Fear and Loathing in Computerland
A few weeks ago I started in on a new computer system.
Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-SLI motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 dual core cpu
NVIDIA 6600 GT graphics
Couple of 250 gig SATA hard drives
Optical ...yada yada.
First problem was that although the motherboard said I had a dual core cpu Fedora Core 4 didn't think so. I threw on Windows just to check and Windows also thought I had a single cpu.
Gigabyte said the motherboard was suitable for X2 dual core, what's up?
Nick Francesco of Sound Bytes fame has 2 repeating cures for computer problems.
1) Update the bios
2) Reinstall the O.S.
He was right with #1, there was an update for the bios only available at Gigabyte's Taiwan site and not at any mirrors and it's beta. But it worked and a reinstall of the O.S as per #2 worked. Tada!
After installing Fedora Core 4 I set up user accounts and the root configs and all is well. Fast machine!
I used 'yum update' and then installed the NVIDIA graphics driver, version 7676. All hell broke lose. The mouse started jumping all over the screen doing random clicks all on it's own. Screens opening and closing, fonts changing and colors flashing. Yikes.
I replaced the ps2 mouse with a usb mouse and rebooted. All was well for a few minutes until the keyboard repeats started to go crazy.
% rpm -Uvh would look like rrrrrrpppmmmmmm -------UUvvvvhhhhhh
Then the mouse went wacky again.
OK, I tried installing Kubuntu. Kubuntu was happy, happy but I don't really know the idiosyncrasies of Kubuntu and I don't want to learn right now. Plus I couldn't get a DVD to play smoothly. Did I mention that I also had this problem with Fedora Core 4?
I tried CentOS version 4.2 which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linus v4. It's a commercial OS and should be more stable than Fedora. I skipped the NVIDIA driver because I suspected it was the problem.
Well, the mouse was happy but the key repeats was still with me. I could and did turn off keyboard repeats and that was that. But I like keyboard repeats!
DVDs didn't play smoothly either. Things were kind of sluggish. Hummm, nothing in messages.
After a great deal of google'ing I found out that they (and they know who they are) broke the kernel. By default Fedora Core 4 uses the 2.6.11 kernel and I used this while setting up the system. After the yum upgrade I would have a 2.6.13 or 2.6.14 kernel and it has issues with SLI motherboards and X2 cpus. I thought it was NVIDIA because I did all at once but not so.
I reinstalled FC4. One thing I really hate about yum is that I can't configure it to ignore new kernels, it's all or nothing.
A co worker suggested apt-get and the 'dag' repository. I went to http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/
install the version of 'apt' found there and upgraded my new system with all upgrades, but not the kernel then, because I like to live dangerously, I installed the NVIDIA driver.
That’s it. It’s the kernel. Somewhere after the 2.6.11 kernel SLI and X2 support was broken. There are still problems with the 2.6.14 FC4 kernel and I have not found a patch yet. But currently my DVDs play fine and the keyboard and mouse are behaving themsleves.
