Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

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