I've been happily running Debian/Sarge on my Athlon 1400, Giganyte GS-7@748-L motherboard, 512 Mbytes RAM. Following a power failure, I a) Replaced CPU fan b) added a further 512 Mbytes RAM for a Giggle total. On reboot, Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird (my primar email client) all segfault on starting. Worse, parts of KDE (eg Konqueror and Kkmail) also crash randomly with segfaults. Surmising some corruption I applied 70 Mbytes or so of updates to no effect. I'm pretty sure I installed Epiphany and that it also doesn't work. This Debian system has been seriously mistreated over time; I suspect I originaly copies ~summer from a Valhalla system. Since I had 80 Mbytes or so of disk, I decided to install fc3. True to form I copied ~summer from Sarge. Well, here a crash there a crash. Actually, figuring that out wasn't as simple as it should be; some fartherless soul thinks sending error messages to /dev/null a fine idea, and I'm not sure that I checked that everything's the same. Some is, though, right down to segaulting in the same scripts. Somewhere I began to suspect RAM so I ran two or three passes with memtest86 (from the FC3 DVD) with no errors. That left corruption in ~summer so I spect some time trying to find common config files used by the failing programs in ~summer. Couldn't see anything so finally I created ~john and tried that. That also fails, and there is no chance of pollution of the FC3 system with stuff from Sarge. So... Is anyone running FC3 in 1 Gbyte RAM on IA32? Does anyone else have any ideas? Here's the short-form list of the hardware: Glider:~# lspci 0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 746 Host (rev 10) 0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SG86C202 0000:00:02.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS963 [MuTIOL Media IO] (rev 25) 0000:00:02.1 SMBus: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]: Unknown device 0016 0000:00:02.5 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] 0000:00:02.7 Multimedia audio controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] Sound Controller (rev a0) 0000:00:03.0 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.0 Controller (rev 0f) 0000:00:03.1 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.0 Controller (rev 0f) 0000:00:03.3 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 2.0 Controller 0000:00:04.0 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 PCI Fast Ethernet (rev 90) 0000:00:09.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Triones Technologies, Inc. HPT366/368/370/370A/372 (rev 01) 0000:00:09.1 Unknown mass storage controller: Triones Technologies, Inc. HPT366/368/370/370A/372 (rev 01) 0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV5M64 [RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro] (rev 15) Glider:~# That aside, there are two further critical barriers to my use of FC on the Atlhon: 1. These work from Sarge to FC3 and Nahant: 8634 ? S 10:33 /etc/X11/X -query kookaburra :2 8651 ? S 1:47 /etc/X11/X -query dugong :1 8671 ? S 0:01 /etc/X11/X -query Thylacine.demo.room :3 8687 ? S 0:00 /etc/X11/X -query Quokka.demo.room :5 Actually, Quokka is a Sun Ultrasparc running Debian/Woody. They do not work from FC3 on that machine (Glider). There are no messages about why on Glider to say why, and the others say: Dec 19 15:54:36 kookaburra gdm[2878]: gdm_child_action: Aborting display Glider.demo.room:1 Dec 19 15:57:41 kookaburra gdm[2878]: gdm_child_action: Aborting display Glider.demo.room:2 2. I switch virtual consoles often. I regularly switch between my GUI desktop to a VC (quite likely I have six in use, some running screen). This works as epected on Debian/Sarge, but I have serious video corruption on FC3: not always, but once it starts I can only clear it with a reboot. I't clearly based on what is supposed to be on the screen; VC1 with the boot messages has more than the others, and all respond to the keyboard. I think (I have seen this before) the problem will not occur if I boot with VGA=6, but I've not tried that yet. I'm looking forward to any handy hints regarding any of these. To the list pls so others can comment. -- Cheers John Summerfield tourist pics: http://environmental.disaster.cds.merseine.nu/
