[Coco] Re: OT -- Linux hardware

[Lawrence Weeks]

Once upon a time (Sat Dec 20), David wrote:

> If you are booting into X, I'd remove that, and be sure I'm booting into
> console mode.  You could probably CRL-ALT-F? to go to a text window if X
> doesn't work, but it would be simpler to do that.

Just in case you don't know, you can boot Linux into single user mode
with an argument at boot time. Just append "single" as an argument
to the image name. This is trivial with LILO, less so with grub.

> I'd be sure my kernel didn't have anything in it that was specific
> to the old board that would be incompatible with the newer one. One
> thing is to be sure it is compiled to support your IDE controller -
> or whatever system that connects to your HD.

In general, Linux adapts to the actual hardware installed, so I
wouldn't worry about that. If you have IDE support compiled in the
kernel, it should work with any vendor's IDE implementation. I should
specify parallel IDE now that there is serial though. Serial is
different. In the Linux kernel configuration, the different options
for different IDE implementations add features/bugfixes, not the
core support.

Now, SCSI is a different issue entirely... CPU too.

And, back to the core issue of the bad motherboard, what vintage
is this board? It may be one of the many, many, many motherboards
bitten by the bad batch of capacitors. I had to replace two because
of that. Replacements of the same generation, even different
models/brands, may have the same problem, as they were likely all
manufactured in the same time frame with the same parts. I just
upgraded the failed servers from dual PIII to dual Athlon MP to avoid
the potential pain.

Larry
-- 
Lawrence Weeks                                    lweeks at anabasis.net
Anabasis Consulting Ltd