Re: amd 64 and linux

["Stephen J. Smoogen" <smooge@gmail.com>]

On 8/21/05, kaushal <kaushal@rocsys.com> wrote:
> hello list,
>            I have a 64 bit AMD Athlon xp machine with 64 bit Fedora core
> 3 installed .The cds have been purchased as a set of 8 cds including the
> sources.After installation what I find  is:

No matter what OS you decide upon, make sure that you are running an
up to date version of it. A lot of these problems can show up due to
older drivers on the machine. To better help, people would need to
know:

Brand of Computer
Motherboard:
CPU:
Video Card:
Memory:
Diskdrive:
Network (or settings for network)

>                                 1.The machine boots up VERY slowly.

This may be due to bad network settings or a fix that was in the initscripts.
>                                 2.Graphics display the previous windows shutdown screen if I reboot

That is a video card issue with whatever is in the machine. The driver
Linux is trying may be old or the card has been tweaked enough that it
isnt able to work as advertised by manufacturer (seen with some
Emachines). Once you know the video card, you may be able to get a
commercial version of the network drivers from the manufacturer (ATI
and Nvidia do this)

>                                 3.The machine runs very slow as if it were to be a 386 machine
> although have 256 MB ram (192 for programs and 64 for vga).Can I tune
> any proc entries and improve the performance safely?

This can be a lot of things.. 
1) BIOS settings or revision of BIOS. We fixed a couple of AMD boxes
by making sure the BIOS was up2date.
2) Misconfigured applications trying to get to a network that doesnt exist
3) Problems in applications that are fixed in updates.

>                                 4.Whenever I try to copy a cd from linux it fails everytime
> reporting some kind of seek errors,but the same cd would get copied in
> windows.Is there any default switch to cp which I have to override?
> 

No. if you are getting seek errors that is a kernel problem. The
kernel is getting errors from the CD-device that says "Bad disk".
Windows may either be ignoring those errors or tweaking other kernel
settings to get around them.

>                                 5.When I shutdown/init 0 the machine  it simply reboots.
>                         I suspect the drivers for my graphics is not
> present.Is it possible?

It can be a lot of issues. Again BIOS and motherboard items usually
were the 80% fix.

> Thanks in advance.
> 
> -kaushal.
> 
> -
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator