10/13/03 Hello All, from The Other
A few of you may remember I've been trying to get a stable installation of Mandrake 9.1 since May. Thanks to my niece for sending me a Debian distro 3.x with documentation. I may have figured out what was going wrong all this time. The Debian documentation on installing the system was something like 120 pages, of which the 10 or so about setting up before the installation begins was the gem I needed. Explaining that the Linux kernel wants full control of your computer and to disable just about everything the computer was trying to manage led me to the following: Disable ALL Shadow RAM Sure enough, my BIOS was set to shadow some of the video RAM. I disabled that and got a flawless, Gnome desktop only, installation of 9.1. Then I went into Mandrake Control Center and started loading in the other packages I wanted. Here's where it gets a little worrying. On two separate occasions last night I got a frozen system when Logging Out so I could immediately Log back In to see the newly installed programs show up on the menus. When Logging back In, the left half of the CRT screen was black and the right half was scrolling black/white pixels. Powering down the system, restarting, and following the recovery prompts, got me back to a working Bamboo system. Anyone know why the freeze-up? Is my system unstable? I'm still seeing the beginning message during boot-up: BIOS Data Check Unsuccessful. That continues to worry me a bit. Thanks All, it's nice to be back. "The Other" Stephen Stubbs Champaign, IL USA
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
