Re: Mother Board

["Tom Droege" <droege@snapmail.us>]

Justin gives several useful system calls to find out about some of the
system parts.  Apparently while everthing else is "plug and play" on a PC,
the identity of the motherboard is a well kept secret.  I did find by
searching:

http://www.winsbios.com/numbers.shtml

What you do is watch for the number that shows up on boot in the lower
left corner of the screen.  The pause key (I found later after booting
many times and catching one number at a time) will hold the screen.  Now
one goes to the site above and decodes the number.

In this case I have found that I have Shuttle motherboards to add to the
other two.  I also found (by reading the manual) that there is a jumper on
the Biostar boards that needed to be moved to 133 from 100.  So at the
moment I have one of the computers working.

I agree with Chris that it would be nice to run some sort of centralized
system.  But in this case, I have to have ISA slots.  One has to discover
the quirks of motherboards that still have ISA slots!  Sigh!

Tom Droege

> On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 01:10:54AM -0500, Tom Droege wrote:
>> Justin,
>>
>> Is there a way to get the computer to cough up the motherboard type?
> The CPU info is available in /proc/cpuinfo.  Although I don't really
> understand what I am looking at, I can get lots of other system
> information from "DMI" by running /usr/sbin/dmidecode:
>
> # dmidecode 2.6
> SMBIOS 2.3 present.
> 59 structures occupying 2284 bytes.
> Table at 0x000F7990.
> Handle 0xDA00
>                 ...
> Handle 0x0000
> 	DMI type 0, 20 bytes.
> 	BIOS Information
> 		Vendor: Dell Computer Corporation
> 		Version: A23
> 		Release Date: 11/07/2002
>                 ...
> Handle 0x0100
> 	DMI type 1, 25 bytes.
> 	System Information
> 		Manufacturer: Dell Computer Corporation
> 		Product Name: Inspiron 4000
> 		Version: Not Specified
> 		Wake-up Type: Power Switch
> 		...
> Handle 0x0200
> 	DMI type 2, 8 bytes.
> 	Base Board Information
> 		Manufacturer: Dell Computer Corporation
> 		Product Name: Inspiron 4000
> 		...
> Handle 0x0300
> 	DMI type 3, 13 bytes.
> 	Chassis Information
> 		Manufacturer: Dell Computer Corporation
> 		...
> ...
> Handle 0x0400
> 	DMI type 4, 32 bytes.
> 	Processor Information
> 		Socket Designation: Microprocessor
> 		Type: Central Processor
> 		Family: Pentium III Speedstep
> 		Manufacturer: Intel
> 		...
> ...
> Handle 0x0B00
> 	DMI type 11, 5 bytes.
> 	OEM Strings
> 		String 1: Dell System
> 		...
> Handle 0x0D00
> 	DMI type 13, 22 bytes.
> 	BIOS Language Information
> 		Installable Languages: 1
> 			en|US|iso8859-1
> 		Currently Installed Language: en|US|iso8859-1
> Handle 0x1000
> 	DMI type 16, 15 bytes.
> 	Physical Memory Array
> 		Location: System Board Or Motherboard
> 		Use: System Memory
> 		Error Correction Type: None
> 		Maximum Capacity: 512 MB
> 		Error Information Handle: Not Provided
> 		Number Of Devices: 2
> ...
> Handle 0x7F00
> 	DMI type 127, 4 bytes.
> 	End Of Table
>
>> > Justin
>
>> > On Sun, May 29, 2005 at 11:40:23PM -0500, Tom Droege wrote:
>> >> I am trying to configure all the control computers the same.  Still,
>> I
>> >> have ended up with a mixed bag of computers and DVD+R drives.  With
>> all
>> >> computers loaded with Mandrivia 10.2, some will write DVDs, some
>> won't.
>> >> Seems I recall something about loading scsi emulation or some such.
>> > Are you using a 2.6 kernel or not?  Run "uname -a".  2.6 kernels don't
>> > need scsi emulation for cd writing; just use cdrecord dev=/dev/hdc (as
>> > appropriate).  2.4 kernels will need scsi emulation enabled.
>
>