Temlakos has been having trouble with his card reader.
Slow down, breathe easily, you're not doing anything wrong (as far as I
can tell).
> At first it said something about not having something-or-other in
> place--I can't recall what, because when everything froze, I lost it
> all. I recall that it recognized the reader as a Lexar, but then kept
> saying that USB drivers were timing out. And then suddenly it poured out
> a lot of gibberish, ending in a string of hex codes that I can't
> possibly recall--ending with the phrase "Kernel panic" and a notice
> about "killing the interrupt handler." After that, my Caps Lock and Num
> Lock LED's started to flash, and the system would not respond to
> anything except a cold-turkey shutdown.
>
> Just tho show you how new I am at this game--and that some might say
> that Fedora Core was a poor choice for a total newcomer to Linux--I did
> not appreciate what a "kernel panic" was until you told me to proceed as
> I just did, and I read the above messages (as nearly as I can recall
> them).
>
> All right--so the kernel flies into a panic and shuts down its interrupt
> handler every time I connect the card reader. I assume that the other
> machine does the same thing. So how do I get the kernel *not* to panic?
You've got a kernel panic. Unix-like kernels Should Not Panic: you've
run into a kernel bug. (That means that it probably would happen on any
Linux).
The next question to ask is whether you've got Nvidia, ATi or VMware
drivers installed that *didn't* come with Fedora. If so, there's not much
that the Fedora or kernel communities can do to help you. All you can do
is report a bug to whoever provided those drivers.
If you haven't been installing binary-only drivers, then the next thing
to do is to enter a bug on bugzilla.fedora.us. They probably will want
you to provide one of those crash dumps: it isn't gibberish to them.
You should find that Ctrl + Page Up and Ctrl + Page Down still work:
these scroll back to let you see the rest of the text.
Do you have a digital camera? If so, I'd recommend taking photos of the
kernel panic, and transcribing them at leisure. If not, I'd recommend
an old-fashioned piece of techology known as a pencil and paper.
In your description, emphasise that it is reproducable.
In the meantime, I'm sorry, but there's not much you can do. It looks
like your card reader is not compatible with Fedora Core 1.
You might have more luck with Fedora Core 2: a lot of work has been done
in this area.
James.
--
E-mail address: james | Legacy (adj):
@westexe.demon.co.uk | an uncomplimentary computer-industry epithet that
| means 'it works'.
| -- Anthony DeBoer
