BlindedByScience
More Human than Human
- Joined
- May 26, 2000
- Messages
- 9,228
So, one of my new year activities (hate to call them "resolutions") was to spend some of my free time to learn more about Linux. To that end, I put together a system just for this purpose out of stuff I had in the shop. It's nothing fantastic but I'd think it should do the trick in spades; a P4 2.8G on a new Asus P4S800D-X motherboard (SIS 655X / 964 chipset) with two 128M sticks of ram, a WD PATA 80GB drive, a Matrox G550 video card, and a Samsung DVD-R optical drive. No OC on the system. It ran Memtest86+ overnight with no errors and the hard drive passes WD's diagnostic tests with no errors.
So far, I cannot get a Linux distro to load.
I started out with Fedora Core 6 (ISO image fc-6-i386-DVD.iso) on a DVD and went to it. The disk file has the correct SHA1SUM checksum, and the physical disk I burned passes the "self test" in the Fedora installer. I prepped the drive by running a disk wipe before booting the Fedora installer. I told the installer to "erase all partitions and set up a standard" partitioning scheme. All seems to go just fine until the system tries to re-boot post install. It randomly hangs at different places in the start up sequence as it's loading modules. What's weird is that it hangs in different places during boot....not consistent at all.
Frustrated with this, I downloaded the openSUSE distro from Novell (openSUSE-10.2-GM-DVD-i386.iso). Same care was taken with the burn and image verification to make sure I had a "good" DVD to load the OS with. It crashes during install saying it can't find one of the modules required (didn't write it down) at which time the installer piles up. At least it's consistent....
Pissed off late last night, I threw in my XP Pro disk and proceeded to load XP, flawlessly, the first time. It acquired all it's updates and ran some benchmarks all night without an issue. Sure leads me to believe that there's nothing wrong with the hardware......?? So, I'm not sure what to do next. I'll fiddle with the hardware in the XP environment a bit but the truth is it seems solid as can be.
I'd really like to get some "cockpit time" with an up to date Linux distro. Suggestions....??
So far, I cannot get a Linux distro to load.
I started out with Fedora Core 6 (ISO image fc-6-i386-DVD.iso) on a DVD and went to it. The disk file has the correct SHA1SUM checksum, and the physical disk I burned passes the "self test" in the Fedora installer. I prepped the drive by running a disk wipe before booting the Fedora installer. I told the installer to "erase all partitions and set up a standard" partitioning scheme. All seems to go just fine until the system tries to re-boot post install. It randomly hangs at different places in the start up sequence as it's loading modules. What's weird is that it hangs in different places during boot....not consistent at all.
Frustrated with this, I downloaded the openSUSE distro from Novell (openSUSE-10.2-GM-DVD-i386.iso). Same care was taken with the burn and image verification to make sure I had a "good" DVD to load the OS with. It crashes during install saying it can't find one of the modules required (didn't write it down) at which time the installer piles up. At least it's consistent....
Pissed off late last night, I threw in my XP Pro disk and proceeded to load XP, flawlessly, the first time. It acquired all it's updates and ran some benchmarks all night without an issue. Sure leads me to believe that there's nothing wrong with the hardware......?? So, I'm not sure what to do next. I'll fiddle with the hardware in the XP environment a bit but the truth is it seems solid as can be.
I'd really like to get some "cockpit time" with an up to date Linux distro. Suggestions....??