I got a new computer a while ago and since then have had quite a bit of trouble in my attempts to install Linux. The computer is a Celeron 1.8Ghz, 3/4 gig RAM, two hard drives, USB audio and mouse, PCI firewire card and an nVidia graphics card.

Here's the thing: I can install linux no problem using the minimal bootable image of Debian 3.1 (using the 2.4 kernel). Of course that's a huge pain since I have to do so much configuring myself and install so much software by hand.

It would be great to install a more complete distribution, but so far I haven't gotten a single one to work. I've tried SUSE, Kubuntu and Knoppix recently and each one of them hangs on boot at the hotplug stage of the process. (Incidentally, I get the same error if I try to install Debian with the 2.6 kernel).

I know that hotplug is a useful thing, but why does it fail in this situation and why does it entirely stop the computer from booting? It seems like it would be better if it encountered a hardware problem to just ignore it and continue booting...

Anyway, is there a way around this? Are there are any up-to-date distributions that use the 2.4 kernel? Are there any that have a reputation for avoiding this hotplug issue? (I've read on many forums that other people are having the same problem, but there don't seem to be any solutions floating around.)

Thanks!

Go here, http://www.us.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ ... get the netinstall .iso (roughly 100 mb). It's the testing distro rather than stable, which is probably what you want anyway. It'll install kernel 2.6.12 which probably doesn't use hotplug at all. (it's been replaced with udev.)

Thanks for the reply, but no luck... I got the testing iso which apparently has kernel 2.6.15. Debian installed just fine, but when I rebooted I got the same crash when hotplug started up. The error is this:

3212 segmentation fault udevsynthesizer
/etc/init.d/rc exited outside the expected code flow

I'm going to keep trying to figure this out. I know if I used kernel 2.4 I wouldn't have a problem, but I'd love to know why 2.6 does this. It's very annoying!

You shouldn't have hotplug on there. Can you get to a system prompt? If so ... dpkg --purge hotplug

Course now your error says udev, so maybe hotplug proper isn't involved now

Okay, I installed Debian from the stable release and used the advanced setup option to choose the 2.4 kernel. And I'm pleased to report that I'm typing this from Konqueror!

Apparently there's just something about 2.6 that doesn't agree with my system... Everything seems to be working just fine - even my USB audio was automatically detected (which has never happened before...)

Either boot with -nousb, or unplug the USB stuff!

I had this problem when first setting up Slackware 10.1/10.2 on my laptop - until I configured the kernel to properly handle my USB devices, it froze on the hotplug detection.

It's pretty much a moot point now, since I'm up and running, but I'm even more curious about what the problem was. The 2.4 version of the kernel works perfectly - all my crazy usb stuff was recognized and set up automatically.

That's all great, but why is it that the supposedly "better" version of the kernel, 2.6, doesn't do any of this and just crashes? I could see this as being sort of a problem as I imagine distros and software that support 2.4 are going to become less and less common as times goes on. I suppose one day I might be required to use a more recent version, but it's just not going to work on my hardware!

Maybe just issues with the generic kernel; do a 'lspci' to check what hardware you have, then compile a specific kernel for your machine.

{Every time you compile the kernel, keep the previous .config file; you almost always miss one device, so it's easy just to re-read the previous .config an amend it as appropriate.)