Hello.

I'm not sure where to post, so I hope I've done it in a relevant place.

I have tried to install Fedora Core 3 in my relatively old laptop as a sandbox experience for installing it later on on my main pc. It's the first time I'm trying to install Linux, but my first help layer (a number of friends with considerably more Linux experience than myself) were also unable to help me out.

Installation goes about without any problem, load and boot from FC3 DVD, choosing all relevant settings through the installation GUI, and waiting about an hour for the whole thing to install. By the way, the 20Gb hardrive has Windows XP Pro, I have shrinked its NTFS partition from the whole drive to ~9Gb with Partition Magic, and during the installation created a 10Gb ext3 root partition and a 400Mb swap partition.

After I reboot, the GRUB loader works perfectly, and I choose FC3. While booting, imediately after I see the message "Press I for interactive startup" (that I am unable to activate either by pressing i, Shift+I or Caps Lock then I repeatedly...), the loading process completely halts on "Initializing hardware: audio" (after it has passed storage and networking). It stops reading from the hard drive and it just stays there... Since I cannot try the interactive startup (what am I doing wrong?), i have no clue even about how to try to debug this process.

The Satellite 2800-S201 is around 4 years old, and it's specifications can be found at sleepingstill.com/projects/2800_howto/ (sorry, I'm not allowed to posts links, this will take you to a Linux how-to on this machine), where the sound card, that I obviously think is the problem here, is listed (Built-in Yamaha DS-XG "724" sound card).

Thank you in advance for any ideas, and please bear with me if I'm doing something really dumb, as I'm (still!) only a Linux newbie.

Best regards,

Vasco Pimenta.

I had the same problem about interacvive setup. I could do it pressing "i" repeadtly all the time after grub.... I don't know in what moment should be pressed but it works sometimes.

Hello, I have recently installed FC3 in a Toshiba Tecra laptop, and I had the same problem as you.

FC3 always hanged up when trying to initialize the hardware. I rebooted my laptop using the rescue cd so I could get a prompt shell to execute a

command and see what was happening. In the huge list of messages I saw one telling me to boot the kernel with the acpi option switched to OFF. I did it and it worked for me.

You can pass that parameter to the kernel for the current boot in this way:

When Grub starts and shows you the list of available OS for booting on your machine, highlight the 'Fedora Core (2.6.9-1.667)' line or whatever you have and press the 'e' key to edit it. Next highlight the one titled as

and press 'e' again. Now add the

param at the end and press enter. You will see the new kernel booting line properly modified. Next, press the 'b' key to boot with it (don't forget to highlight it if you haven't) and your system should boot now perfectly. I hope so .

As I have told you this fix the booting problem just for this time, so to do permanent the changes you have to edit your

file and add there the acpi=off param.


Regards,

Sergio Gil Conde.

Thank you very much! I'm sure your hints about grub boot options will come in handy in other situations as well.

As for now, your suggestion solved my problem, and you've even saved me the trouble of booting from the DVD as well. When I have time, I'll make the changes permanent by editing it in the grub boot options.

Is there a way to really solve this problem, rather than going around it by not using acpi?

Obrigado!

To be honest, I dunno. I also wonder myself that.

Regards.