laptop problems
I just installed bo on a Fujitsu Lifebook 535Tx. It's working, but there are
a couple of glitches I'd like to solve.
Initially, I couldn't get Linux to load from the boot floppy (or anywhere
else). At first I thought this had to do with shadow RAM, since the
installation instructions say to disable shadow RAM, but the Lifebook's BIOS
setup doesn't provide any way to do that. But with some experimenting, I
discovered that telling the BIOS to disable both primary and secondary cache,
I was able to get Linux to load, and all went well after that.
Now, even though this seems to work, I have some questions:
1) Does telling the BIOS to disable L1 and L2 cache have any affect on Linux?
I would guess not, since Linux doesn't tend to pay any attention to the BIOS,
and since I haven't yet noticed any performance degradation (Win95, on the
other hand, is REALLY slow with this setting).
2) Why was this preventing Linux from loading?
3) What affect does not disabling shadow RAM? Does it just decrease the RAM
available to Linux (/proc/meminfo does seem to report about 1.5 MB less than
16 MB I'm supposed to have)? Or can it cause more serious problems.
4) Is there any way to disable shadow RAM, if the BIOS setup doesn't offer it
as an option? Is there any way to reclaim the lost RAM?
Another curiosity: When I went to run fips to shrink the win95 partition, I
found, instead of just one large partition, there were four partitions: The
first was almost the full 2 GB, the second and third were empty (zero length),
and the fourth was 4 MB, but of "unknown" type. I was a little worried that
some win95 feature was using that last partition, so I was afraid to delete
it. Luckily I was able to shrink the first partition and put Linux swap and
native partitions as the second and third, and leave the fourth alone.
I can live with the loss of 4 MB of my hard disk if I have to, but I'd like to
know why it's there. Does anyone know of anything might be using it? If it's
something in win95, is there anyway to find out?
I had thought this 4th partition might be used by the "Save to Disk" option
for the suspend function. But win95 claims it uses a file in the main
partition (I think).
Thanks.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
David S. Zelinsky
dsz@alumni.caltech.edu
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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