EMC wont run on Intel D945GCLF2D (X_CreatePixmap)

I have spent untold hours on this. I am at my wits end getting EMC (even just the latency test!) to run. I bought an Intel D945GCLF2D motherboard (ATOM 330) because I heard from quite a few people who had luck running EMC2 with onboard video. In addition it is listed in the "hardware that works' list (wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?Latency-Test) In fact, I spoke with a couple people directly on IRC that have it running fine on this machine without problem. I have a 2GB RAM chip installed, have it plugged in to an old Sony VGA CRT, have a network connection on it, a USB keyboard and mouse, and that's it.

I thought the first board might have been faulty so I returned it and got another, it has the same behavior.

The problem happens if I boot it from an attached CD Drive, or a USB memory stick, or a 100G sata disk. I used the most recent LiveCD, burnt to disk from a Mac. I also burnt a CD from another Ubuntu 8.04 machine which does that same thing. From that second CD I installed onto the 100GB sata disk.

I have played with the bios settings (there are really only a couple settings that might matter) to no avail.
On my first motherboard I installed Ubuntu 8.04 separately and built the SMP kernel according to instructions found in the forums and still had the same problem.
I tried installing libgl1-mesa-swx11 and modifying /etc/X11/xorg.conf, still the same problem.

Here is the problem:
If I boot the machine Ubuntu comes up fine and everything seems to work. If I select Applications -> CNC -> Latency Test, the machine seems to hang for a couple minutes (can't do anything in the UI) and then returns without, apparently, having done anything. If I then open a terminal window and run "latency-test" at the command prompt, I get: "Realtime already running. Use 'halrun -U' to stop existing realtime sessions."

If, upon a fresh boot, I open a terminal window and run "latency-test" I get this:

tome@Gort:~$ latency-test
Waiting for component 'lat' to become ready........................................................................................................
X Error of failed requst: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 53 (X_CreatePixmap)
Serial number of failed request: 271
Current serial number in output stream: 588

Someone on the IRC suggested that since this is an X Windows error I should try a PCI video card instead of the on-board video. But I bought the darn thing to run on-board video, I don't want to plug in a stupid card I don't need! Any ideas what this error is and where I might go from here?

Thanks,
Tome

I have been having fits with the latest Ubuntu version (9.10), it seems they have been fixing X to the point of not working.

If you haven't tried it yet. Try installing the previous version (8.04?), but the plain Ubuntu Live CD without EMC2. I find I have to burn my CD's at a slower speed than the burner software selects, but that is probably just my system. For some systems, a DVD drive is needed for the installation even though the install disk is a CD. Almost all of the time I have to tweak /etc/X11/xorg.conf , mostly to change the video X11 driver to "vesa". The Ubuntu 9.10 doesn't have an xorg.conf so I'm the dark about that. Apparently, you can create your own xorg.conf but I haven't gotten one to work yet. Grub is totally different now too.

Once you get generic Ubuntu working well, you can install EMC2 with an install script:
www.linuxcnc.org/content/view/21/4/lang,en/
(See bottom half of this page.)

I hope something here might help.

I really miss the good old days when Linux would run on just about any computer. With the way Ubuntu is getting, I might as well go back to Windows.
--
Kirk Wallace
www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/
www.wallacecompany.com/E45/index.html
California, USA

Kirk_Wallace wrote:

I have been having fits with the latest Ubuntu version (9.10), it seems they have been fixing X to the point of not working.

If you haven't tried it yet. Try installing the previous version (8.04?), but the plain Ubuntu Live CD without EMC2. I find I have to burn my CD's at a slower speed than the burner software selects, but that is probably just my system. For some systems, a DVD drive is needed for the installation even though the install disk is a CD. Almost all of the time I have to tweak /etc/X11/xorg.conf , mostly to change the video X11 driver to "vesa". The Ubuntu 9.10 doesn't have an xorg.conf so I'm the dark about that. Apparently, you can create your own xorg.conf but I haven't gotten one to work yet. Grub is totally different now too.

Once you get generic Ubuntu working well, you can install EMC2 with an install script:
www.linuxcnc.org/content/view/21/4/lang,en/
(See bottom half of this page.)

I hope something here might help.

I really miss the good old days when Linux would run on just about any computer. With the way Ubuntu is getting, I might as well go back to Windows.

Kirk,
Thanks for the reply. The CD and DVDs that I wrote seem to install and run fine. The checks on downloaded image are good and all the files that I examine have valid checksums. Ubuntu seems to install and run fine in all cases, everything I test works, it is only EMC that doesn't work. I am (mainly) trying the EMC2 LiveCD which is Ubuntu 8.04 and they claim that only 8.04 (and 6.something) will work so I haven't bothered to try any other releases. Not sure about tweaking the xorg.conf file, other then the attempt I made after installing libgl1-mesa-swx11, but that was according to some instructions not directly related to my problem. Perhaps I will look at that some more.

I had installed Ubuntu by itself (again 8.04) on the first motherboard and then installed EMC according to the instructions at the link you sent. I also built and installed a new kernel for SMP, but both times had the same result. I was told by people on the IRC that I should not update any packages in 8.04 after the install but I am thinking that perhaps I should look at that as well.

Thanks again,
Tome

I wish I could help but...
All I can do is to suggest buying returnable items. I tried to use a Dell Optiplex GX270 today with 8.04
and could not get the SMI turned off following the simple instructions. It was listed as working if the SMI was turned off. No luck there so I returned it. Good thing I made the deal that I would only buy it if it worked.

I have a Asus A8V-VM working good with 10671 max jitter. Looking for another mother board to build a machine with and might just buy another Asus a8v-vm. I wouldn't be surprised if the second one didn't work like the first.

This is not easy.

Dooh. Your right 8.04 is the latest or EMC2.

Still shooting from the hip, have you tried using a PS2 keyboard? And maybe disable USB in BIOS. Or disable other stuff in BIOS like power saving features? Verify the RAM? Check power supply voltages? Verify the hard disk? I recently had some sectors in my swap partion go bad and caused some bazaar behavior.

Sorry, that's all I got. Good luck.
--
Kirk Wallace
www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/
www.wallacecompany.com/E45/index.html
California, USA

Wow, I can't believe it. It turns out the problem was simply the monitor I was using! I took the system into a friend's office to work on the problem and using his newer lcd monitor solved the problem. Apparently, something about my old sony crt was causing problems with X windows. I suspect I could tweak the X config file to get it to work but I am not going to bother.

I wasn't even planning on using that monitor on the machine so it doesn't make any difference to me but I just can't believe I spent days (literally) working on this and that is what it turns out to be.

Thanks for the replies.

Tome

Thanks Tome. Usually I have a monitor that will go blank or scramble when X11 comes up, but not crash applications. There must be something that DPMS(?, what I mean is the feature that reads the monitors information through the video cable) is returning to X11, which sets the video card to a bad setting. I believe you can disable DPMS in the xorg.conf file. I usually set the Horizsync and Vertrefresh to match the manufacturer's specs on the monitor, but that only helps X11 select valid monitor resolution options. Usually, crashing is caused by a bad video card driver or setting, such as selecting a resolution that the card doesn't have enough speed or memory for. There may be a way to manually set the proper video card data but X11 sure doesn't make it obvious or easy. They seem to take the Windows approach and try to Plug and Play us to death. I know it's a moot point since you won't be using this monitor, but it sure would be nice to know how to handle this when it comes up again.

I guess it shows that sometimes blind parts replacement (thrashing) can be an effective, though discouraged, troubleshooting technique.
--
Kirk Wallace
www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/
www.wallacecompany.com/E45/index.html
California, USA