This is starting to get ridiculous...

[tyme]

did you do md5sum checks on your cds? sorry if this was already asked, but i've never seen or heard anyone experiencing all the issues you're describing, without there being something wrong with either the CDs or the hard drive. and since you've ruled out the hard drive.....

[Guest ndeb]

greeneggs,

Its a little harsh to expect u to be patient given ur long and bad experience. But if u still want to try, I would suggest this:

 

1. Configure ur system to not start X at boot (run-level 3).

 

2. Do not choose KDE/GNOME as ur desktop but try the simplest desktop called TWM. Just create a file called .xinitrc in ur home directory and put this line

/usr/X11R6/bin/twm

in it.

 

3. Login from the text console. Start X using the command

startx

 

4. If TWM starts properly, a right click on the desktop will pop up a menu.

 

Let me know what happens.

[Pzatch]

What was the error?

 

Never shut off/reboot linux without using the shutdown command. If you don't do it right you get a whole list off problems. And you look to be finding each and everyone.

The first problem is that when you don't use the shutdown command you are not unmounting anything in the computer. This can screwup the whole file system. Thats why its asking for the integrity check.

[Guest greeneggs]

Hi Folks

 

Well, just a few things here. First of all, I have been at the doc's office for some blood tests for kidney disease, diabetes, prostate tests, etc. Then I come home and it's back on the meds again (which make me very dizzy and nausious) and tommorow, I go in for an ultrasound of my...er...well, nevermind. Anyway, let's just suffice it to say that I don't feel well at all and in the middle of the night (last night) I was jolted awake. It was weird and scary. Just sort of like BOOM!! and there I was totally awake. Maybe I was dreaming or even had an REM seizure or something but it freaked me out REALLY badly and I have no idea what it was. I a few days, I go back to see my...hmmm...well, I guess noone really wants to hear about my personal problems and since this is a Linux board. Anyway, thank's for at least listening and letting an old man rant a little bit.

 

Ok, I went ahead and did a complete format but this time I installed RedHat 9.0. I had to do it people because I've got too much going on right now (my health, taxes, business, house is a mess, not feeling well, etc) to deal with all this and to learn a lot of new things. Sure, I would prefer MDK - I just think it's a lot more fun and community-oriented than RH but there you have it. I hope you all don't mind if I pop in once in awhile and ask an RH question or two and as for BVC...I just went through my PM's and read them (not sure when they were written) and I appreciate your help and concern. I want to thank all of you for going that extra mile for me. Maybe when MDK 9.2 comes out, I'll have another go at it :D

 

PS: Please say a prayer or two for me and my health - I'm really going through a lot lately and may need surgery.

 

- Peace

[Cannonfodder]

By all means hang whenever, we have an "Other Distro" forum right? Another thing to mess with when things slow down is run two distros (Redhat/Mandrake) so you can work while figuring things out.. I just made a partition set (/, /usr, /home) for each distro while sharing a swap and a /share partition..

[Guest fubar::chi]

Sure, I would prefer MDK - I just think it's a lot more fun and community-oriented than RH but there you have it. I hope you all don't mind if I pop in once in awhile and ask an RH question or two and as for BVC...I just went through my PM's and read them (not sure when they were written) and I appreciate your help and concern. I want to thank all of you for going that extra mile for me. Maybe when MDK 9.2 comes out, I'll have another go at it :D 

 

PS: Please say a prayer or two for me and my health - I'm really going through a lot lately and may need surgery.

 

- Peace

Hey use whatever's good for you buddy, we don't discriminate here :).

As for that prayer it's been sent and I'm sure already recieved :wink: Just have a little faith and you should come through just fine :D

[Guest greeneggs]

Hi

 

After many days of problems, I reinstalled MDK 9.1 under a variety of configurations. The install was a success but I decided to do a little detective work which lead me to the bugzilla section of XFree's website where I soon discovered from reading a large number of bug reports from people who were experiencing the same problem. This problem first appeared in XFree86-4.2.2 but is not in earlier version such as the one in MDK 9.0. The solution is to downgrade to an earlier version of XFree but I'm afraid I don't know how to do this and if I first uninstalled my current version of XFree, would'nt this screw my windowing system up?

 

How do I do this?

 

Thank's

[Guest ndeb]

This problem first appeared in XFree86-4.2.2 but is not in earlier version such as the one in MDK 9.0.

There is no XFree86-4.2.2. Officially, the versions are:

4.2.0 (in LM8.2)

4.2.1 (in LM9.0)

4.3.0 (in LM9.1)

 

The install was a success but I decided to do a little detective work which lead me to the bugzilla section of XFree's website where I soon discovered from reading a large number of bug reports from people who were experiencing the same problem.

Which bug numbers are these ? Have you reported ur bug in the XFree's bugzilla ?

 

The solution is to downgrade to an earlier version of XFree but I'm afraid I don't know how to do this and if I first uninstalled my current version of XFree, would'nt this screw my windowing system up?

Its very likely since X-4.3.0 uses a very different style of font rendering (using font-config etc.) compared to X-4.2.x. But if this bug is driver-specifc, you can just downgrade the driver.

[Guest greeneggs]

This problem first appeared in XFree86-4.2.2 but is not in earlier version such as the one in MDK 9.0.

There is no XFree86-4.2.2. Officially, the versions are:

4.2.0 (in LM8.2)

4.2.1 (in LM9.0)

4.3.0 (in LM9.1)

 

The install was a success but I decided to do a little detective work which lead me to the bugzilla section of XFree's website where I soon discovered from reading a large number of bug reports from people who were experiencing the same problem.

Which bug numbers are these ? Have you reported ur bug in the XFree's bugzilla ?

 

The solution is to downgrade to an earlier version of XFree but I'm afraid I don't know how to do this and if I first uninstalled my current version of XFree, would'nt this screw my windowing system up?

Its very likely since X-4.3.0 uses a very different style of font rendering (using font-config etc.) compared to X-4.2.x. But if this bug is driver-specifc, you can just downgrade the driver.

 

Sorry, I meant XFree 4.2.1. No, I hav'nt reported the error yet because until now, I had never even been to the XFree website and don't even know my way around there yet. It does'nt really matter anyway now because already I'm starting to have problems again (ie; Mozilla web forms won't accept data after one use, cursor freezing on screen, etc). I guess this is the point where I'm supposed to get disgusted and just give up. I'll admit, it's tempting but I really would like to get this sorted out and RedHat seems to have very little support for KDE and there's a lot of programs I can't get to work in it. ::sigh::

[Guest ndeb]

No, I hav'nt reported the error yet because until now, I had never even been to the XFree website and don't even know my way around there yet.

What video card do you have ? Please post the output of

cat /proc/pci

[Guest greeneggs]

No, I hav'nt reported the error yet because until now, I had never even been to the XFree website and don't even know my way around there yet.

What video card do you have ? Please post the output of

cat /proc/pci

 

I should mention that each time I've installed MDK 9.1 and get the summary window at the end showing all the different configuration settings, there is always a message in red lettering saying that the graphics have not been configured so at this point, I usually just go in and select whatever happens to be listed as the default/generic and complete the installation. I'm still not sure this is the problem though because what happens sometimes is that I will boot up and see a login shell but no graphical desktop/windowing system and no matter what I try, nothing happens - almost as if Xfree has been completely obliterated or something. Anyway, here are the results from the code you provided and thank's for your help...

 

cat /proc/pci

PCI devices found:

 Bus  0, device   0, function  0:

   Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8361 [KLE133] Host Bridge (rev 0).

     Master Capable.  Latency=8.

     Prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe0000000 [0xe3ffffff].

 Bus  0, device   1, function  0:

   PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8361 [KLE133] AGP Bridge (rev 0).

     Master Capable.  No bursts.  Min Gnt=12.

 Bus  0, device   7, function  0:

   ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super South] (rev 64).

 Bus  0, device   7, function  1:

   IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586B PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 6).

     Master Capable.  Latency=32.

     I/O at 0xc000 [0xc00f].

 Bus  0, device   7, function  2:

   USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (rev 26).

     IRQ 5.

     Master Capable.  Latency=32.

     I/O at 0xc400 [0xc41f].

 Bus  0, device   7, function  3:

   USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB (#2) (rev 26).

     IRQ 5.

     Master Capable.  Latency=32.

     I/O at 0xc800 [0xc81f].

 Bus  0, device   7, function  4:

   Bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 [Apollo Super ACPI] (rev 64).

 Bus  0, device   7, function  5:

   Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C686 AC97 Audio Controller (rev 80).

     IRQ 11.

     I/O at 0xcc00 [0xccff].

     I/O at 0xd000 [0xd003].

     I/O at 0xd400 [0xd403].

 Bus  0, device  11, function  0:

   Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 16).

     IRQ 11.

     Master Capable.  Latency=32.  Min Gnt=32.Max Lat=64.

     I/O at 0xd800 [0xd8ff].

     Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe8000000 [0xe80000ff].

 Bus  0, device  15, function  0:

   Communication controller: Lucent Microelectronics 56k WinModem (rev 1).

     IRQ 11.

     Master Capable.  No bursts.  Min Gnt=252.Max Lat=14.

     Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe8001000 [0xe80010ff].

     I/O at 0xdc00 [0xdc07].

     I/O at 0xe000 [0xe0ff].

 Bus  1, device   0, function  0:

   VGA compatible controller: Trident Microsystems CyberBlade/i1 (rev 0).

     IRQ 10.

     Master Capable.  Latency=32.

     Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe5800000 [0xe5ffffff].

     Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe6000000 [0xe601ffff].

     Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe5000000 [0xe57fffff].

[root@localhost teddy]#

[Steve Scrimpshire]

Hi

 

The solution is to downgrade to an earlier version of XFree but I'm afraid I don't know how to do this and if I first uninstalled my current version of XFree, would'nt this screw my windowing system up?

 

How do I do this?

 

Thank's

 

I'm not 100% sure because I've never actually tried it, but from doing

 

man rpm, I see this option:

 

 --oldpackage

             Allow an upgrade to replace a newer package with an

             older one.

 

So, that sounds like you could do

 

rpm -Uvh --oldpackage <<older version of XFree>>

 

But, I'm not sure about this. Judging from the fact that you just now said that you always choose whatever is selected by default for your video card that doesn't get setup at install, I'd definitely say it is a hardware issue.

[Guest greeneggs]

Hi

 

I failed to mention this earlier but it hit me just now as I was thinking back a little ways.

 

The very first time I ever installed MDK 9.1, everything worked great for 2-3 days and I was one happy cookie. Then, I decided it was time to load up on some games so I went to the FTP site (here) and downloaded/installed maybe 10-15 different games. It was about 5 minutes after I had finished installing these games that this whole problem began (ie; HD cooking like crazy, everything slowing down, unable to bring up KDE, command-line shell, etc).

 

So, I did a format and a second install and since I had saved a few of these games on my zip disk, I decided to reinstall them right away (remember, the first time I installed these games 2-3 days after a trouble-free experience with MDK 9.1).

 

The games/programs I installed were Freecraft (a Linux Warcraft clone) and Enigma (a puzzle-type game). I also installed the following...

 

Flash-plugin (flash support for Linux), j2re (Java support for Linux), Povray, povray-common, Realplayer8, Hpbulider-wine and hpbuilder (IBM's Homepage Builder software for Linux).

 

Sure enough, about 2-3 minutes later my HD starts cooking, everything slows to a crawl and when I rebooted, I had nothing but a command-line shell asking me for my username and password and although I tried everything, KDE was apparently TOAST!.

 

I read somewere (but can't remember) that some guy had installed Warcraft under Wine and had some sort of problem with Glade drivers and his system ended up taking a dump. I don't know if my problem has anything to do with this but it makes me wonder.

 

What do you people think?. Am I onto something here?. Is there any connection?. Is there anyway a game like Warcraft (or any other Linux program) could kill KDE so that it would'nt come up - even using xtart or startx, etc?.

 

Thank's

[Guest greeneggs]

Ok, here's an update (MDK seems to be working for now)...

 

I surmized that what was happening was that because of a faulty video card, MDK was switching over to the text mode. This is why for no apparent reason, I would suddenly lose KDE, Gnome, XFree, etc. This also makes sense in light of the fact that many of you were suggesting that I should check my video card and the fact that I was getting an "unable to probe monitor" message while installing RedHat and a "no graphics card selected" error in the summary window of MDK toward the end of the installation.

 

So, I ditched my old Apollo video card and put in a Trident one. I then loaded up RedHat and no longer got the error. I immediately removed the RedHat CD before it had a chance to actually install and popped in the MDK 9.1 CD. I went through the entire installation without a single problem and did not receive the graphics error this time (much to my delight!).

 

However, when I removed the third CD and rebooted MDK and all the scrolling text began going down the screen as it was loading, it suddenly froze at the line that read...

 

"loading latin.inc"

 

I waited...and waited...not wanting to be impatient. However, once I passed the 5-minute mark, I decided to hit the reset button on my PC. In the past, I've always just shut it down completely using the on/off switch when the machine would freeze up and then I'd get one of those "integrity check" options and the more I'd run it, the more errors would accumulate until I would end up with quite a mess on my hands. By using the reset button instead, I did'nt get the integrity check thing and everything loaded up nicely.

 

Conclusion: the problem appears to be corrected now. The freeze during boot-up makes me kind of nervous and the jury is still out on wether the problem has been solved or if I'm going to get all excited, soend days customizing and configuring everything, installing all the programs I like - only to have it take another dump on me.

 

If this happens and after everything I've already been through with this, I'll probably need a couple of tranquilizers.

 

Only time will tell and both fingers (and toes) will be kept crossed until the verdict comes in :D

 

- Peace

[Ixthusdan]

A bad power supply can make any piece in the system look bad. That is why the problems have no pattern and keep changing.