: the only main one being that the Emperor remain in power and not be pressed for war crimes, etc.

Given that the Emperor of the time was very anti-war and doing everything to convince the military to give up, I can't help thinking the Yanks deliberately refused a pretty fair surrender offer just so they could "blow up some Nips" with their expensive new toy.

[zey.livejournal.com]

Oh. And big booms impress those heathen anti-capitalist Russkies ;-).

[greylock.livejournal.com]

If you get time, go to www.abc.net.au/rn and download last night's Australia Talks Back (the kids call it "the podcast").

Tommy Uren was brilliant.
He said something like "When the war ended I wanted to personally go out and slaughter every stinking Jap, then I started realising what had happened to them."

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Tom Uren is brilliant. I've been slowly going through his biography for some time now ("Straight Left"). He and Jim Cairns had a long alliance, only really upset when Jim decided to involve himself more with "personal development" to the exclusion of "social change".

Another great Australian who would have been a magnificent PM if it wasn't for his politics :/

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

*nods* I have read (someplace, somewhere) that there was even a manic cadre of Japanese officers that attempted to launch a coup against the Emperor when he announced surrender.

I was aware of this...

[octobrianaoz.livejournal.com]

...when I went to the Psychic Fair on that date. I was in the reeaders' pool you see, so I had to be there. Not a good day overall, but you have to take the hard with the easy.

It always struck me that with all the hoo-hah about "weapons of mass destruction", that the USA is teh only nation ever to have used them.

Re: I was aware of this...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It always struck me that with all the hoo-hah about "weapons of mass destruction", that the USA is teh only nation ever to have used them.

*nods* The also hold the overwhelming number of WMDs and spend almost as much as the rest of the world combined in military machinery.

It's sad and tragic behaviour from a nation founded on noble principles.

Re: I was aware of this...

[(Anonymous)]

Not quite, octobrianoz. Nuclear weapons, yes. But if you include chemical and biological weapons as "WMD" (as we did when scraping the tarry residue from the bottom of the diplomatic barrel to find a vaguely plausible casus belli against Iraq), then amongst "users of WMD" we have to include Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Russia (WWI), Germany (WWII), Japan (China War), and Iran & Iraq (Iran-Iraq War, then called "Gulf War").

If you expand the "chemical warfare" definitions to include agents which act primarily against vegetations, and secondarily against humans, and to include the use of conventional weapons in a manner designed to cause mass destruction (eg, blowing up dams to flood cities), then the list becomes rather larger...

Of course the weapon most destructive of human life since WWII has been the humble rifle, commonly the AK-47...

Cheers,
Kyle Schuant
(sorry, I have no LJ or similar)

Re: I was aware of this...

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

*nods*

WMD has always been a bit of a dubious classification. I suppose by definition it is any weapon that can destroy more than one mass with a single act... Which of course, as you pointed out, would include any assault rifle..

Re: I was aware of this...

[octobrianaoz.livejournal.com]

See the Leunig Cartoon I posted to this (in the same thread).

Re: I was aware of this...

[octobrianaoz.livejournal.com]

[decklin.livejournal.com]

There are Linux distributions where this is still a problem? What device?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Hello Decklin ;-)

kernel is 2.6.8.1-12

lsmod gives:
ehci-hcd 27972 0
uhci-hcd 30448 0
usbcore 107396 4 ehci-hcd,uhci-hcd

It's a IBM mass storage device.

I'm getting a lot of timeout messages from dmesg
e.g.,
usb 4-6: new high speed USB device using address 2
irq 21: nobody cared!
...
Disabling IRQ #21
usb 4-6: control timeout on ep0out
ehci_hcd 0000:00:10.3: Unlink after no-IRQ? Different ACPI or APIC settings may help.
usb 4-6: control timeout on ep0out
usb 4-6: control timeout on ep0out
usb 4-6: device not accepting address 7, error -110
usb 4-6: new high speed USB device using address 8
usb 4-6: control timeout on ep0out
usb 4-6: control timeout on ep0out
usb 4-6: device not accepting address 8, error -110

[decklin.livejournal.com]

I actually have no idea (sorry). Have you tried booting with the usb-handoff option?

[jagaroth.livejournal.com]

I got curious and I did a google search.
The first page I hit revealed that there is a bug with some revisions of the 2.6 kernel that is known to cause the timeout error.
You may just need to update the kernel.
Had you come across this link already?

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=128602

There's more links to other threads and other possible work arounds.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that seems to be the consensus.. that 2.6 is foobar for USB :/

I think I may take this opportunity to give Mandriva the flick and go back to RH.

[jagaroth.livejournal.com]

It seems that Kernel 2.6.8 in particular had a few too many issues in general.
Kernel 2.6.9-1 seems to work well for me with all the USB devices I've thrown at it. But then I don't think I have tried an IBM brand mass storage device. It looks like many find using the latest and greatest Kernel solved their issue.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Just tried it with my new laptop (*sigh*, 'tis so beautiful) with Fedora 4 RH, 2.6.11 and it works beautifully.... it's all 2.6.8's fault..

[devilgirly.livejournal.com]

Weee spanx so much for helping me celebrate my birthday! :)

Hope you enjoyed it despite the fact that by some quirk none of the other people you actually know ended up coming to Sahara - pity you guys couldn't make it to KKBB, but sounds like your weekend was quite busy enough! :)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was a busy weekend (like always). All my spare time however was spent on the USB problem...

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

My experience with Linux is that you just keep finding giant potholes in the user experience like that.

Another letter on land tax - congratulations, you are well on your way to letter column crank status :-)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Re: Linux

Yes. Fortunately it seems just be that particular version of the kernel. Previous versions work fine. However, as it is said, it still isn't quite up to scratch as a fully functional desktop for the end user.

Damn fine as a server technology tho'.

Re: Land Tax

The fortunate thing is that Tim Colebatch, the economics editor for The Age, is also a proponent of land tax. So not all is lost...