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Re: Installed for the first time, strange problems



> On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 05:50, Sam wrote:
>> I just installed Debian for the first time on my Power Mac 6500.
>> I put on a few packages, including the 2.4.28-powerpc woody kernel image.
>> But now the strangest things are happening.
>> Sometimes when I am in enlightenment it will just freeze up.  Moving the 
>> mouse and pressing keys does nothing.  The transmit light on the ethernet 
>> card flashes every so often, but pinging the machine from the other one 
>> (two machine ethernet using crossover cable) does not work.
>> And other times I get an "Oops" message for no apparent reason.  This 
>> happens often during the shutdown process.
>> Upon occasion after I type my login and password into xdm, the little 
>> "opening session for user storm" will appear on the xconsole, and then 
>> one of two strange things will happen.  Sometimes it will almost 
>> instantly print the closing session for user storm message.  Other times 
>> it won't seem to do anything.  The really strange part is that the "xdm" 
>> processes owned by storm refuse to die, even with kill -9 from a root 
>> login on tty1.  Even with a "shutdown now" and then hitting control-D to 
>> start things up again.
>> And, most recently, I started up, logged in, opened an Eterm, and tried 
>> to use netcat.  It died with an illegal instruction.  Then I tried ssh.  
>> Same.  Neither seemed to do anything before printing "Illegal 
>> Instruction".
>> What's going on?  What can I do?
>
> Sounds like either a kernel or a hardware problem. The fact that most
> other people don't seem to experience the same problems with the same
> kernel points towards the hardware I'm afraid - might be faulty RAM or
> something. 

Sounds scary...
I booted up into single user mode and ran memtest.  It went through four 
passes without errors, then I got bored and killed it.
It only tested just under 50MB though, even though I have 96MB... more on 
that to come.

Is there any way I can have the kernel load in a different location so I 
can test the memory the kernel is currently in?  (I am using BootX)

Why can it only around 50MB?  I'd think it could get more than that.

> Anything interesting in the kernel output?

Well I've never run anything unix-like on my own computer before, just 
used other people's, so it's all interesting ;)
There were a few things I thought might be relevant or errors:

Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: Memory BAT mapping: BAT2=64Mb, BAT3=32Mb,
residual
: 0Mb

[as I said, I have 96MB of memory, and it just happens to be a 64MB 
module and a 32MB module, I suppose that's what that means.]

Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: Linux version 2.4.18-powerpc
(root@voltaire) (gcc
version 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease)) #1 Mon Jun 9 01:31:09 UTC
2003

[that's the version of course]

[...]

Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: Memory: 93704k available (1620k kernel
code, 1044k
 data, 280k init, 0k highmem)

[that doesn't add up to 96MB, does it?]

[...]

Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: PCI: Probing PCI hardware
Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: PCI:00:10.0: Resource 0: f3000000-f307ffff
(f=200)
Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: PCI:00:12.0: Resource 0: 81000000-81ffffff
(f=200)
Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: PCI:00:0e.0: Resource 0: 00000400-0000047f
(f=101)
Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: PCI:00:0e.0: Resource 1: 80800000-8080007f
(f=200)
Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: PCI:00:12.0: Resource 1: 00000400-000004ff
(f=101)
Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 1 of
device 0
0:12.0
Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: PCI:  parent is c02fa030:
00000000-007fffff (f=100
)

[that seemed odd, I'm not sure if it's a problem though]

[...]
Jun 14 21:14:36 Wakko kernel: ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for
PIO modes
; override with idebus=xx

[I don't know if that's right, but if it was wrong I think I'd probably 
have found out pretty quick since my root is /dev/hda6]



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