The Point of my story is that I DID eventually run a memory test before attempting an install and discovered that the RAM had errors-  which is USUALLY the answer when you have intermittent undiagnosable failure. I went to the corsair helpdesk (http://www.corasir.com/helpdesk)  and answered a few quick questions; they accept a failed memory test as grounds for replacement under their lifetime guarantee, so I expect an RMA and a new chip rather soon. I think if this works out and my Mythbox runs smoothly again I’m going to share some good Christmas tidings with Cecil. (Paypal style!)

 The symptoms were after a clean install of Fedora Core 6, and/or Red Hat 5 ( RHEL 5 ), the initial boot would hang at random places. Viewing the verbose output showed an error like:
  * Fatal Error Inserting apci_cpufreq 
  *  no such device acpi-cpufreq.ko
but NOT as the last lines of output -the kernel continues to load until it crashes, allowing this text to scroll off the screen.

WAIT! All of the following about architecture is PROBABLY correct, but i found a simpler solution to the problem. All I did was enter interactive startup (“I” on boot) and select “N” for irqbalance; i eventually removed it from startup, and now i’m problem free! 

The deal is, the i586 kernel is not compatible with multi-threads, and crashes on boot. Here’s the solution (i think) i reached:

1. Use the fedora cd to boot into rescue mode (make sure your installation is mounted).
2. Chroot into your install by typing “chroot /mnt/sysimage”
3. Check your kernel architechture by typing rpm -q kernel –qf ‘%{ARCH}\n’
4. If your architechture is i586, this upgrade might work for you!
5. type this: yum install kernel-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6.i686
6. with the new kernel installed, you should be able to boot, just to be safe, type “startx” to log into the x server as root, and run updates (you could do this from the command line too, but i was desperate to see x11!)
7. Restart and -HOPEFULLY- Fedora will boot properly.. this fix should also work for Red Hat 5.

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• SL7PM

 Anyway, the configuration is what i wanted to talk about! I previously had 10 partitions, a 150 GB partition for XP, and 10 x 10 GB partitions for various linux distros. The big change I made is to commit to working on a few major distros and focusing a little less on checking out new distros.

 The new configuration is:
100 GB for Windows XP – I think i will continue to shrink this as I get away from Windows.
20 GB for Ubuntu – currently as Feisty Beta.
20 GB for Red Hat – because I really don’t have much experience with it.
20 GB for Suse – Again with the variety, Suse is such a strong distro, you just can’t ignore it.
20 GB for Knoppix – Another Debian distro, but it’s quite different from Ubuntu.
35 GB for “Documents” – part of my getting away from XP means migrating my data to an OS independent drive.

The plan is to get into a routine of booting into a different OS every day until I really get a good gut feeling for what distro executes what task most efficiently.

I’m sort of depressed to realize that I’m shifting gears away from pure programming and into webmastering, but I won’t sweat it – I am used to allowing myself to switch gears on a monthly basis.

I’m going to spend the rest of the evening with PEAR. Maybe I’ll talk about it tomorrow. I’m noticing that while I’m creating a site to generate traffic, I’m not using any php in the page… I guess that makes sense- my biggest goal is to generate traffic, not to provide the perfect piece of information.

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• 48 hours archives phpbb
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