Hi,
Ever since the betas of Mandrake 8.0, through 8.1, through 8.2, I have never been able to run a Mandrake distribution kernel on my Athlon desktop PC. (Sounds outrageous, I know). 7.1 and 7.2 used to work. Just so you know I know my way around Linux: I have successfully installed 8.0 and 8.1 and 8.2, both on a PC with Pentium 200MMX, and a Celeron Laptop. But my main desktop is a Gateway Athlon select 900Mhz, 256M Ram, 15G Hard drive. That is the most powerful of my three machines. That is the only one that has had this problem of not being able to run the distribution kernel. In each case Mandrake installs fine, up till the point of configuring X, and rebooting. On rebooting, soon after the line that says "Init version d.dd booting", it hangs, very reliably. It used to do this on 8.0 and 8.0 with Init version 2.78, and now with Init version 2.83. In each case I have solved the problem by booting into redhat (dual boot), and compiling a kernel for mandrake, and this works fine when I get the kernel sources from www.kernel.org. While investigating this problem I also created a way of cross-booting so that I could use a Redhat kernel to boot the Mandrake distribution, or use the Mandrake kernel to boot the Redhat distribution. The Redhat kernel *can* boot the Mandrake distribution, but the Mandrake kernel *can't* boot the Redhat distribution either. However I would *really* *love* the luxury of not having to do a kernel compile each time I install mandrake. As you can tell I'm always installing the latest Mandrake release, even despite this problem. What can I do to figure out what causes this problem? It is obviously something about the way Mandrake modifies the kernel which they get from Linus, which does not work well with some quirk of my hardware, ... Any ideas and suggestions are welcome. Thanks, Ambrose L
