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Grex Agora41 Item 118: Sleep Deprivation caused by UNIX
Entered by steele on Tue Apr 23 10:04:31 UTC 2002:

Howdie - I seem to be seriously suffering, grex'ing' since around 2am. God
help my little broken sleep. I have been waking up at even odder hours as of
late, often around 1-2am and falling asleep at 11PM - I can only take so much!
Heesh.

Scotty comes to mind...."I can give 'er anymore Captain! She's fallin' apart
between our knees!"

28 responses total.

#1 of 28 by tsty on Tue Apr 23 14:27:58 2002:

oh! gee!  welcome to grex!

#2 of 28 by steele on Tue Apr 23 21:57:41 2002:

Well, I quite appreciate the usefulness of this until I pick up my three new
(PII 200, 96 MB RAM 4 GIG HDD) computers and get Mandrake running on them,
or perhaps Best Linux 2002 Any suggestions?

#3 of 28 by scott on Tue Apr 23 22:23:08 2002:

Mandrake is pretty nice; I'm using it at the moment.  I used to use RedHat,
but it was annoying how many little things I had to fix after the
installation.

#4 of 28 by oval on Wed Apr 24 01:02:29 2002:

i hear there's a fairly new distro called gentoo that's supposedly pretty
good. (gentoo.org)

<shrugs>

..it's designed for programmers and network admins.

#5 of 28 by jaklumen on Wed Apr 24 02:31:20 2002:

I thought script kiddies used gentoo.

#6 of 28 by oval on Wed Apr 24 05:12:20 2002:

why?

#7 of 28 by rlejeune on Wed Apr 24 14:47:06 2002:

I'm using Red Hat 7.2.something right now. I like it a lot so far. Never used
Mandrake or  Gentoo.

#8 of 28 by flem on Wed Apr 24 19:58:36 2002:

I'm moderately happy with redhat.  I don't think I'd be as happy if it weren't
a throwaway installation, though.  I plan on doing LFS.

#9 of 28 by steele on Fri Apr 26 10:02:16 2002:

Well, I am in a bit of a bind now.....I decided against 3 computers, instead
opting for a Dual Proc. DEFF OptiPlex with 4.5 Gig HDD and SCSI and 128 megs
of RAM. Have a few interesting little problems. First, instead of each
partition being labelled hda1 hda2 etc it is labelled sda1 (Notice the "s"?).
Secondly Mandrake 7.2 siezed on install.....now, unless I put a Mandrake
INSTALL CD in, even any other boot diskette the thing just reads STAGE 1 and
doesn't do anything else. Any solutions?

-Steele

#10 of 28 by gull on Fri Apr 26 13:05:00 2002:

The sda thing isn't a problem, it's normal.  IDE disks are named hd*,
SCSI disks are sd*.

Sounds like the boot loader didn't get completely installed.

#11 of 28 by steele on Fri Apr 26 14:50:52 2002:

Figured it out, seems it stops on Configure X Windows, which wasn't a problem.
I am able to use the disk (Boot) to get into LILO and load up. I am thinking
of buying another copy....since DISK 2 no longer seems recognised...

#12 of 28 by steele on Sat Apr 27 11:22:24 2002:

Well, I have but one wor...... HELP :)
I linstalled Mandrake, and everythign went fine until it got to the bootloader
whcih didn't get loaded at all. I have tried installing the RPM fro GRUB and
LILO, but LILO wanted too many files I didn't have and GRUB, after
installation didn't do anything. Is there a setting that should be changed?

#13 of 28 by scott on Sat Apr 27 14:17:00 2002:

Try installing again?  I usually end up reinstalling a time or two as I figure
out what is needed.

#14 of 28 by jazz on Sat Apr 27 15:29:05 2002:

        When you say that LILO wanted too many files you didn't have, what do
you mean?

#15 of 28 by steele on Sat Apr 27 19:20:57 2002:

it wanted libsafe.o libsafe wanted libc.o (V. 6.0 whereas I only had 5.0)
I have tried re-installing, it crashes EVERY time. No exception
Any help is of course appreciated....
Steele...

#16 of 28 by tsty on Sun Apr 28 03:59:23 2002:

something in the bqck of my mind says there is something about
booting off scsi disks makes something VeryDifferent from a 'normal'
installation ... but i could be incorrect.

#17 of 28 by mdw on Sun Apr 28 05:45:55 2002:

The SCSI controller probably has code in it to trap the bios hard disk
calls, and to do the appropriate SCSI thing with those calls.  This will
include code to map fake head/cylinder/sector mappings to the native
SCSI linear sector addressing.  During boot, this will be used several
times: once to load the MBR itself, once to load the secondary boot
record, a few more times to load any additional records that are likely
logically part of the partition boot, and then possibly a few more times
past that to read "random" disk blocks that point into the filesystem
and load something "smarter".  That something "smarter" could be either
linux itself, or yet another boot program to load linux.  Past that you
start getting into boot program specifics.  Grub and LILO are two common
Linux boot programs.

You said it seems to stop on "X configure" -- X should be involved
relatively late in the game - long after the boot program has loaded
Linux and exited the stage.  X configuration problems are common.  Some
linux distributions don't start X up by default (debian); those might be
easier to install.  If your installation software has a "shell" mode,
you might find it easier to experiment with the underlying calls
directly than to just keep reinstalling.  You'll have to learn a lot
about how the underpinnings work, to make this useful.

#18 of 28 by steele on Sun Apr 28 10:23:31 2002:

Well another odd thing happened. I screwed my system tryign to edit the
hostname so I decided a re-install just to see what I might be missing. Well
I tried somethign I never had, LBA (Doesn't Work on old BIOS') Hrmmm well I
unchecked it and it actually proceeded through the installation. I got to the
BOOTLOADER section and it passed through. I think YES! But NO! I configure
XWINDOWS (Finally doing it at setup) and remove all media and reboot. I am
on cloud nine now, I see it restarting and booting

BIOS installed successfully

BEEP!
stage1

S&^%^*&%^%^^%$#!OQ@!@#@!$^%*&***)*)^^%%#
Anyways, I am really not sure WHAT to think now. If I can't even boot another
disk to install antoher distro, I must be screwed. the only thing I can think
of is the Bootloader GOT installed but somethign in the mbr is severely, well,
you know..... What would be the command in root that I would have to run?
I have attempted fdisk /mbr, fdisk \mbr but no luck. The onyl way I know how
to do it was through DOS, so as always (you must be getting used to me saying
this) any help is VERY graciously accepted. And, anyone who would rather
e-mail me (for some reason) mazeltov@magma.ca

-Steele

#19 of 28 by mdw on Mon Apr 29 02:21:20 2002:

If you're running linux fdisk, it's probably something like:
        # fdisk /dev/sda0
You should be able to do a "ls" of /dev first to see what devices you
have.  If you're missing "ls", try "echo /dev/sd*".

#20 of 28 by flem on Mon Apr 29 16:59:42 2002:

I've had stability problems with Mandrake installation in the past, too.  IMO,
Redhat has the most reliable installation system of the distributions I've
used, so if you're having trouble getting up and running...

#21 of 28 by jazz on Mon Apr 29 20:04:05 2002:

        Don't count on any of their betas installing cleanly, though, even the
late-release ones.

#22 of 28 by mjh48060 on Sun May 12 03:46:03 2002:

I lost a few months sleep setting up my own LFS system, and a few days
making a homemade bootable installation CD. Kinda fun typing commands on
shaky fingers at 5:00 am hoping I don't screw it up. The only problem I
had with it was the bttv driver hanging the machine after a while. It
was just a matter of patching the kernel to the bleeding edge, and
getting the video4linux patch and downloading the development driver,
rebuild, and voila! No problems since.

#23 of 28 by h410g3n on Tue May 21 16:28:08 2002:

First off, Linux is a KERNEL.  So running Mandrake instead of RedHat has
nothing to do with it.  It is all the same shit, just a different pile.  Use
FreeBSD or Solaris.. Jesus.  Linux is such a torn-apart lump of crap, and it
more bloated and slow then Windows!

#24 of 28 by remmers on Tue May 21 16:41:58 2002:

<religious debate alert!>

#25 of 28 by flem on Tue May 21 17:06:56 2002:

Jesus won't run on my hardware.

#26 of 28 by gull on Tue May 21 17:47:32 2002:

Re #25: Too bad.  I hear He overclocks well:
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2002/03/ocjesus.html

#27 of 28 by flem on Tue May 21 18:44:10 2002:

Yeah, but the EULA is killer.  And girls avoid me at parties if I talk about
him too much.

#28 of 28 by gull on Tue May 21 19:41:14 2002:

Girls avoid you at parties if you talk about computers too much, too.

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