Hi,

I am a Linux newbie and have asked this question on my lug mailing list but with no helpful reply.

When I log out (Mandrake 9) everything seems to go okay, get the green "OK" for each process. It says "halting system", and then sort of goes haywire giving me a long messgae about stackage and call trace. Then it stops with the message "bad EIP value".

I did a google search and found a thread which talks about APM and enabling it or not. I don't want to fiddle with this as it requires root permission and I really have no idea what to do.

Do I need to do anything? If so what?

This might be related or not. On booting I get messages about "insmod" errors, but the script goes too fast for me to read properly. It seems to be about parameters of some sort.

Any help appreciated
Thanks
Rose

The oops is coming from the kernel flaking out over some piece of hardware that it tried to control, but failed to entirely... its probably modular, it might be apm, who knows... if this is desktop you have little use for apm anyway. Unfortunately, every kernel panic will end with Bad EIP value, so that's not helpful, its actually around the first lines of the error that are important here, the upshot is that most of this probably got logged to a file called:

/var/log/messages

You'll have to be root to read it. Don't fear logging in as root, just don't do it for mundane tasks... Paste as much of the error parts here that you can. Also, not the entire log! that thing is going to be rather... huge.

insmod errors are pretty common for Mandrake, it gets a little hyper trying to guess at what support you need for what toy so it tries to ram in every driver it thinks you have hardware for... its probably inocuous, and almost definately entirely unrelated... the driver afterall isn't getting loaded.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi,

Well tried to read /var/log/messages as root but got "permission denied."

I simply went "su", password, enter, then on next line entered the /var/log/messages. Is that correct?

Thanks
Rose

more /var/log/messages

or

tail -XX /var/log/messages (where XX is the number of lines you want displayed, from the end of the file...)

or

less /var/log/messages

Just typing the filename tries to execute the file as if it were a program...

Cheers,

Finegan

Mar 30 14:50:12 funtime kernel: Intel Pentium with F0 0F bug - workaround enable
d.
Mar 30 14:50:12 funtime kernel: CPU: Intel Pentium MMX stepping 03
Mar 30 14:50:12 funtime kernel: Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
Mar 30 14:50:12 funtime kernel: POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
Mar 30 14:50:12 funtime kernel: mtrr: v1.40 (20010327) Richard Gooch (rgooch@atn
f.csiro.au)
Mar 30 14:50:12 funtime kernel: mtrr: detected mtrr type: none



Mar 30 14:50:12 funtime kernel: No local APIC present or hardware disabled


ar 30 04:38:30 funtime kernel: Kernel log daemon terminating.
Mar 30 04:38:31 funtime exiting on signal 15


Sorry it has taken me a while to do this. Had to figure out the cut & paste from the console!

This a sample of what I see. Don't really see any error messages as such. "Exiting on signal 15 happens a lot, maybe all the time. Don't know if this helps with the problem or not!
Thanks
Rose