Hi Kieran, On Sun, 19 May 2002, Kieran Ashley wrote: > we've got a knackered old PII 300 we use to provide [...] > keeps mysteriously crashing on us.
This could this be faulty hardware. Have you tried a thorough memory check using MemTest86. Has the mobo got an external (ie L2 cache)? If so, does disabling the cache help? Does your zero-sized budget stretch to a watchdog card ? You are probably better off moving to a more stable (such as Linux), but this would be a temporary solution whilst you migrate. The watchdog card will automatically hit the reset button if the machine locks up (saving you the journey). There is support for these under Linux too, so you can continue to use it after your switch. > My preference would be to invest in a spanking new Mac and just run OS X > on it, but this apparently isn't within our financial budget of, um, > zero. So I've been volunteered to try and sort out a bodged Linux > solution. What I'm looking for is a small version of Linux which will > provide good compatibility with Network cards, Sound cards and USB, Support for network cards, sound cards and USB are in the kernel, which is (more or less) consistent across different distributions (for the same kernel release). > but > with low-overheads and preferably fairly easy to use (I've got some UNIX > experience with OS X so I'm fine with user-admin and compiling and > installing things, but of course the wonderful thing about Macs is that > the hardware just works, Yes, although my impression is you pay for it, in terms of price and flexibility. But they do look rather nice machines :) > so when it comes to things like drivers and network configuration I'm > left somewhat floundering.) There's always lots of people who will help you out here :) > Any suggestions? I tried Debian the other day but I spent a couple of > hours swearing and cursing but it just couldn't seem to recognise the > network card, or if it was then it certainly wasn't using it! You've probably already done all of this, but just in case ... You can get the actual kernel messages by typing dmesg (you can do this as any user). If the kernel has successfully loaded a network driver, then it will be listed as ethN where N is an integer (usually 0). To see all the interfaces, do "/sbin/ifconfig -a" (you can do this as any user). If you don't see eth0 listed, then either there was an error when it tried to load the driver, or the kernel didn't try to load the driver. Use the dmesg command to see which. If the kernel tried to load the driver but failed, you need to configure it. PCI cards should "just work", but for ISA cards you may need to tell it the IO address, IRQ ... of the card. If the kernel didn't try to load the driver then, depending on how Debian does things, you either need to rebuild the kernel, or tell it which module to load. Look in /etc/modules.conf for details. HTH, Paul. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Particle Physics (Theory & Experimental) Groups Paul Millar Department of Physics and Astronomy [EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Glasgow [EMAIL PROTECTED] Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm +44 (0)141 330 4717 A54C A9FC 6A77 1664 2E4E 90E3 FFD2 704B BF0F 03E9 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
