Today (or tomorrow) I take the Linux plunge....

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Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 4:06 pm

@JM, are you getting "APIC" errors when trying to boot w/ the Nvidia 8 series card? That is what I get. Crying or Very sad

My bios has no option to turn it off and I can't seem to find anything that will make it work. I'm hoping that the next version Hardy Heron will work w/ 8 series cards.

I have used puppy linux in the past and like it, I'll have to try Slap's recommendation too and see how it works on mine.

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

No, the only error I get is when Grub is loading at Stage 1.5, then it says "Error 2" and that's it.

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 6:34 pm

@JMR

certainly seems to a problem at a pretty basic level when your HDD's aren't detected during POST.

Its a real bummer that its happened at this time as it may colour your whole Linux experience!

Dr Who seems to suggest that Mandriva supports your video card " out of the box". Maybe you can download that distro and give it a go ( or Puppy at 100megs all in! Cool

)

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

Well, I suppose trying another distro may solve the issue of hardware vs. OS, that is if the other should work.

I don't know if my BIOS is not recognizing the HDs because it's in a RAID array, and therefore, won't view them the traditional way....

Trophy Videos · Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 7:14 pm

@JMR - you may have hit the nail on the head...RAID might cause the problem??? Just for kicks and giggles, remove the raid card, connect the hard drives direct to motherboard. Then, set one to MASTER, the other to SLAVE. Don't use cable select..force it to use the settings you want.
Raid complicates things, and doesn't do all that much for speed, unless you are using it for a server, or heavey duty into games and absolute top framerates. Let us know how that works out. Does the Bios see the drives, now?

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

Interesting. I probably shouldn't have bothered with RAID in the first place, but I couldn't resist. Wink

Good idea. I'm going to open it up anyway to see if anything got knocked loose in delivery...

I'm giving it 2 more days of trying then I'm shipping the *$&@@* thing back!

EDIT: On second look, I think my motherboard has the RAID built in, so I'll have to do it from BIOS, which according to my manual I can disable.

Trophy Videos · Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 8:55 pm

ok, JMR. I had some problem with a friend's Raid setup for the second time (his kids and wife used to love to click on all those popups, and he had no firewall running for months, so needless to say the array was trashed, to the point of seriously corrupting one disk so that I could not use it anymore) so I ditched his RAID setup, and told him it was only complicating things. He wasn't any serious gamer, or running a webserver, just surfing the web and playing a few games. He never made any backups or images of his disks or files, either. RAID was ridiculous for him, so I trashed it. It sure made it easier to setup, too.

If after you connect both drives to one SATA channel and both DVD/CDR drives to the other channel, and your flavor of linux will not boot, try Puppy Linux here: http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyLinuxMainPage
Have the drives been formatted for use, yet? Puppy will run from the cd live and load everything in RAM in under 256MB, and allow you to format your drives before you install to harddrive, if that is the way you want to set it up. Good luck! Very Happy

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 1:57 am

Ditch the Raid.

I went through a few Distro's before the hardware in my current laptop was recognized without to much tweaking.

Fedora 8 worked best for me on this machine. Give the live CD a try.

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 3:14 am

RAID actually shouldn't be a problem for modern distro. Even my little distro can handle RAID, and it's far from being something for "normal users".

The RAID provided by budget RAID-controllers, or onboard RAID-controllers, sometimes are called Fake-RAID, basically because they let the user think it's Hardware-RAID, but it actually isn't, the RAID-operations still are done by the software, that's why you need a driver for this. You might call this Hardware-supported-RAID, but I don't think it really fits too.
A real Hardware-RAID is completely transparent to the OS, it won't notice at all that the device it's working with is made up of more than one disk. No drivers necessary.

Linux handles Fake-RAID through the Device-Mapper, which also is used for a great technology called LVM, the Logical Volume Manager. I actually prefer LVM over RAID, except maybe a true Hardware-RAID, because it's a lot more flexible than a RAID is.

But all that's just a little side-note...

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 12:58 pm

OxygenDeprived wrote:

@JM, are you getting "APIC" errors when trying to boot w/ the Nvidia 8 series card? That is what I get. Crying or Very sad

My bios has no option to turn it off and I can't seem to find anything that will make it work. I'm hoping that the next version Hardy Heron will work w/ 8 series cards.

Have tried editing your GRUB boot options to boot without APIC? To do this, simply open /boot/grub/menu.lst as root, (if you can't boot, you can access this by booting into a live CD) and find the section that looks something like this:

Quote:

title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=ab0293a2-57e1-404e-8e14-67dbcf481f34 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
quiet

And add the 'noapic' option to the kernel line, so that it looks like this:

Quote:

title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.6.22-14-generic
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=ab0293a2-57e1-404e-8e14-67dbcf481f34 ro quiet splash noapic
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
quiet

You'll also want to find this line:

Quote:

# defoptions=quiet splash

And add the option to it:

Quote:

# defoptions=quiet splash noapic

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

Thanks again to all for the advice. I was able to disable RAID in BIOS and it booted up without a hitch! Very satisfying.

I was able to configure most everything, but I've hit the wall with installing Flash Player for my 64 bit system.

I've been to all the help forums and am close, but when I get the script, I can't run it in the terminal. Ark opens it, and i try to manually do the script, but no luck. I just can't seem to get over this mental block to run it.

This is the page I'm talking about:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=476924

Installing the normal 32 bit only takes 2 lines! But this....

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 3:57 am

One user here (maybe Wayne, but I'm not sure) also recently installed Flash on his 64-bit-Ubuntu. The "trick" is that you need the nspluginwrapper then it'll also work.
Don't know about Ubuntu, but in Fedora it's just been a few clicks and everything was fine.

Check the software-management if you can find that plugin-wrapper there, and then install the Flash-plugin in the way recommended for your distro. That should do the trick I guess.

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

Yeah, that link has the nspluginwrapper.

My problem is much more elementary -- i download the file, but can't run the script. Mad

EDIT: Well, I don't know what I did, but now it works. I'm not going to question it... Cool

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 7:47 am

JMR
Nice one mate!! Sometimes you just have to persevere. Hope you enjoy the Linux experience!

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

I always find that when you hit a difficult problem in Windows, it takes you three days of tearing your hair out and you end up formatting and reinstalling, sadder, no wiser and feeling incompetent. When you hit a difficult problem in Linux, it takes you three days of tearing your hair out, and you end up with a solution that works and that you understand. You have learned something and feel empowered.

Trophy Videos · Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 9:42 pm

@JMR - Glad to hear that you got it going, finally. Very Happy

Baiting Guru Joined: 03 Mar 2006 Posts: 7103 Location: Yes

Thx!

I am a bit worried about a few things like iTunes not really being accessible with linux (I know there's a supposed WINE workaround, but I'm quite exhausted at the moment).

I'm pondering a dual-boot, as I have two HDs, I may put XP on one drive and then (gulp) re-install GRUB. But, again, I will need a good rest before I take that plunge.

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 11:27 pm

I just got all my parts in to build a MAC machine, hopefully this build will go well. Rodus already sent me a link to help with the build.

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2008 7:30 am

JMR

Dual booting works well. The other alternative is either VMware or VirtualBox. I think it depends on how much you need Windows.

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