Fedora Core 6 booting and speed issue.
 

I recently installed Fedora Core 6 on a laptop with the 855 intel chipset, 1.6ghz pentium M, 1gig of ram, and a 60gb hard drive. I beleive the video card is also just an intel chip. I don't know what version of core 6 I have but I downloaded it on January 9th 2007 from redhat.com. During the install, which also ran very slowly, I did not receive any errors. After the reboot from install, my laptop seemed to hang after displaying "loading udev". If I wait about 20 minutes, this message changes to "Starting udev: Wait timeout. Will continue in the backgroun(Failed)" and my laptop continues booting. after another 10 minutes, the laptop has finally loaded to the login screen and I am able to log in. Even after the laptop is fully booted it runs very very slow. I found some things on the internet that seemed to describe my problem but I either didn't know how to do what they did or I did it and I still have the problem. One thing I tried was booting onto the install CD and typing linux rescue at the prompt. After I got to another command line I did "yum -y install kernel". This ran without giving me an error but when I rebooted the laptop it was still slow. If you need any more specs of my laptop or any other information just let me know how to find out and I will tell you. Any help is appreciated.

Now wait a minute, you got FC6 on January 9, 2006 ?? I'm confused :confused:. Can you please clarify?

Did you verify the integrity of the CD iso's you downloaded by checking the SHA1SUM and comparing them to those posted on the download mirror?
Are you using bargain basement type media (CD's)?
The burner you used, how old is it, how many burn jobs has it done in it's lifetime, is the laser clean?

I ask these questions because reading your post reminded me of a time in the past when trying to install Mandrake 10, and that's exactly how it went for me, so eventually I downloaded MD5sum checker for Windows from this place:
http://www.toast442.org/md5/md5.exe
and found I had a bad ISO CD1.

And the more we talk, the more likely you are to drop the right hint that will tip somebody off and point you to your problem.

Edit: that md5sum.exe probably won't give you a sha1sum but I'm sure toast has something for sha1sum

Sorry I meant 2007, I am using a sony cd burner and sony cds. I am pretty sure the media is good but I will check out the MD5sum tommorow. I remember that I also tried to install Fedora cores 4 and 5 and they all got hung up in the same way on this laptop if I remember correctly.

You also will probably have better luck setting the burn speed really low, like to 4 instead of 52 or 48. It will take a good 20+ minutes to burn, but we've seen a lot of people have problems with the CDRoms that come from high speed burning.

Peace,
JimBass

It sounds like your cpu is being throttled or stepped either due to heat, or power conservation. I've seen this happen when the system bios has too low a temperature set for interrupt. The cpu drops to 1/2 or 1/4 speed, and the machine just crawls. Also, FC6 may not be controlling the power saving features of the laptop properly. Suspend to ram has been a tricky one in the past. Notebook power saving functions can drop the speed to a crawl. I would guess there is some module to be loaded in the grub command line at boot, or one to be forbidden. You can try the text mode install. That is a little more foolproof than graphical install. You also might want to consider FC5. You don't need to dl the whole thing. There is a file on all the FC mirrors called 'boot.iso'. The path looks like this:

fedora/core/5/i386/os/images/boot.iso

There might be /pub before fedora on some mirrors. Mirrors.kernel.org is a good mirror. Then, the url is:

ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core...mages/boot.iso

After you burn the CD and boot with it, use the same url to download the distro. You'll figure it out. Otherwise, opensuse 10.1 would probably work. That distro also has a boot.iso on the mirrors, but 10.2 does not.

Ok, just checked the sha1sum with the utility I found here. All of the CDs matched the posted sha1sum. Quoted from AwesomeMachine "I would guess there is some module to be loaded in the grub command line at boot, or one to be forbidden." do you know what command I would need to add or where I could find out what commands to try? Also I will check the bios for CPU throttling but I dont think this bios has that option. Although I don't think temperature is an issue for me because the laptop doesnt even feel warm at any spots(even the fan vents) surprisingly. Thank you all for the help so far.

If I go to System Monitor once the GUI has started it shows the CPU at a constant 100% usage. Also, I just tried to boot a Slackware live CD on this same laptop. It takes a very long time to boot compared to another computer I have with similar spec. Also when the desktop loads it runs slow and has graphics issues i.e. the cursor acts as an eraser or it leaves a trail on the screen. I hope this information helps for troubleshooting.

In the bios, the power saving setting may be set high, you may want to look into that, but if it does not happen when you do a fresh install of it's original operating system off the CD/DVD, than it is a Linux specific problem as you said earlier that this happened with every Linux distro you've tried.

Another thing I have witnessed while working on computers, when you are using 100 percent cpu, it's because of a lack of memmory or poor memmory, this usually improves by pumping up the ram and quality of ram.
Did you make a swap partition double the size of available ram?

I chose to remove all partitions and create a default layout when I was doing the install. How do I check the size of the swap partition? Also I have 1 gig of ram which I have run memtest86 on to make sure that it is good memory. The test didn't report any errors. The actual brand is probably a cheap brand its called TMTC, it is ddr333. This is a generic computer and the company that makes it is called ABC I think. I opened it up to see if I could get any more information and pretty much the only thing of note was that the bios chip had
"686
AMIBIOS
NBEC@2000
BB30
8862" on it. I dont know if I could find some firmware update with that information or not.

Well at the risk of being blunt and "truth hurts", I "feel" it is not a Linux related problem but more of a sub-standard hardware issue. With one GB or ram and default layout, there's no need to question the size of the swap partition which can be viewed from menu/system/kinfocenter/memory in KDE, I can't help with gnome but it is probably in a similar path.
Is this in the general area you found you were using 100 percent cpu resources?
Non the less, with that much memory, it should not be using 100 percent, I've only seen that on computers with minimum required memory specified by the operating system, and a second stick of "matched" memory would always boost performance as well as reduce the load on the CPU.

BTW: don't make judgement based on my opinion alone, there may be another underlying issue, keep searching, and yes, specific hardware info will help. I suggest trying an older distribution with less demands many of which are equally as impressive as the "buggy" newer ones, but try to stay with 2.6 kernels.

The machine runs Win XP pro pretty well and can even play 3d games like guild wars. I know it isnt top of the line hardware by any standard but it should be able to run linux if it can run 3d games right? Also the only power options i can change in the bios involve the speed stepping of the processor. I have tried all settings with no luck. There are no acpi or is it apci options in the bios either. I tried fedora core 3 today and it has the same problems. I was able to look at the swap partition and it is 2gigs. Is it possible that the bios wouldnt be compatable with linux?

Have you tried something other than Fedora, take into consideration what AwesomeMachine is saying in this thread.

I have so far tried all of the posted solutions that I could. One new thing I have noticed is that both Slackware and my cd from http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page (I think it is gentoo based) fail or slow down in the same spot. With slackware the boot process slows down tremendously at "Activating hardware detection: /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug start". On the gentoo cd booting acctually fails at "Starting USB and PCI hotplugging". I think that all of my issues have something to do with this part of the boot process but I don't know how I could disable that particualr part or if it is even wise to disable it.

So far I have tried 4 different versions of Fedora, Gentoo and Slackware. I have a debian web install I will also try.

Well I was able to install Debian with all the bells and whistles onto my laptop today. It is running very well. Any ideas why this particular distro runs so much better on this machine?