Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

baslinux - Re: [BL] BL3.40 Card Services release does not match

baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Baslinux mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] BL3.40 Card Services release does not match
  • Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 00:44:54 +0000 (UTC)

Re SMC pcmcia ethernet card that won't work in BL3.40 because cardmgr won't work.

The card works in BL3.32 with the 2.2.16 module. I got the 2.2.26 module
from the BL3.40 site.

On the laptop I did a rmmod of all the modules that had been loaded and
'start' again and it crashed with some kernel problem.

I may try an ethernet file transfer with 2-floppy BL3.32 and the modified
'config' and module added from floppy disk.

That worked but got a kernel crash partway through copying Opera.


We came very close to copying over ext2 BL3.40 and BL2.1 to a laptop
computer with 40GB hard drive, which BL3.40 mke2fs could not handle (it
kept crashing to the point where I had to power off) but PQMagic for DOS
worked fine on (after fixing some partition table problem, which did not
help mke2fs). fdisk had no problems that I noticed with it.
But I don't want to copy via plip or llpro.
_______________________________________________

The above are all related. Crash with 'kernel NULL pointer dereference' when I tried to use mke2fs, e2fsck, or do a file transfer via ethernet card using 3.32 (which worked until it crashed) or even sometimes when I tried to reboot. A Czech site suggested a memory problem so we ran memtest, which gets to 50% of the first pass and crashes. There is one 64MB memory module. Adding mem=32M to the loadlin line eliminated the crashing.

I have a PI with four SIMM slots that works with 64MB SIMMS, and another where the same SIMMs are recognized as 32MB and it crashes a lot. Maybe someone upgraded the RAM on our laptop computer to something incompatible and it cannot really handle all of this 64MB DIMM, only 32MB? But DOS was able to make a 64MB virtual disk with it.

I had used 3.32 2-floppy (having copied the network module and the modified config file) for ethernet pcmcia, but I can't add mem=32M to the 2-floppy lilo boot set so we made a .tgz file of BL3-40 on the other hard drive, and used llpro to transfer between DOS drives and then moved to linux and uncompressed the .tgz. I did not bother even trying plip because it does not work on most of our laptops (it does work on the 486 Compaq).

I could have copied bl3-32 to the DOS drive (20MB fs.img) in another /baslin directory after renaming the old one to baslin34 and used that for pcmcia ethernet file transfer but this was simpler if not faster.

I await a fix to BL3-40 pcmcia before we do any more file transfers.

We have one 8MB memory module that we could use (assuming the extra RAM does not cause more crashes) in one PCMCIA slot, with modem or ethernet card or CF adaptor in the other.

Chips and Technologies video chip crashes with Xvesa. I will try X_SVGA and the generic XF86Config next. Toshiba Satellite 233 or 266MHz, our best computer, with working floppy and hard disks. Opera ought to work with 32MB RAM if we keep the memory cache small and add a swap file.

This was not supposed to have taken all day. We also discovered that the full-size hard drive which won't let us boot loop or ext2 BL3 is full of bad sectors. A replacement 540MB works perfectly. DOS for some reason worked okay on it. Linux must check the hardware better during boot.
Spinrite rejected it during benchmarking after getting very low values. It had 'sleeping forever' problems, maybe because zimage or fs.img were on bad sectors.

Sindi




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page