I have a laptop that exhibits similar symptoms. (Note this is a very nice ruggedized laptop from a police cruiser.) It was discarded because windows 8 and 10 will not run on the Pentium M cpu's.
Installing a modern distribution with a PAE kernel will work sometimes long enough to log in and other times it locks up at the login screen. Booting into recovery mode seems to work, not sure what recovery mode does, it may not try and use PAE related instructions. I tracked it down to the laptop having a Pentium M cpu. These Pentium M's are odd ducks. There are 2 versions... 400Mhz FSB and 533Mhz FSB (front side bus). The 400Mhz chips do not support PAE and all the modern distributions since ubuntu 10.04 seem to assume you have a cpu capable of PAE. The 533MHz fsb version of the chip does not advertise as having PAE, but it actually does and you can get it to work by booting with the forcepae boot option. cat /proc/cpuinfo This will display the CPU model info and the flags available (look for the model name and pae in the flags) Since my laptop only has 2Gb of ram, I dont need PAE kernels. I have tried rebuilding the linux mint 17.3 kernel but have not found the magic combination of switches to turn off PAE and the highmem stuff. Rebuilding the kernel is painful... about 6 hours on an old P4 3.2Ghz box with 2GB ram. I found I had an old cdrom with EMC and Ubuntu 10.04. This installed successfully and runs nicely. So far, the only software I updated was firefox directly from the firefox website ( version 20 to version 44! ). The archived repositories do provide some upgrades, but 10.04 is 2 years past its LTS lifetime. Question for the group.... what versions of emc/linuxcnc iso images require PAE cpus to run? cheers Lawrence VE7IT On 16-02-23 08:21 PM, Jon Elson wrote: > On 02/23/2016 08:38 PM, Jim Craig wrote: >> I installed the iso image from 2.6.8 on my dads laptop. I had everything >> working the way I wanted it last night. I powered it down and then >> tonight when It boots up the system will lock up within 10 to 15 seconds >> of getting to the login screen. >> >> If I am fast I can login to they system and the xwindow shell comes up >> but it will still lock up before the entire system can start. >> >> By lockup I mean the mouse does nothing, and apparently the keyboard >> does nothing. >> >> If I do ctrl+alt+F1 to F6 nothing happens. >> >> I have booted into the recover option (second option in grub) and I can >> use the startx command and it will bring up the xwindow shell and work >> just fine. >> >> Please help me troubleshoot. I have been googling the topic but I have >> not found the solution yet. >> >> > Hmmm, so this is a LinuxCNC install? Will you actually be > running LinuxCNC on this? (Real time and laptops don't > coexist all that well, although the trouble USUALLY only > starts when you try to run actual real time stuff.) > > One of the big problems is that laptops do all sorts of > system management stuff in the machine BIOS, such as battery > management, thermal management, emergency shutdown upon low > battery or CPU overheat, etc. > Running RT OS's can disable part of these features on > certain machines. > > Right now, I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 (without the rtai > option) on a few laptops, and it seems to work pretty well. > > One thing you can do is a Google search on the specific > version of Debian and the laptop model, and see if there are > known problems. I'm not clear, but it seems you say that if > you use the recovery boot and start X manually, then it is > stable. So, that may mean that either X is starting at the > wrong time, before something else is ready for it, or that > somehow the manual start brings up a different X > configuration that works better. Possibly the graphics > driver that is used is different in the two cases, lots of > machines are sensitive to which graphics driver is used, and > there are some different drivers that can use less > accelerated graphics features and may be more reliable. > > If you give me some more specific info that "your dad's > laptop" I might be able to dig up something pertinent. > > Jon > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance > APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month > Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now > Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=272487151&iu=/4140 > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=272487151&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
