Everything freezes when I try to do ANYTHING
 

I am a newbie in the linux world, having used linux- and unix-based systems for years but never having tried to actually administer one. Excuse me, please, if this turns out to be a common issue, but at least I was unable to locate any questions that looked the same...

My installation of Fedora Core 2 went very smoothly. I installed everything, rebooted, and the machine started up into Xwindows and eventually Gnome. However, the screen plot seems to have serious problems - the original batch of icons displays ok, but if I click on any of them, only the frame of the resulting window appears. If I move my mouse over the area of the screen, the icons which are supposed to be displayed there eventually show up.

More annoyingly, whenever I try to run ANYTHING - the little red throbbing up2date icon in the lower corner or anything else, the system freezes, and I must reboot the system.

The same thing happens when I try to boot into KDE instead of GNOME, and if I select the "failsafe terminal" it freezes the minute I click on the "OK" button of the dialogue informing me that I am in failsafe mode.

Unfortunately I am installing this thing on an old machine, so don't have all the technical specs. But the ones I do have are:

Processor: 1 GHz Duron
RAM: 512 MB
Hard Drives: primary - 20 GB . Secondary - 150 GB.
CD-ROM: 52x
Video: ATI All In Wonder 128 (Rage Ultra chipset)
Sound: Sis onboard AC97 (which seems to be working properly)
Motherboard: Tyan, unknown model
mouse: PS2 wheelmouse
keyboard: standard Windows 104 key

Anybody run into this sort of problem before, and does anybody have any ideas how I can get the video subsystem to at least work smoothly long enough to run up2date?

Thanks,
Kevin

It looks like it is a hardware problem. Is the CPU overclocked? Could be a temperature issue too. Try selecting a lower frequency setting (say, 66 MHz vs. 100 MHz), and booting. See if this works. Good luck!

Thanks for your reply cincindie.

No, the processor is definitely not overclocked. I put this machine together myself a couple of years ago, and I never overclock processors. Just to be on the safe side, I did as you suggested and lowered the clock speed - no change. The thing still booted beautifully, but froze up as soon as I tried to do anything useful.

It could be a temperature issue, I suppose, although the thing is well heat-sinked and fanned, and the case has a total of three fans in it, including one right next to the hard drive. I guess I can try replacing the processor fan, if you think that would help.

I should mention that this machine was happily running Win2k up until a couple of weeks ago when I decided I wanted a FreeVo box :-) So I'd be surprised if there are any critical hardware problems.

Any other ideas, anybody?

have you tryed xfce
or mabie you had a corupt install cd

fedorafreak -

All 4 disks passed the media verification test with flying colors. What is xfce?

No, a 66 MHz setting would have significantly reduced the temperature. The rest of your hardware seems fine too. I cannot think of anything else, but to update your software, you can just copy the update folder from any Fedora mirror onto a CD, boot into your computer without graphics (init 3), mount CD, run the updates manually using the rpm command (rpm -Uvh package.rpm) and reboot. I'll let you know if I can think of anything else.