Last week, my computer was hijacked for the last time. I stopped using Internet Explorer months ago, and I was using FireFox, when I got a trojan that I spent over an hour removing. It was at this point that something in me snapped. I finally gave up on Windows. I have used Linux in the past when building a few game servers, and I enjoyed it. I have used Mandrake, Redhat, and Debian. The reason why I have continued using Windows XP is because I sometimes play games. Now, I do not enjoy games as much as I did when I was younger. I have been building my own computers for a long time, and last year I built a 64 bit one, hoping Microsoft would release a 64 bit operating system. I was dissapointed. here are the specs:

Dual AMD Opteron 242 1.6GHz
MSI K8T Master2-FAR with Via SATA RAID
1GB Kingston ECC DDR
2 36GB Western Digital Raptors
1 40GB IBM Deathstar
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB

I have never attempted to install Linux on this computer before, but I assumed it would install as quicker on this one than it did on the 450MHz I put the server on. So I downloaded Fedora Core 2 64bit, and it will not install. It crashes when anaconda opens the graphical interface (I tried ide=nodma and linux noacpi, and the combination of the two. So I got a copy of the SUSE 9.1 Professional DVD from a friend (after reading numerous reviews I decided this would be best for me, as I am not advanced enough to use Gentoo, and I enjoy RPMs.) I got the 32 bit version because I want to wait awhile until the 64 bit kernel is a bit better.

Originally this was going to be a dual boot until I got used to Linux. I installed SUSE on the 40GB, and left windows on the SATA Raid alone (I am aware this is a software RAID.) For some reason the install took over 3 hours. It took forever to copy packages, and the perfomance was very sluggish. Once it was installed, I logged in to root, and it seemed to work alright. I restarted after trying to fix the bootloader, and when I logged into my account, Everything was incredibly slow. My first computer was an apple IIe, and this was slower than that. I went into Windows and Repartitioned the 40GB into two 19.1 GB partitions on which I backed up my files. Using Yast, I made my first mistake. I created a software raid array and installed onto that. After waiting 3 hours, I realized that I would not be able to boot this. So the next day I did not create a software RAID. I made a root, home, and swap partition on the first drive, and made the second drive into a file storage. I told it to mount the windows FAT32 partitions I made. I installed it, again waiting 3 hours. This time, the bootloader wont work. It just says GRUB and has a Blinking Cursor. When I boot the partition using the CD, it goes incredibly slow, as it did before. I will click something and it takes 5 minutes to come up. On a postitive note, it did indeed mount my Windows Paritions, and they worked. But I simple can not stand this incredible lack of speed, and the install should not take over 30 minutes. Does anybody here have any idea why it took so long? Any how can I eliminate this incredible sluggishness?

Edit: If you do not know what is wrong, I am open to new distro suggestions. 64 bit would be nice, but is not required.

post the system logs somewhere we can look at them
whatever they are called there for you
kern.log , sys.log, boot.log ???????????? one can never know where they really are or what they are called it's proprietary disto secrets .................
wherever you find the stuff that starts with
Inspecting /boot/System.map

and also the x logs

Thank you for the Reply. It is going to be extremely hard to access any such files, because the only other CD I have is Knoppix STD, and it does not mount the SATA drives. I guess I'm going to have to do it the slow way, this is going to take a while, but I will upload the files to an FTP if I can, and post the link here.

I'm sorry to hear about the difficulties you've had. There's nothing worse than being unable to get your new computer up and running. I can sympathize, though.. It took me two weeks to get my first x86_64 box up with a 64bit OS. (Once you learn the proper BIOS settings - ie, no hardware RAID - it gets a lot easier, though.)

I was going to suggest Fedora Core 2 Test 3, since I've been happily using that for the last 3 months with very few problems., but it seems like this failed for you. I tried the Gentoo 64-bit version and had the same problem you describe, it just never gets up and running. You might have better luck than I did, however, so it could be worth a shot.

I have never tried SuSe 9.1, although I admit I was close to buying it in the x86_64 version, so I'm very interested in hearing from people who've compared it with Fedora 64-bit.

Although I can't help with your SuSe problem, if you fill in more about your Fedora problems, maybe I can contribute there. No guarantees, though. /-:

I used SUSE 9.1 Pro, and had a lot of issues, and a little time, so I reverted back to Suse 8.2

That being irrelevant, here are some Suse9.1 Issues I found and resolved:

during install, the swap space is unusable. you should see a very quick message about swap type X no longer being supported, and to issue some command as root. Do that as soon as possible. It is likely that your swap is not bing used, and this will considerably drag the system. if you can get into X, do it thru Yast (i think under partitions). That helped me a lot.

the other was changing the mode of the hard drive (turn on DMA). My system started flying after those 2 fixes.

I went back to Suse 8.2 (like I said a lack of troubleshooting time) due to multiple freeze-ups, though I use it at work without any issues, so it is likely a prob at my home PC.

Good luck.

Thanks doug!

Those are great tips - I'm probably going to hold off buying it for a while, until I have more time or more help to do the troubleshooting required. That said, it sounds like it does well once it's up and running. I'll keep that in mind!

Well, I got it working. I sat down and thought about it for a while, and decided that the problem was with the Via SATA controller. I went into the controller's BIOS, and sure enough, that was it. It turns out I still had the controller set for a raid0 array even though I did not use RAID when I installed SUSE. So I "destroyed" the array, and the bootloader suddenly worked. But now I had to reinstall, which I did (it still took around 3 hours). I did not have much hope of it working, and I fell asleep while it was installing. When I woke up, it was done copying files. The post-install config went fast, and this gave me some hope. I logged in, and it worked! I am posting this from it right now. The only problem is with the Hardware Acceleration on the video card. I tried out some 3d screensavers and they barely run. I went to ATI.com and downloaded the newest Linux Driver for my card, and I got the one for the correct X version. I then installed the kernel source. When I try to install, I get a problem I cannot find on the ATI guide.

From root, I opened a terminal in the directory I had the drivers in.

rpm -Uh --force fglrx-4.3.0-3.11.1.i386.rpm

This gives the "No custom kernel error"
So, I do what it says and do a sh make.sh to build a kernel module for the driver.
I get this error:


Here is the Log File:

Blinking Cursor - congrats on solving the original issue and thanks for posting back with the solution. That will be very helpful to future readers.

As for the ATI video card issue, suffice it to say that it can be "challenging" to get ATI cards fully configured. If you haven't already done so I'd recommend doing a Search here at LQ for existing threads on the topic; there are many and chances are good that you may find something helpful -- J.W.

I finally got the ATI Drivers to install! I found a guide on here that explained how to to compile a kernel with options, and install the drivers. I learned alot thanks to this. Everything is perfect now. Another happy Linux user thanks to this site!

Which thread/post was it? -- J.W.

It was the guide by liquid, a bit time consuming but it worked.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...+9800+suse+9.1