From: dcs11@cl.cam.ac.uk (D.C. Strawson) Subject: Bizzare crashes with SLS Date: 16 Oct 1992 16:22:28 GMT
A friend and I are a bit concerned (to say the least) about the
bahaviour of the Linux
OS on his PC. I have helped several other people install either Linux or
SLS with
few problems.
First, the hardware:
486 - 33 MHz 126K Cache EISA motherboard
8M System RAM
Adaptec 1542 SCSI card (ISA)
Orchid Prodesigner IIs 1M crd + Philips 4CM2799 20" monitor
The partitioning on the disk is 51M Linux plus 3 x 50M DOS
Award BIOS - This has a BETA marked on the initial screen
For those in the UK, the machine was baught from MJN.
The software:
Linux 0.98 SLS distribution
OK. We booted up and after a bit of hassle, made the partition. Then SLS, which
did not want to install at all. It first managed to install about the
first disk
and then came to the conclusion that it had finished. Every time we ran
doinstall this
happened, in various ways. I suspect that sub-processes were dying and
causing it to
terminate early.
In the end I installed most of the system by copying all the DOS disks onto the
DOS area and using a small shell script to untar them.
All through this, bash kept dying, roughly every 5-20 commands entered. Often
sub-processes of it died, such as ls or more, all processes dump core.
However, on a brighter note we now have X running - almost happily, the
big problem
seems to be that bash or similar exits, so the X server shuts down prematurely.
We have tried zsh instead of bash, and have had similar problems, but
nowhere near
as bad. We even managed to go through a whole load of the demos - great!
We are both really impressed with the system - we cannot wait to get going with
something useful. At the moment, however, it is not really helping if
the system
crashes once every five mins.
I stress that the kernel has very rarely crashed - init (almost) always
has managed
to recover. Only once did the system have to be reset - I bet this was
that each new shell
created by init died immediately, and a loop was created.
By the way, does anyone have monitor settings for the above mentioned
screen...?
We would be most grateful to anyone who can help.
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Daniel Strawson & Tim Mills CST 1B e-mail : dcs11@uk.ac.cam.phx
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