[Bdi4emc-help] Install probs, bdi-4.30

Thu Dec 15 01:51:58 CET 2005

Hi all;

2 things, first I put a 40 watt light bulb in the box for heat, along 
with a thermostat that shuts it down at about 60F.

Then I just made 3 passes at re-installing bdi-4.30, without formatting 
the /usr partition.

First and second times I did it in text mode, and found what I'd 
consider a major bug in that procedure.  In text mode, after 
everything has been installed, it pops up the x config screen to see 
howto configure x.

Unforch, by then, the keyboard mapping is foo'd, bar'd & maybe even 
bazzed.  Keystrokes are shown on screen, exactly as they come out of 
the cable.  No mouse of course.  So the only thing to do is tap the 
reset button  Figuring it had re-installed grub by then, I removed the 
cd before I hit the reset button.  It rebooted, started a very low res 
X screen and brought up a login requestor after advising me that root 
logins were disallowed.  Which is fine I guess, but if root logins are 
disallowed, why hadn't it asked me for a regular user and his passwd 
yet?  Obviously, since it hadn't yet set that up, there was no valid 
user, and with root disabled, it was 3 finger time & re-install the 
2nd time.  Same scenario at the end, no keyboard mapping when it asked 
me for the screen setup.  Just semi garbled, 3 or 4 chars per keypress 
mess onscreen.

Reset time again, only this time let it do a graphical install, which 
goes all the way till nearly the end where its installing the kde 
windows manager, which gets to 50% and freezes the box.

I'll try it again tomorrow after memtest86 has run for a bit.

But the text installer should setup a username & passwd before it gets 
totally lost.  That way, if it upchucks again, I could simply login, 
su -, and get to fixing the problems.  Sensibly it seems like this 
should be the next step after configuring the network interface, but 
its not.

This motherboard, a Mach Speed, has a minimum cpu speed I guess, I 
cannot slow it down in the bios enough to make it say the cpu is a 
1400.  So it logs in on the post screen as a 1600 mhz athlon & I have 
NDI how much faster it might be able to run.  On the old mobo before 
it upchucked, it did run at 1400 ok.  And its running about 80F cooler 
on this board than it ever ran when it was on the old board.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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