i am new to this board looks like a good size knolegable comunity. so here is my problem i have 2 distros of linux RH 7.2 and mandrake 8.0. i seem to like mdk better than RH. i have a system built of an a7m266-d asus mother board 3 hard drives, 1gig ecc ddr registered ram w/ dual 1800 amd 1.53 gig mp chips. my problem seems to be in both that only 1 cpu is being recognized and as an XP AMD 1800. cant seem to find away to fix this.

Sounds like you need to re-compile your kernel to support dual processors.

Go to http://www.justlinux.com/nhf/Compiling_Kernels for instructions on how to compile your kernel.

You don't need to down the updates unless your kernel version doesn't have an option of supporting dual processors.

After you are done compiling the kernel, you have to add a line to either LILO or GRUB.

Make sure you keep the original kernel image so you can always refer to it if your re-compile kernel does not work. If the new re-compiled kernel works. Leave the orignal in your computer for a few weeks.

I'm pretty sure that Red Hat used to either detect a dual processor system (or it was me selecting the SMP kernel during the custom installation). Electro's suggestion to rebuild the kernel is probably the most straightforward solution... unless you really want to reinstall. :-)

The instructions in Red Hat's Customization Guide regarding building custom kernels are quite easy to follow and work great. Just be sure to save your ``.config'' file in /usr/src/linux-XXX before you run ``make mrproper''. Then copy it back when that first make step is done. Otherwise it's gone and you have to answer a ton of questions. (Or figure out which of the config files in /usr/src/linux-XXX/configs is closest to what you want and make a copy of it to use as your base configuration.) If you run ``make menuconfig'' you really should only have to jump to the section ``Processor type and features'' and select the SMP option near the bottom of the list. Then do follow the rest of the instructions and reboot.

Good luck,

Rick

yeah weird thing was i did a few different upgrades w/ the cd selected the smp kernel and wound up w/ same results. went as far as to reinstall the hole system slecting it as the kern to boot. and nothing. now i have my board on jumper free mode dont know if that has anything to do w/ it but the exact problem is hapening in both distros. after getting fed up w/ redhat i went back to doing the same w/ mandrake. as we speak im looking in kernel.org for the up-to-date mandrake kernel and not finding anything. but the thing that stumps me most is why both systems think the cpu is an XP? maybe its cuz those o/s were released before the AMD MP athlons? i know this board acepts both 1 xp or dual mps. so i chose the dual MP route. thanks for the advise sofar.

p.s ive thought about going out and bying anew box set(to save this head ache) but then id never learn how to compile a kernel. guess i gotta a little more.

My guess is that the OS doesn't know the difference between XP and MP chips (and might not care if it did); unless instruction sets are substantially different (which I don't believe they are), the OS isn't much going to care one way or the other. That is, the difference between these chips is all on the inside.