Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Learning Fedora 15

We've been doing a lot of research and tweaking, with SPARCL10.  For instance, on older versions of Fedora Linux, the X video drivers were more generic, so they worked fine with our old MX4000 video cards.  On version 15, we have the Nouveau driver.  It is an open-source effort to write drivers for Nvidia video cards.  For this-generation cards, it works great.  On old cards, it crashes.  Turns out the once-a-day crash due to Nouveau has been known since Fedora 13.  There are several workarounds, like turning off Nouveau, or installing the Nvidia closed-source driver, but the simplest one was to put an Nvidia 6200-based card in SPARCL10.  It's been running for more than 48 hours, now.
Today, we fired up SPOCS 2.0 on SPARCL10 for the first time.  With just a couple of tweaks, it came up, and Festival's female voice informed us that SPOCS had completed startup checks, and was running.  Soon we will test SPOCS with actual devices, and then it will be time for SPOCS 2.0 to go on the air.