Two most relevant pieces of hardware:
1. Abit NF7-S mobo (nforce2) --> using onboard sound and NIC
2. nVidia 5700 FX 256MB AGP

Running MDK 9.2 previously. I recently upped to 10.0 from 9.2, due to the opportunity presented when I had my primary machine's Winblows XP go bad on me. In preparation, I got the latest drivers for the nforce board (supporting the 2.6 kernel) and video card.

Initially, the 10.0 install changed the NIC driver to the "forcedeth" modified one, and the NIC no longer worked. The nvaudio seemed to work fine, so I didn't think too much about that. After reading the nVidia documentation, I noticed that I needed to make some changes to /etc/modprobe.conf and /etc/modules.conf. I got rid of the "forcedeth" net and snd-x810 sound configs and changed them to the recommended aliases/values of nvsound and nvnet, followed by modprobing them. The sound seemed to be working, but the network wasn't, and the system had a complete lockup (no keyboard or mouse input, KDE froze) while I was testing the sound with XMMS.

After rebooting, I opened harddrake to see if I could make some changes on the fly to the network config, and found that harddrake still saw the "forcedeth" driver as the one it was using. I tried to manually choose my device, but each time I tried, I would get an error saying it failed. On top of this, the freezing/lockups continued like clockwork, requiring me to manually reboot the system. Eventually, I solved the networking problem like so (this is off the top of my head, so please forgive if path is not exact);

cd /lib/kernel/2.6-3/drivers/net
mv forcedeth.ko.gz forcedeth.orig.gz
cp nvnet.ko forcedeth.ko
gzip forcedeth.ko

Then I changed my /etc/modules.conf and /etc/modprobe.conf files to replace nvnet with forcedeth and then modprobed them. Starting up KDE again, I started up harddrake and found that now when I chose to modify the settings of the forcedeth module, the nvnet options were available (optimization, force_speed_duplex, autonegotiate, etc.), so I knew that the nvnet driver (disguised as the forcedeth driver) was being loaded. Afterwards, I restarted the network, and everything worked perfectly.....

Now, during the above, I repeatedly had to endure (sp?) lockups that required me to hit the physical reset button. This happened at various times, even while installing the 6111 nVidia video drivers (while in the CLI) one time.

Anyone else experiencing this? Could it possibly be the new sound driver/settings? I've read that KDE's sound (artsound?) causes lockups, are my experiences similar to those symptoms?

Oh, and BTW, I tried tailing the /var/log/messages to see if something was getting called and freezing the system, and I didn't see anything unusual...
Thanks for the help in advance...

I am going to try adding;

noapic nolapic nioapic to my lilo.conf file tonight to see if that clears it up....


I'll let you know.