SAM Flex 800 Some Software Issues- Partially Solved

I just received my SAM Flex yesterday after being Amigaless for 7 months so I am a bit rusty. Most things work ok but I have a few issues with which I could use some help.

OWB 3.13 - Loads quickly with splash screen but browsing is dog slow, unbearable. I have checked SObjs and tooltypes to no avail. I did have trouble configuring my network (router with DHCP Roadshow would not configure automatically) maybe this has an impact?

EDIT -I did a complete reinstall of the required fonts and works fine now.



Netsurf 2.1 - Crashes and brings down the house, I can't seem to do anything with it.

AmiUpdate-latest - A program I was relying on to update important files, always crashes at 35% scan.

Push4Dock - Installer will not work, asks for a Python installer


IBrowse and Simplemail work fine as does AmiCygnix/Netsurf and Claws.

Any suggestions appreciated.

ace



SAM Flex 800/512 Radeon 9250/128

@acefnq

Welcome back!

The only thing that I can suggest is that you e-mail the authors of those programs and attach GR crashlogs. For NetSurf, that would be Chris; for AmiUpdate, check with Rigo.

I'm surprised the Push4Dock installer requires Python. If you want, I can send you a AmiDock.amiga.com.xml file for a basic Push4Dock installation.

___ Paul ___

@PEB
Thanks that would be great if you could email. I may have done the usual and cross contaminated by loading my old stuff, I'll work through it slowly and fix but will contact the authors if I hit a brick wall. There are some minor issues with Flex which will be sorted in the upcoming update so I'll have to be patient a little longer.

Cheers
ace

@acefnq
How is OWB slow? Loading of pages over the network? Or rendering? Once a page has been loaded, try reloading it - if it loads a lot faster then the problem is a network issue (perhaps Sam440 does not like your internet router or has wrong settings?). If it is a rendering issue then we need a bit more info, like what pages you are viewing (e.g. basic Google one?), and what exactly is slow - if even the mouse pointer is slow then maybe you are running out of Video memory (what is your screen size?).

@acefnq

Quote:

If this is reproducible everytime, can you enable the VERBOSE option (either from the tooltype or the menu), and send me the resulting log after a scan and crash.

Simon

@Rigo

After re-installing, removing my sil card, updating drivers and thinking all looks much better. Amiupdate works great now. The only remaining issues are Netsurf crashing and trying to remember how to mount a usb pendrive.

A big issue was remembering to install the SVG datatype and icon stuff, that was really playing havoc for me. I am sure there are other things I will need to remember, it has been so long since I installed my original OS4!

Thanks for the offer of help.

ace


PS wow OWB is awesome!

@acefnq

I removed my SAM 667 and put in the SAM 800 and away we went...

so by Sil you're referring to your IDE controller? I wondered about the ability to plug that in from my dead A1...

@Slayer
Everything seems to be working now, even Netsurf. It's all the little extras that are needed. I have another sil680 which I will try later......much later.

cheers
ace


PS What is dead in your A1? Board or CPU

@acefnq

Quote:

I was wanting to try using an IDE DVDRW before the flex (tried a SATA MB to IDE Interface but it didn't work... guess it might work for HDs but I only tried my 2 DVDRWs and neither worked, possibly wrong brand of SATA2IDE too but nevermind!) since there is something not quite right about burning DVD-Rs on the SAM ie it is incredibly slow.

I will try my sil680ide controller from the A1, could burn DVD-Rs quickly on that...

Quote:

Thing is I'm not even sure something is dead, just one day I turned it on, I got white writing across the screen. I turned it off and turned it on again and got nothing and that is what happens each time I tried to get it going... no whirling of the HDs even...

And it's not the Case or Power etc... since... last night I ripped out the A1 and stuck in the SAM-Flex... hooked it all up and have 4 SATA devices going and no worries...

For some reason, when I installed the FLEX into my brand new tower that hosted my normal SAM it killed the Power Cables... there is power to the board, since the blue light goes but nothing else works... power to the fan, Harddrives whatever else etc...

I didn't get a Flex manual so perhaps I shorted something accidently the first time around... nevermind, the system functions and stable as far as I can tell AND it's snappy and I love the 1gM

What a waste of a $200.00 case when the OLD faithful does the Job... LOL

hope you can follow that, a bit of chopping and changing... poor A1 motherboard is lying on the harth with its AGP Radeon on top of it... heh

@SlayerQuote:
In that case you are doing much better some of us. Even with one 512MB memory removed, Compositing turned off and all WBStartup programs removed I am still getting system freezes. Please keep us posted on the performance of your system. If it continues to work properly then maybe I need to exchange my SAM Flex board for another one.

@xenic
So far I have found this with help from these and Amigaworld forums.

Clean install
Use the OS4 theme option (this appears to be a big issue).
Register and update on Hyperion's site (2 x updates).
For me there was issues trying to use Ken's icons because I forgot about the extra libraries and dataypes, install them.
Then there are extras like aysinco lib etc.
Then there are there requirements of other software, ie Tunenet (I haven't tried yet but from memory needs additional libs).
Turn composting off.

I scoured the last few months of updates on OS4Depot and updated a lot, whilst I was frustarted at first I realise I now have a fairly lean mean Sys partition, yes I will have to add to it to get some other older stuff going but it is not the jungled mess I had grown over the many years which obviously caused me the grief.

Is my system perfect, no not by a long shot but it is now pretty stable and running alot of stuff pretty damn quickly. The upcoming updates will address a lot of our issues.

My second Flex arrived today, this is going to be my serious machine with Linux and OS4 installed and yes i am expecting a prickly time getting it going smoothly.

hang in there.

ace

PS a cheap $10 keyboard works better for me than 5 other top of the line models! Keeping it simple seems to work.

@acefnqQuote:
Since I discovered that I could produce my system freezes with AmiPDF I have finally made some progress. I started stripping things from my system partition and now think I have isolated the problem. Removing WBStartup and user-startup customization didn't help but today I removed my DosDrivers and can no longer freeze my system with AmiPDF. It will take a couple of days of testing to determine if all the freezes are gone, but I think I'm finally on the right track.

@xenic

which dos drivers did you remove to get it to work?

@jahc

I am also interested.I buyed last day a new cooling fan to avoid freezes.

What software or tricks do you recommend me to avoid freezes?

I have lots of problems now and I ask because if the cooling fan doesn't make my A1 works better in the future.

Quote:

Seems strange this should affect anything unless perhaps something is actually mounted ie like using diskimage for example and actually has a virtual ISO up and accessible... but still, why?

I have diskimage installed for some time and never actually used it, did try and mount an encrypted PC ISO once (the reason for installing it, latest software solution for my Modded Xbox for the curious) and I didn't put enough time into it to get it going before I lost interest... but the DOS drivers have been there ever since...

My Flex doesn't freeze unless I'm using IBrowse and that's not that often and we already know that freezes... other than that, no problems...

BUT!!!!

get this, the other night I've noticed my monitor gets turned off randomly but only when I am using OWB... it doesn't always do it but it does do it now and then BUT it ONLY does it when I am using OWB...

VERY strange... and yes, it completely kills the signal and I can't turn it back on by any means except resetting the machine... It doesn't bother me but it is Strange...

You'll never see me start a thread saying OMG my Monitor DIED!!! OS4.1 and SAM Suck the BIG ONE!

LOL like some of these other extremists... that are conditioned to believing a CPU should be perfect...

being an Amiga User from way back I couldn't care less if the Machine plays up occassionally, it never died when it was Important... like rendering scripts etc...

@jahc
Quote:
It took me a while to determine which driver it was and it turned out to be the RAD (recoverable ram drive) drive. I've been using a RAD: drive ever since it was added to Amiga OS. Most people don't use it or even know what it's for. For those who don't: It's a ram drive with fixed size that survives an Amiga reboot (not a system freeze though). The RAD dosdriver in SYS:Storage/Dosdrivers is set to mount a small RAD drive the size of an Amiga floppy. That one is handy for extracting ADF files.

When I first set up my SAM Flex I decided to increase the size of my RAD drive to 64MB because I thought I would be able to use 1GB memory. I thought I ruled out the RAD drive as a problem when I rebooted from the OS4.1 CD, but forgot that the KickStart remains in memory and that the RAD drive would remain active after a warm reboot. If I reduce the size of the RAD drive to 32MB or smaller, AmiPDF and some other programs stop freezing my system. I can't explain why a recoverable ram drive would cause other programs to freeze the system but that seems to be the case. For the time being I have removed the RAD drive altogether and eliminated a lot of system freezes. I have still had a few freezes with IBrowse & OWB but the frequency is noticable reduced.

@xenic

Perhaps it has something to do with the addresses that RAD uses? or making sure you use absolute values? I remember I used to run a RAD disk the same size as a floppy disk etc...

Still, I think all the problems are software based and not hardware...

You will always get problems with IBrowse because it just isn't geared up for SAM and OS4.1

OWB for me doesn't crash however... all good there!

@Slayer
Funny when I was having my problems it was OWB that was killing everything. No such problems now.

Thanks for the ide setting tip, my sata drives are now configured and have reduced ide cd and disk timeouts significantly.

ace

@Slayer
Quote:

RAD may be using the same protected memory that Kiskstart uses and possibly using too much of that memory when it's size is too large. The majority of my remaining freezes occur when I'm dragging the scrollbar in IBrowse or OWB. Since I've noticed that the mouse seems to eat memory as it's moved, I suspect some deadlock between memory allocation and reading the mouse values. That's just a theory but I'll continue to experiment with changes to see it I can further stabilize my SAM.

@xenic

I have the same freezes on my AmigaONE with OS4.1. So i think the problem is not the hardware.

I will try to remove DosDrivers too.