Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX
OK VoidMan I'm Back
voidmain:
quote:Originally posted by MeatHead:
One last thing VoidMan. I know I should learn a bit more first, but I do have a history of using my unsuspecting neigbors' computers for my own educational purposes. I guess I shouldn't go to medical school.
--- End quote ---
Heh heh, I have a good buddy who is a Plastic Surgeon. He calls me probably every other night with an MS question. Of course I have to put him through terror with my anti-Microsoft crap before I give him the answer to his problem. You'ld think he would eventually quit calling, but no......
Louis D:
I guess you should solve it for him. Ask him to figure out why they call it fdisk.
voidmain:
quote:Originally posted by MeatHead:
I guess you should solve it for him. Ask him to figure out why they call it fdisk.
--- End quote ---
Maybe I should give him the steps I gave out for turning on DOS mode in XP in another thread.
Louis D:
I am again posting from the dark side of my hard drive. Linux is behaving very strangely. Yesterday I was happy to have my network card up and running. Today it runs and then everything just stops working. This distro (mandrake 8.1) has been tempermental with the sound card as well. In short, things work when I boot into KDE, and then slowly one by one, stop working. It usually takes about two hours for the ethernet card to stop working, the internet gets progessively slower, then it just stops all together.I know this is a rediculously general complaint, I just need to let off some steam. I'm not quitting though. I just need a break.
Anyway, I'm not asking anyone to fix this for me, but any suggestions anyone has are always welcome.
voidmain:
quote:Originally posted by MeatHead:
I am again posting from the dark side of my hard drive. Linux is behaving very strangely. Yesterday I was happy to have my network card up and running. Today it runs and then everything just stops working. This distro (mandrake 8.1) has been tempermental with the sound card as well. In short, things work when I boot into KDE, and then slowly one by one, stop working. It usually takes about two hours for the ethernet card to stop working, the internet gets progessively slower, then it just stops all together.I know this is a rediculously general complaint, I just need to let off some steam. I'm not quitting though. I just need a break.
Anyway, I'm not asking anyone to fix this for me, but any suggestions anyone has are always welcome.
--- End quote ---
Well, I can't say without some more info but I would be willing to bet it has something to do with that network card. Fortunately I can't get slammed too hard on this one if it is because WinXP doesn't even include a driver for this card, the manufacturer just released an XP driver. I would suggest looking at the hardware compatability list on Mandrake's web site and get a more well known card. Some cheap cards can be found from around 10-15 bucks from companies like DLink (http://www.dlink.com) and LinkSys (http://www.linksys.com). I like 3Com cards but you won't find one in that price range from 3Com. I've used DLink and LinkSys very successfully.
Another thing you might want to try in the mean time is open a shell prompt and run "top" as soon as you start your machine. Note how much memory and swap is in use. Maybe you are running out of memory or that NIC driver has a leak. You can sort the processes by memory usage by pressing the "M" key. Of course you could also use the graphical process/memory viewer (kpm or many others).
It bothers me when people brag about Linux not needing as much memory, you'll never hear that one from me. Linux screams when you have a lot of memory and never get into swapping. Not true if you do a lot of swapping (fortunately I got 512MB of RAM for $80 for my new machine so it's not a big deal to stick in a lot of memory). It is true that you can use Linux for certain server roles without X on very little memory but when you are using it as a desktop OS, the X and the graphical apps use a lot more memory. The Laptop I am using right now typing this has 64MB and I can do a fair amount of work but right now I do have 47MB of swap in use along with the 64MB of real memory. It's not unbearable but it would be noticably faster if I had 128MB in this thing. It's not any slower than my Win2k partition on the other side of the hard drive though, but that side rarely gets booted.
Linux has good support for well known main-stream hardware but you can certainly get into these types of issues with the oddball stuff. Last time I had a network card problem with Linux was at work when we were still running a Token Ring network, trying to get some Token Ring cards working. I've actually had more problems with Ethernet Cards under Windows than I have with the same cards under Linux. You may have an exception.
Oh, you might also periodically check the error count on your eth0 (/sbin/ifconfig). And check the system logs for errors (/var/log/messages). This does look like a quick throw together driver where a shoehorn was used to port from a similar card.
[ December 20, 2001: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
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