Death of a computer? was Re: [BL] More fun with Xvesa and trident card
3aoo-cvfd at dea.spamcon.org
3aoo-cvfd at dea.spamcon.org
Sat Oct 30 01:24:03 EDT 2004
sindi keesan wrote:
>
> This computer does not appear to be very good for
> linux but DOS works fine. Why?
Linux exercises the hardware more. It is quite common
to see DOS running happily on a system with a dud RAM
chip (What me worry?). But on the same system, Linux
crashes immediately.
> Perhaps this is a bug affecting this model motherboard
Perhaps. There are fixes in the 2.2.16 kernel sourcecode
for certain motherboards. To see which motherboards, go
to a Slackware 7.1 site (or CDrom) and search the following
file for "motherboard"
---------------------------------
/docs/linux-2.2.16/Configure.help
---------------------------------
To see which of those fixes has been included in the
BL3 (or BL2) kernel, read the kernel config file at
the BasicLinux site. To see which fixes are in the
bare.i kernel, read the config file that accompanies
that kernel.
> Does linux strain the hardware more than DOS?
Yes, Linux uses the available resources to the max.
> Maybe the SIMMs are causing part of this problem
That's possible. I recommend a thorough RAM tester,
like MEMTEST (which can be downloaded free).
> WOuld memory cause this sort of problem with unzipping
> files?
Probably not bad RAM (which usually crashes Linux right
away). However unzipping a large file does put pressure
on your CPU and RAM (which might be triggering a hardware
issue). Is your RAM perhaps being shared with the video
card? Or is there anything else unusual about your RAM
(for example, I recall something about certain systems
having a "memory hole"). Perhaps there is a parameter
in your CMOS setup for turning off such features?
Cheers,
Steven
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