Due to instability problems with previous hardware (Abit AV8, AMD-64 3400+ 939 and GEIL RAM) I had RMA'ed the hardware. This was a package sold by Newegg.com and I could not even get Windows 2000 running on it, let alone any 32 or 64 bit Linux distro. All this despite tweaking BIOS settings and boot parameters.
The replacement hardware was actually less stable at first. But after trying various BIOS settings I noticed that the defaults - even for the so called failsafe settings - included mild overclocking. I fiddled the settings to the other side of the fence so that I was underclocking the RAM and processor and the result seems to be stable operation. When it came to installing Debian, I still ran into some difficulties. the first problem involved partitioning and formatting the drive. I had selected: /dev/hda5 - 4 GB FAT-32 (Win32) /dev/hda6 - 100 MB Reiserfs - /boot /dev/hda7 - 10 GB Reiserfs - / /dev/hda8 - 2 GB swap /dev/hda9 - 10 GB - Reiserfs - /home (Remainder of 120GB drive left alone.) The operation to save and format following this setup ran into difficulty and reported problems formatting /dev/hda6. I dropped into a shell and formatted that partition manually. I reran the previous step and this time it reported difficulty formatting /dev/hda7. But when I tried to format that one manually, mkfs.reiserfs reported that it could not create the journal file. I switched that to ext3 and marked the other partitions as "unused" in (?) parted. Installation proceeded until I got to the part where it asks what the box was to be used for. I specified desktop along with print server and a couple other selections. The installer then went about installing everything and rebooted. (OK, I did need to manually edit my sources.list since I was installing from the network and the default does not work.) And all was good with the world. Except there was no X. I'm not sure if this is a DI or AMD64 issue. I fiddled some more with my sources.list and began trying to figure out which packages would pull in a complete X install. It seemed that installing GDM pulled in the most packages. But I still could not start up an X session. I noted that Xprt was crashing on startup and gnome-settings-server was exiting abnormally when starting an X session (logging in via GDM or running startx from the command line.) I noticed at that point that sawfish had not been installed and that's the window manager on my laptop Debian testing installation. But installing it did not solve the problem and googling for it provided no useful suggestions. At one point one of my apt-get update/upgrade cycles installed a new kernel. The next time I rebooted, I was presented with the "unable to mount root" error. :( Following reset I looked at the grub choices and all versions of the kernel appeared to be identical versions (<blank>, failsafe, Default, Default failsafe) IIRC. I tried booting the one named "Default" (Not the default kernel) and the system came up. I took a step back decided to have a go at this with Ubuntu. It started out with a very familiar install screen, but disk partitioning went as expected there was no need to fiddle the sources.list. Installation proceeded normally except that when choosing screen resolution, I screwed up and hit <Enter> instead of selecting the resolutions I wanted. Following reboot I logged in and was presented with a normal looking desktop. I haven't fiddled much with it as it was late in the evening by the time I got to that point so I don't know if it is using Nvidia video drivers or what this will be like to administer. I just noticed that sshd is not enabled. I was sorry to see that the Debian installation hadn't gone better, but getting X up and running is usually a chore even with the 32 bit variant. OTOH once installed, it is usually close to trivial to keep upgraded. Having dabbled with Mandrake and Fedora and been unable to upgrade between even minor versions I really appreciate apt and debs. I've got another laptop on which I originally installed Progeny that still remains current. I really appreciate the help of the folks who post here and regret not being able to help more. But relatively speaking, I'm playing in the deep end of the pool and my contributions would be more along the lines of reporting problems rather than solving them. I don't suppose issues with an Ubuntu install are relevant to this list though the underpinnings are similar. Thanks again and best wishes for your holidays, hank -- Beautiful Sunny Winfield
