Guest stevn_s Posted October 7, 2002 Report Share Posted October 7, 2002 I am using Mandrake 9.0. Whenever I try to install software or change/add a software source, I experience a very long delay before anything happens. I have determined that the slowness is being caused by my Promise Ultra100 IDE Controller card. I have installed Mandrake with the exact same configuration minus the Ultra100 card and software management worked perfectly. The IDE card doesnt appear to be causing any other problems. Mandrake sees the drives attached to the card and I can browse the contents of the drives attached. It appears there is alot of CDRom activity at the time of the slowness, as if it is continuously being searched. The CDRom drive is not attached to the IDE card. This activity does not happen when the IDE card is not attached. The simple answer would of course be "don't use the card!". Unfortunately I have to. Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this. My current config: Supermicro 370DDE dual P3 1ghz 1 gig ram Sound Blaster Live Platnum GeForce 2 Ultra IDE 0 - Quantum 10 gig - Master Quantum 10 gig - Slave IDE 1 - Maxtor 40 gig - Master HP CD-Writer 8210 - Slave IDE Card - IDE 1 Maxtor 40 gig - Master Zip100 - Slave Mandrake is on the Quantum 10 gig slave on IDE 0. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Steven Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtweidmann Posted October 7, 2002 Report Share Posted October 7, 2002 I have a raid controller built into my motherboard, and it takes ages for urpm to open uop in MDK 9. I do not know if its the RAID controller causing it. (Can't exactly remove the card). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stevn_s Posted October 8, 2002 Report Share Posted October 8, 2002 I tried a couple of things to get around this problem and found that there are 2 things that can be done: 1) You can remove the entries for all CDs in your software sources. OR 2) copy the "RPMS" directory from each CD to its own location on your harddrive, you will also need to copy the "base" directory from CD 1. Then add a software source pointing to each of these directories and their corresponding hdlist.cz files from the "base" directory. I know that neither of these is a true fix, but it make Software Installs, Removals, and Updates work without having to wait 5 minutes between each step. If anyone finds a better work around I would love to hear it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glitz Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 Is it really checking the CDROM drives? Hmmmmm, I smell supermount problems. I do not have any raid controllers and it is also slow for me. In fact, a lot of people have noticed this. If I were using 9.0 right now I would try disabling supermount. Glitz. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Stumbles Posted October 11, 2002 Report Share Posted October 11, 2002 Is it really checking the CDROM drives? Hmmmmm, I smell supermount problems. I do not have any raid controllers and it is also slow for me. In fact, a lot of people have noticed this. If I were using 9.0 right now I would try disabling supermount. Glitz. IMO it is supermount. I commented out those entries in the /etc/fstab and created the appropriate entries for the cdroms and floppy. Does not take near as long now. You might have to create the needed syslinks and such depending on the hardware (cdrom drives) you have. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glitz Posted October 12, 2002 Report Share Posted October 12, 2002 I tried disabling supermount and now it is faster than LM8.1. It takes about 5 seconds to pop up! I simply did: supermount -i disable and rebooted the system (you have to reboot the system for the new setting to take effect). Glitz. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Stumbles Posted October 12, 2002 Report Share Posted October 12, 2002 I tried disabling supermount and now it is faster than LM8.1. It takes about 5 seconds to pop up! I simply did: supermount -i disable and rebooted the system (you have to reboot the system for the new setting to take effect). Glitz. If I recall is this not the 2nd or 3rd time Mandrake has tried to dole out supermount? Never dawned on me that it could be disabled. I just hacked those lines in /etcc/fstab and monkeyed with some sym links. Next time I will remember that disable switch. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stevn_s Posted October 18, 2002 Report Share Posted October 18, 2002 I reinstalled Mandrake 9 last night and tried disabling supermount to see if that solved my problem. Sure enough, it worked. Thanks for the suggestion, now I dont have to waste almost 2 gigs of HD space housing the contents of the install CDs. Now my next question... is there another way to auto mount media? I noticed during the installation that there were 2 optional components that could be installed that say they do auto mounting. I beleive one of them was autofs but I cant remember what the other was called. Will either perform the same automounting function? If not, is anyone aware of another alternative? Thanks again for all your help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Counterspy Posted October 18, 2002 Report Share Posted October 18, 2002 You found correctly that the problem is supermount. It is broken. If you want auto mounting, you can copy autofs from your install disks. Note that it requires command line configuration but once done is highly reliable. If you take advantage of search you would have found a post about supermount being broken, although not with the consequences you have described. COunterspy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cardassianscot Posted October 30, 2002 Report Share Posted October 30, 2002 Autofs is definitely the way to go. I had all sorts of problems with supermount when changing floppy disks. However, you will have to configure it manually. The changes I made were to edit /etc/auto.master to make the timeout 1 second for auto.misc. Then comment out the appropriate lines from /etc/auto.misc for my floppy disk and CD. I also had to add umask=0 to the options for the floppy disk so that all users could have write access to the disk (only in Mandrake 9 though, not 8.2). You also have to create /misc , which for some reason is not created by the install package. Then I create links to the standard mount points using ln -s /misc/floppy /mnt/floppy etc., altough this is mainly because I already have a lot of programs and links for lots of users setup to use /mnt/floppy . One word of warning, autofs only creates a mount point if you access it, ie., I use /misc/floppy to access my floppy drive but if I do ls /misc there is no entry for floppy, I have to either type ls /misc/floppy or cd there. This isn't much of a problem for command line use but might throw you if you usually access your files through konqueror or another graphical file browser. You either have to type in the directory in the address bar or use links (which cause a slight pause as you access a directory with a link as it checks wether you have a cd or floppy in your drives). Just a quick reminder autofs works unlike supermount. Hope this helps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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