Missing CPU Cores on Quad core CPU

But Nothing's Changed...

Randomly, the other day my computer began reporting only two CPU cores instead of the physical four cores it really has. Forget Hyper-threading, my CPU does not do this; they are real cores, an Intel Q6600 Quad Core CPU. But Ubuntu only displayed two CPUs.
Interestingly "dmesg" did show something unusual, 2 "hotplug CPUs". Somehow the HPET ACPI table had become corrupted (BIOS side) and flipped a few bits resulting in loss of 2 cores; 1 and 3.

ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x01] lapic_id[0x00] enabled) ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x02] lapic_id[0x01] enabled) ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x03] lapic_id[0x82] disabled) ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x04] lapic_id[0x83] disabled)

Which presented as hotplug CPUs:

SMP: Allowing 4 CPUs, 2 hotplug CPUs

After trying lots of noapic, nolapic and other kernel options I decided to reset the BIOS to defaults. On some systems this really requires removing the battery but on mine it was an option in the BIOS itself, which also allowed me to set back some unrelated preferences at the same time. Now dmesg reports 4 CPUs and /proc/cpuinfo agrees.

ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x01] lapic_id[0x00] enabled) ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x02] lapic_id[0x01] enabled) ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x03] lapic_id[0x02] enabled) ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x04] lapic_id[0x03] enabled)

So although nothing changed, nothing has changed from the user or software side, minor data corruption has caused this behaviour. Machines are not utterly predictable.

Mounting SMB shares from NAS in Linux

When mounting  SMB shares in linux from a NAS box I got this error:

mount error 12 = Cannot allocate memory

I discovered that the problem is the NAS device's implementation of SMB requires the "nounix" option to be specified.

smbmount //IP_of_NAS/share_on_nas /local/mountpoint -o nounix

Hope this helps someone.

Converting lossless WMA to WAV/FLAC in linux.

While trying to figure this out I found this blog: http://thestrayworld.com/2010/04/23/how-to-convert-wma-lossless-to-flac-in-ubuntu-karmic/

Which should work but is not succinct and involves redundant operations.

Firstly, if you do download wmp11-windowsxp-x86-enu.exe from Microsoft (where else ;¬) , you do not need to install it under Wine.

You do need Wine though, so get that first if you don't have it.

Instructions for Ubuntu, other distributions may differ.

Right click on the wmp11-windowsxp-x86-enu.exe file and choose:

Open With > Archive Manager.

Then in the Archive Manager extract and run WindowsXP-MSCompPackV1-x86.exe .

Then install foobar2000 under wine, it will be able to play and convert lossless WMA.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

I am fairly sure that this is not the only way and that there may be a way to include WMA lossless functionality into some native app's but it certainly is easy.

I hope this saves somebody some time.