Re: 64 bit downloading and kernel upgrade problem
On Mon, 20 Nov 2006 18:42:21 +0530 (IST), Arvind Marathe wrote
> Hi all,
> Few months back, i first started fiddling around with linux and debian.
> Now that i am a little more experienced and have got some free time,
> i decided to make my system more efficient. Earlier i had installed
> a lot of unnecessary things (whole of gnome and kde etc) and it was
> not working at full efficiency. My motherboard is intel915 with 3.4G
> processor and 1G RAM. So initially i did a clean install by
> downloading minimum bootable i386 stable version from net, copying
> it on a cd and installing it. I only loaded x-window system and it
> was quite fast. Now since hyperthreading is allowed on my system, i
> was told ia64 debian version should work and also give better
> performance, so i downloaded that from the same site. However when i
> copy this on a cd and try to boot, it says:
>
> Reboot and select proper boot device
> or Insert Boot Media in selected boot device
>
> This happened for both netinst image and business card image. Any ideas
> why this would be happening? I would like to upgrade to 64 bit if
> possible. (I downloaded both i386 and ia64 images from the site:
> http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/
> but i386 version works, ia64 doesn't)
Hello,
Right, ia64 won't work because its designed for Intel's Itanium chips.
Completely different from Intel's Pentium lineup.
What you want is AMD64. (of course your CPU must support em64t)
Intel's Pentium chips 600 series or higher (and some 500 series) should have
em64t support I think.
http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/
> So i went back to i386 and decided to upgrad my kernel because
> 'dmesg' always warned that 'memory usage was not optimal, only 896M
> would be used, upgrade kernel.' I used 'apt-get install' to install
> appropriate kernel version 2.6.x (earlier was 2.4.x) but when i try
> to boot using this version, i get 'kernel panic' message...also it
> shows some scsi disk errors, but i have no scsi disks. The entries
> in /boot/grub/menu.1st seem fine (i.e. it shows /dev/hda1 for root
> filesystem which is what i have). Is there anything else i need to
> do? I did try some things suggested online but didn't work.
>
> So basically i need guidance on two things:
> 1> Can i use 64 bit version on my machine? would that improve performance?
> 2> How to upgrade kernel?
Sounds like you have SATA disks. On kernel 2.4 they will show has /dev/hdx
devices. With 2.6, those same drives will now appear as /dev/sdx devices.
You'll have to update your /etc/fstab and grub otherwise / can't be mounted.
You could consider re-installing from a sarge installer, even an etch
installer for either i386 or amd64. These installers should give you the
option to install with a 2.6.x kernel.
Cheers,
Mike
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