larryt

greeneggs, When you installed did you create a password for 'root'? Did you create a password for 'user' ? can you type 'su' and the password for 'root' and get a prompt that says something like 'root@localhost' or something like that? If so you should then be able to type 'startx' and go into the graphical 'X' But you really want to get into the graphical GUI as 'user' so when you get that login prompt you should type in your pre-selected 'user' name,then your password, then type in 'startx' , always of course, without the quotes. Oh, and about those stalls during boot, don't be too hasty, it is normal to halt after detecting the scsi card for 10 seconds and sometimes it will pause a little at 'dependences' so give it a little time. Also try to read ( you have to be fast) some of the text scrolling by during bootup. You will pick up a little more info as the number of bootups increase.

pmpatrick, Yes, I have burners and that will probably be the solution of the future. I had to work pretty hard to get the bzImage down to 1mb. Of course just another 350>400 bytes would have been enough, I think. I'm sure I could come down a lot more if I really understood what it all meant even though they (linus?) do a great job with the help section. Ran into a few wierd things I made mention of at the tail end of your 'make boot disk tutorial'.

Man am I slow! :) I finally got my kernel down to 1 meg so could make my boot disk with mcc so the stock kernel and custom kernel both boot from lilo and the boot floppy will boot to the custom kernel so that will get me there in case of hard drive corruption in the boot sector . So i'm happy in that sense. I noticed , however, when booting the customized kernel, during the boot process it changes my burner to a hdd and has a nice interactive gui so I can have input. But wonder why it does it? My lilo is the same in the append area. Also, If i boot a different kernel from the previous boot, I have to reinstall the NV 4349*run file each time. Painless but not too great. This is with the floppy or lilo. If I boot to the stock kernel , it changes it back to a burner. Gets me to login console but need to reinstall "4349". :( Nvidia problem, I think. I used to be able to run numerous kernels with one NV driver install. But i'm deviating from the main subject. I assume the cdrom/hdd thing comes from the way I configured the kernel but it hasn't sunk in yet as to just what.

pmpatrick, That is good info to have, a big ''thank you". It went well except the two (neither) small txt files would fit on. So I thought I would go ahead and install some of the upgrades mentioned by ndeb as someone said it worked for them. Well, I didn't install them all , just 34 files, tried to guess at which ones were relevant. Left out Samba and such. After that I rebooted to be safe and 'same 'ole story'. Since my eyes have rested a bit from the wee hours of this morning, I think I will copy my stock kernel to another folder as before and give it another go. I think that floppy will actually hold those files because it reports 1.42 mb. I'll check back here a little later on :) Larry

ndeb, Thanks for that link. I had already compiled but I did't do 'make clean' 'cause I read recently some people had better luck without it. Not for me, I redid using 'make clean' and it went OK. HOWEVER, uumm, after it made its way through LILO the screen went black so I guess I borked the job. I did get the kernel down by about 300kb (now is 951 kb) though which was enough. According to the hd activity it seemed to be booting so I believe it was a screen problem I caused. I'll go look at the link above and see what it says. Thanks, :) Larry

NDEB says: ------------------- "Thats still less than 1.44MB. Did Code: dd if=floppy.iamge of=/dev/fd0 work ? Obviously, this is a mandrake bug (as confirmed by pmpatrick)" ---------------- Hi ndeb, Yes, but that ~1.25 mb was just the kernel. The rest of the files on the boot (that is, tried to put on boot disk) added up to a lot more than 1.44 mb. mainly, I think because of the LARGE kernel image. So what i'm doing now is recompiling. I think I have taken enough out but will wait to see. I've just started the "make modules_install" so shouldn't be too long. Thanks for bringing the above command back to my attention, i'll give that a try pretty quick. Larry

pmpatrick, Thanks for the reply and "Yes", I'm interested in that boot floppy tutorial. I was reading a little HOWTO on that , but like many HOWTO's, it tells you everything in the world how to do it but I am the kind that needs something a little more straight forward. I'm sure a few others will appreciate it before long. :) So thanks in advance. larryt ( P.S. , I would thinK something like this would have been a MAJOR priority for MANDRAKE), embarrassing beyond belief, I would think?) :roll:

Well had a number of problems too but basically went pretty smooth until I tried to make a boot disk while in the install phase. It would just hang, so had to reset, while maybe didn't HAVE to but didn't know about the diagnostics procedurs mentioned above. I ended up not trying to make the boot disk then everything went OK. But here is another little wierd thing..... After about the 5th try to install ( I have another drive with LM 9.0 on the same computer) the partitioning tool wouldn't allow me to make a /root folder because it said I already had one. It was looking at the other drive. I ended up unhooking that drive to do the install then all went OK, Yes I think there are a few bugs, v9.0 never had these problems. Also when trying to make a boot disk in KDE I found that there was not room on the floppy. Seems the kernel image in /boot is about 1.25 mb. whereas the one in LM 9.0 is more like 800+ kb, big difference. Still haven't tried to sort this one out. Any help would be appreciated. In the meantime I suppose I could try to thin the kernel down by recompiling. Wonder why noone else (that I could find) has mentioned this as a problem, puzzle puzzle :?

Well, maybe I can get you started a little. I'm old and my memory isn't too good any more ;) If you can't find it mentioned on the mandrake site, don't feel too bad, it might still work. They are sometimes incomplete. Do a cat /proc/pci from a console to see if it is listed. I assume you have the modem card in a pci slot? Pull the kppp program up and click setup/modem/device, click device/ttyS0 if it is on comm 1 or ttyS1 for comm 2 etc. and click query modem on those, have you found it yet? Also query /dev/modem while in there. If you can't find it that way maybe you do need the intel driver and maybe it's not really a hardware modem? So if that's the case you will need to move the driver into a folder in maybe your home directory which you might want to create and call it something like 'modem' or whatever you wish.If it is a .tar or .tar.gz file you will need to open it up with (if it is .tar) 'tar -xvf (name of file) or if .tar.gz 'tar -xzvf (name of file) After you have opened the file it may create a directory and some other files, hopefully one will be a 'readme' to instruct you as to what you must to to install it and maybe edit some config files such as /etc/modules.conf and such. check 'man tar' for more info on dealing with such files. You might also do from a console 'dmesg | less to read the bootup hardware detection messages to see if the modem is mentioned. Hope some of this helps Larry

BooYah, If you are still having trouble or are not satified with what you have tried, do try ipkungfu. I like it because it is perfect for people like me who don't know ZIp about how to set up iptables by hand.:) www.linuxkungfu.org/ It is small and light and stealths everything and does not interfere with moving around on the web or restrick anything that I have noticed. Then drop over to pcflank and let it try to get in. However, I am using dial-up so don't know if there are any ASDL issues. Larry

I don't know if the following is pertinent to what you need or not. At any rate, I don't know about the keyboard issue :( I am running the 2.4.20 as well as the stock LM 2.4.19-16mdk kernel and am able to boot either/or using the Nvidia 4191 drivers. I believe (can't remember exactly) I tried the rpms first but needed to use the tarball to get Nvidia drivers to work with the new kernel. At the login prompt after booting with kernel 2.4.20 I ran the line below make SYSINCLUDE=(PATH-TO-RUNNING KERNEL)/include followed by the regulary make install of course and I was able to get into X with either kernel. I don't believe I saw this discussed/mentioned before so whether or not it is necessary in all cases, I don't know. A little input from others may be enlightening. Larry ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nvidia 'Readme' file: How to build the NV driver module using the os interface source kit. This directory contains the source code and header files for the parts of the NV driver that use the Linux kernel api. Since the Linux kernel does not support a binary driver interface, we provide for rebuilding these files on the target machine (or distribution) and then linking with the binary version of the NV kernel driver. $ make This will produce one of the following files depending on the system include directory used to do the build: NVdriver: which is the installable kernel driver module for single processor Linux systems If you want to build NVdriver for a system other than the compiling system, then you'll need to run the make as: $ make SYSINCLUDE=/src/kern/my-smp-kernel/include to generate an NVdriver that will work on the kernel whose include files are in /src/kern/my-smp-kernel/include. This kernel must have been completely configured (make menuconfig dep). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi All, Glad I ran into this thread :D I was prompted to check my P4PE (ASUS) w/hdparm and sure nuff no dma. Then I checked my ASUS P4B266 and I had dma support. So the confusing part is that I have LM 9.0 installed on BOTH computers and installed from the same disk. So how could it just be a kernel problem?? I would think it is a mb bios problem as some have mentioned above (lots of asus's mentioned :( ) But if that's the case, how did a kernel upgrade help?? Questions , questions -------pause pause............ So I checked into my bios (this is the P4PE board) and noticed when the drive is set to 'auto' the dma and pio options are greyed out. Changed to 'user' and they popped up nicely........but turned out there was no change , still 'operation not permitted' when doing the haparm -d1 thing. So now it lookes like chipset problem starting with anything after 845D. I didn't think the 'DMA Enabled' was specific to a chipset so am I wrong there? Maybe I should read some the above links, :? -----------pause---------- Ok, I did Sorry for all the uninformed rambling above. Thanks to _MAX_ who sent the Intel link.