A reason not to give up on this again
 

I need a reason from someone not to give up on this whole thing again. I've installed redhat before, mandrake before, etc. I always thought the installations (for both of those) were pretty smooth and well thought out for the most part (especially mandrake), but what it came down to in the long run was software installs. This time I thought I could have resolved that when I was able to successfully get my ati card up and working the way I liked and sound card, etc.

Anyway.. what's killing me here is that my DVD is still causing the stupid system to stall. I've used both Mandrake 10 community and now Mandrake 10 official (kernel 2.6.3.4 for one and 2.6.3.7 for the other).

Sadly, it still is the same so it had nothing to do with it being pre-release or anything. Of course some may say that mandrake sucks or whatever, but the fact is, what other linux version am I going to be able to install fairly easily and hope to get all that I need working to install ut2k4 reasonably? Fedora? Heh.. I have to say I see no good reason to try that because I'm really beginning to think that linux just doesn't like my drive. But no one to this point has given me any specific advice on how to resolve the issue with it besides turning dma off or on (I've tried both). I've also tried a few other things to no avail. The drive is an NEC ND-2500 A. If anyone else is using this successfully I'd appreciate telling me what distro you are using. It's a good drive and works terrific in windows and I've not had a single coaster. So I must blame the problems squarely on linux (at the very least mandrake).

Now of course I can look for other things to use linux for (I mean I run ut2k4 fine in windows anyway) but the truth is I've been looking to see if linux was really "ready" for normal desktop users yet. If it was capable, and I've been pretty disappointed when one of the most user friendly distros to install/use is either too unstable or whatever to effectively run my drive.

So anyway, I'm looking for reasonability here on what else I should be trying out with linux that's worth doing/seeing/testing to see if there are enough things that I really want to be doing with linux. I mean ultimately it was just an experiment in the first place. All things have gone pretty well but I wanted to know that everything was working fine before I moved forward.. so I'm not sure if I can't get this working I care.. heh.. because if it can't work I"ll just continue to think of this as a second-rate OS. I said I was looking for reasonability and I meant it. I'll take no windows bashing as a good answer for why I should try to stick with linux for awhile. Windows XP has been a very stable OS for me and doesn't "crash every day" or anything stupid like that. The only reason I've always wanted to use linux is that there is a lot more freeware apps for it, and of course I am more in tune philosophically with the guiding principles of it's creation (as in GPL/open source).

So anyway.. *shrugs* .. any ideas or advice on how I can fix this?

http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr...=Google+Search - may be of help to you - especially the first link.

We really can't give you reasons to stay - you either want to or you don't. If you want to stay we will help. That's why we're here after all. :)

If I didn't *want* to I wouldn't be asking hehe.. I still appreciate the response and I'll take a look...just very frustrated atm..

Post more details. Where´s the drive mounted on? Ide or scsi? What happens exactly?

it's 2.6 kernel so I think it's direct ide nowadays and no more scsi emulation layer yes?

/dev/hdd mounted to /mnt/cdrom (or that's what I do when I do it manually anyway.. I think it's actually something longer than that by default).

It completely stalls (hard crash) at some point during unreal tournament 2004 installation... not always the same point but usually fairly early. Always seems to be while it's in the middle of a file/transfer.

the drive is a standard IDE ATA 33 NEC ND-2500A dual format DVD Burner (8x max).

It could be caused by supermount... I assume that it is installed in MDK 10.
Try disabling supermount. See man pages for details because I can not remember the exact syntax.

supermount.. I'll look, but what is that and why would it be causing a problem?

Disabled it and no go still. But seriously the more I do the more disappointed I am in mandrake/linux. I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt by saying both, but seriously.. this is crappy. First the drive causes stalls. Now it stalls when I'm posting sometimes in mozilla. I've had windows stall (it's rare in xp for me but it happens occassionally), but never does it stall over and over and over because of a previous stall. How is it that linux seems to break when the slightest little thing knocks it over? Or at least that's the way it seems. Because now it's stalling just doing normal operations. Now if I format and reinstall I'm sure it'll be fine. But I want to fix this dvd problem first so that I don't run into this problem again. Either way though, I'm still disappointed that it's so easy to make the box stall. I'm starting to wonder if all the sites talking about linux stability are being insanely sarcastic.
Maybe it's stable for servers but not for desktop use lol.

Sorry, I haven't read through the other suggestions.
Did you try using the 2.4 kernel. G o into the extra options of the install and type "alt1" There may be a few other options that can help you. Maybe you should tell Mandrake expert, since their specialty is Mandrake...

first of all, a few corrections:
Linux is just a kernel. What you are running(Mandrake) is a distro, meaning along with the kernel, it's got the XFree system, and a GUI on top of that too(most likely KDE). Something is causing the system to stall, but that's hardly "Linux". It might be KDE, might be XFree, or the driver or something else. Don't blame "Linux". You want to blame somebody, blame the hardware manifactures who still have a long way of supporting Linux the way they support Microsoft's Windows, since they dont see the financial insentives ...YET.

Now about your problem. There is SO many different solutions you can try, it makes me wonder WHY you havent tried them.
For starters, you can try another distro. KNOPPIX. Red Hat. You DO realize(I hope) you are running a rather new distro and a rather new and untested kernel, right? Why dont you try 2.4 kernel instead? Why haven't you contacted your DVD drive manifacturer and asked for help?