Linux won't run!

asbokid

fwor wrote: »

Lots of very good advice, but one comment on the above: they introduced a completely new Hardware Abstraction Layer in Ubuntu (and hence probably also in anything else Debian-based) a while back - IIRC from Ubuntu 10.04 onward - and my personal experience is that this does seem to make it harder to get running on some older hardware.

That's strange. What was the hardware? Sounds awful!

The new udev device manager relies on a loadable kernel driver module, but udev (and HAL before it) are basically userspace daemon processes, for supporting plug and play devices. It's easy to stop the HAL or udev daemon and any other suspect daemon from running, by choosing an interactive boot, and saying 'no' at the interactive prompt that asks whether to run each of the system V initscripts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_%28software%29

Surprisingly, installing an older version and then dist-upgrading to the current worked for me, but it's a bit tedious as (AFAIK) you have to go through all intervening releases. Still might be worth a try though if nothing else works.

Sounds very painful!

The general rule is to first find a kernel that works and which can get you to a text-based shell. You then look at the configuration of that working kernel to discover why it works where other kernels failed.

I would start by disabling all the unnecessary chaff in the BIOS, and choosing a fail-safe default BIOS configuration to see if that solves the problem.

Then I would use various kernel boot options to disable troublesome kernel modules. Here is an abridged list of kernel boot options...

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions

There is probably a Linux Live CD containing lots of different kernels, and allowing you to choose one of perhaps dozens of different kernel images, each tweaked slightly differently to resolve these sorts of problems.

Worst case scenario would be hand-building a stripped-down kernel on a separate machine, moving it across to the buggy machine, and repeating that kernel build-test process until you have built a kernel that boots (and through the process of elimination, you've found the source of the problem).

Nothing is impossible. I bought a very cheap unbranded core2duo "U50" laptop from Novatech. It was shipped with no operating system and was about £275 in 2009. Not the best build quality, but surprisingly good specification. Everyone, including Novotech said that it was impossible to run Linux on it. They were wrong. All that was stopping the machine from booting Linux was just one buggy kernel option - dynamic ticks or dynticks for the SMP. Normally the dynticks option is compiled into the kernel itself - so that needed to be disabled on the boot command-line with the option nohz=off, and then the machine booted Linux fine (and still does).

That list of boot options in the ubuntu link above is very useful for these sorts of problems..

i would start by trying the following kernel boot options...

single noacpi noapic nolapic

Linbox

[STRIKE][/STRIKE]Dont think bios is a problem as everything works in XP. But it may be that certain linuxes may have problems with your graphics card you dont say what it is. Any way use a livecd and start it with failsafe paramiters - it should be an option at the grub screen.


I suggested some distros earlier Puppy antix and tinyme as they don't all use the same base distro. They are easy to download via Distrowatch it has all the current and not so current varieties available. the full list is on the Right under Page Hit Ranking click on a link and youll go to a screenshot page and a link to the distro is below that

HooCanTellMee

Hi again,
Took the side of the PC, graphics card is radeon 9800 pro.
Some distros will run as far as desktop and access menus, ie list folders, or show what internet options there are. Then the mouse arrow just stops moving, pressing keys makes no difference, just a lock up. Fedora, which is on it just now goes to the blue screen where the logo develops in the middle, gets three-quarters through filling the logo in white then stays there, have left it for ten minutes, no more movement, disc drive lights show no sign that the machine is doing anything at all. I haven't tried any of the smaller linux distros suggested yet, it will mean shutting this machine down. Have many of them on disk so that won't be a problem. Downloading from the internet is a pain, slow broadband, too far from exchange we live in a village. Also have to share it with son, daughter and hubby who are all online in the evenings, so if I try to download Ubuntu it will have to be while they are all away during the daytime!
Thank you all for the suggestions, I am sure you will get me on track, there can't be much wrong with the machine, it has no problems with XP! I just don't like it!

asbokid

I wouldn't personally spend much time with tiny obscure distros. Even if you do find a tiny distro with a kernel that happens to run without further configuration, it will be too limited for normal use, will have a very small userbase and poor online support.

Stick with the well known Linux distributions, IMO.

What version of Fedora have you got there?

Here's Fedora's page on kernel crashes. It also gives examples of kernel boot options that you should try if the kernel crashes.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KernelCommonProblems#Crashes.2FHangs

Fedora suggests disabling the usual troublesome hardware suspects by listing them on the kernel boot command-line:

noacpi noapic nolapic

debitcardmayhem

asbokid wrote: »

noacpi noapic nolapic

I would also try with the option for graphic mode for safe rather than normal.
For Ubuntu there is a bit here that may be worth trying https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver

prowla

Will it run from a "live" CD instead of installing onto hard disk?

Linbox

You are trying to run large upto date higher spec Linux on old hardware.


Despite the self-opinionated rubbish that some people are currently spouting in this thread and others.


What these forums are about is providing simple advice, that doesn’t include requiring in-depth knowledge of operating systems. If the OP had that type of knowledge they wouldn’t be asking on these forums they would be posting on dedicated OS Forums and I suggest they wouldn’t be asking for help on a general tech forum.



Please checkout this search and go to the appropriate forum and don’t be swayed by idiots overindulging themselves.


You could of course ignore my advise as well

fwor

Linbox wrote: »

You are trying to run large upto date higher spec Linux on old hardware.


Despite the self-opinionated rubbish that some people are currently spouting in this thread and others.

Are we spouting self-opinionated rubbish, or just recounting what we have personally experienced?

I've just installed Ubuntu 11.04 on a 7 year old low-spec laptop and it runs just fine with 512MB of memory and a single-core CPU at 1.2 GHz. The installation was even well enough thought-out for older machines that it automatically detected that the graphics chipset was too low-spec to run Unity, and switched to the "legacy" desktop instead.

If I'm going to use a new version of any distro, I usually do a test install on an old PC (typically around 8 years old and about the same spec as the OPs) and I very seldom encounter problems.

baconbuttieman

will it run fromlive cd, try puppy linux

asbokid

Linbox wrote: »

You are trying to run large upto date higher spec Linux on old hardware.

An AMD64 processor is more than capable of running the latest Linux kernel shipped in a modern distribution. The OP's video card is a decent and popular model and well supported by not one, but two different Linux drivers, one from the open source community and one from ATI.

The OP has an unidentified problem with the kernel configuration that is preventing her from using Linux. That has nothing to do with the age of her machine nor the "spec" of the Linux distribution that she has chosen.

Linbox wrote: »

I suggested some distros earlier Puppy antix and tinyme as they don't all use the same base distro.

What are you talking about? What do you mean by "the same base distro" ? Do you mean the kernel?

Every modern Linux distribution for the PC, including Fedora, Ubuntu, Puppy, antix and tinyme, uses a 2.6 kernel.

So all distributions do use "the same base".

Of course, all of those kernels are configured slightly differently, but they still rely on exactly the same codebase.