Linux does not like my computer
 

I hope you have the stamina to read this thread all the way because it really is a matter that bothers me a lot. The fact that Win XP works flawlessly and Linux does not is not exactly fun to experience.

Some time ago I started my conversion from MS to the Linux world, and I’m now happily using Ubuntu 9.04 on my Desktop. I have however a problem when it comes to my son’s computer which runs perfectly ok on Win XP, but has problems with Linux.

To cut a long story short (well at least shorter), the computer I’m having problems with is:

Dell Dimension 4300
Intel P4 1,7 Ghz
512 MB RAM
GeForce 6200 graphics (256 MB)
OS today – Windows XP home
Total HD size 40 GB and almost half of this is available for Linux to use.

I have tried to install (via Live CD) Ubuntu 9.04 Xubuntu 8.10, Xubuntu 9.04, Linux Mint 7, openSUSE 11.1 and Fedora 11 without any luck whatsoever. The live CD starts, but everything freezes after a while (it differs a bit where from distro to distro). When it comes to Xubuntu 8.10 I have tried a direct install instead of starting Live, and the installation completes, but after reboot the system freezes just before the login window should appear. With Mint I’ve come even further. Sometimes the system starts and I can use the computer, but next two or three (or more) times it just freezes the same way as mentioned above. I have tried to run (both live CD:s and installed versions) with acpi=off and noapic, and sometimes it fells like this is working a little better – but not for long. I’ve also tried memtest, but it says nothing is wrong. The CD:s should be ok, since it runs on the other two computers we have.

The only bright side is that I can install Xubuntu 8.04 and Mandriva 2009.1. So what’s the problem you might say? Well first of all I don’t want to use Xubuntu 8.04 all the time, and if I try an upgrade to 8.10 (yes I’ve tried that too) I’m back to major break down again. Mandriva is perhaps the most promising so far, but the big problem is the Netapplet. I have a belkin wireless card (and thankfully I also have the possibility to use wired Ethernet – but it’s not ideal with a cable lying across the house), but if I so much as touches the Netapplet icon – guess what yes the system freezes.

I’m sorry for this long description, but since I am pretty new with Linux I have to describe it the way I see it – I’m not that familiar with the magic of the terminal commands.

Do you know what’s most annoying? That Win XP installs ant runs perfectly, and Linux does not.

I’m thankful for any suggestions

You need to either aggressively prevent a normal installation or get a larger hard drive. Most modern Linux distribution install the most-often-used applications, and these require a lot of drive space. Unless you explicitly avoid a full or default installation, chances are this drive is being filled up.

when do they freeze ? and what do you see just before a distro freezes ? and what is your harddisk layout ?

Honestly, shouldn’t 18 GB (that’s about what’s left for Linux to use) be enough for all of the distros I’ve tried? I mean I’ve been running a Wubi install on another machine with about 10 GB and without any problems.

It differs a bit, but mostly the system freezes sometimes during GUI loading (or at least that’s what I think the system is up to). Often I see the mouse cursor and the “time glass” circle, and almost immediately the circle stops spinning and I have no contact with the computer. The only thing I can do is to shut it off the hard way. When it came to Fedora however I didn’t even get this far. I just saw the progression bar get filled with white and then – nothing.

The harddisk is 40 Gb, and about 18 is given to Linux to do what it wants with. That is to create a normal and a swap partition. When I get home I will boot via my Gparted live CD and check it out more properly. Maybe I have a problem there? If I should optimise this how should I do – if I make the partitions manually? The problem is of course that even the live CD:s does not start, and that should not be happening because of problems with the HD layout should it?

Of course it could be a graphical problem, but it does not make sense to me that Xubunut 8.04 works, but not 8.10 – shouldn’t the hardware support get better with newer distros? Could it have something to do with different kernels (now I’m in a bit deep, because I don’t know much about the difference between the kernels).

Almost any distro will install in 10GB----18 is PLENTY. I'm pretty sure this is not the problem.

When running from Live CD, everything runs in RAM and so 512M of RAM could be an issue. (I've never run a live CD on anything less that 1GB.) I would either upgrade the RAM or install from an "install-only" CD.

As pixellany has said, 512 ram with no swap might not be enough for a live session, that's why I asked about your harddisk layout ...
Since you didn't install or partition your harddisk any further, you may just re-partition it to have a 1 GB of swap BEFORE you try to boot in a live session again ...
using Gparted CD or system rescue CD to so so is a wise solution indeed...
There's a way around to add swap after you'd already partitioned your disk, but since this isn't the case, do it the right way ....

a) Ram is the least allowable for newer distros, but may still work;
b) I have no idea what motherboard houses Dimension 4300 but it should be compatible with a quite "older" distro version;
c) Geforce card has a linux driver, find it here.

When boot up hangs it could either be that--

1. a module is wanting, see the distro if it supports your hardware
2. xorg.conf must be properly configured

that's all for now since i do not get the problem

hope this helps.

good luck.

Most laptops have a highly customized version of M$ windows on it - your Dell will be no different, which is why your Win XP installs and runs perfectly, and Linux does not...

So, try & install the linux in a lower screen resolution & also pre-partition your hdd & swap.

Thanks all of you for your efforts to help me.

I will definitely check out the HD layout (I think I just start from scratch with my Linux partitions) . I also feel that your suggestions that the lack of RAM could be cause might be true. The only problem with this is that I get the same effect after I managed to install for instance Xubuntu 8.10 and should it be that much of a difference in the need of RAM between Xubuntu 8.04 and 8.10?

Unfortunately I can’t take away XP:s good performance (whoa - did I just write that?) because my Dell (it’s a desktop by the way) was delivered with Win Millennium, so the XP version is not customized for this machine.

I will try your suggestions and hopefully I will be back with a positive response.

I have used many Dell Dimensions before, one thing I learned is Dell's APIC fail. (Pun intended)

I've had many occasion of distros refusing to install or refusing to boot due to Dell's terribly broken ACPI BIOS. I've managed to coerce some of these systems to work by passing the 'noapic nolapic' kernel parameters.

Hi the machine runs with ubuntu 8.04 but not 8.10 or 9.04 could be that it doesn't like the later kernel versions these use

I would even go as far as to say try 7.04 or 7.10.

Xp works on that machine because the machine and the OS are old, and XP has been patched up. You wouldn't try to put vista on it, so expecting a post vista era linux distro to run is expecting a lot.

I think you're right – sometimes I get Mint 7 to start if I use as many no no:s as possible when it comes to acpi and such. It doesn't work great but if I don't use them it wont start at all.

So it might have something to do with the kernel? I will try an even older version, but for now I think I run Mandriva 2009.1 for a while first though, since it runs fine (except for the Netapplet). And try to get rid of the terrible Belkin wireless card.

Of course you have a point regarding the age of XP, but since Vista is out of the question – XP is the closest thing if I don't install Windows 7. We don't compare with Vista do we? it's too easy =)

your system doesn't seem like it's too old for linux. Some of the dell systems are configured to work better with windows. Isn't mandriva working fine?

just ditch vista it's just a resource-eater. heard windows7 is not that hungry, never tried. The only windows made a little impression on me is win2k though

Yep, I'll keep Mandriva. Just have a problem with the Netapplet, but I can live with it.

Thanks everybody for your help and support.

I'll gladly second what you say about System Rescue CD. It is a great tool to have around, even if they no longer include the manual on the CD like they used to.

But since we know he has enough disk space, perhaps we should suspect the problem has to do with partitioning rather than shortage of total space? And for resolving partitioning issues, the standard format for partitioning data seems to be the output of Linux 'fdisk -l', rather than Gparted. At least the former is a lot easier to cut and paste to a forum post.

And just in case the font isn't clear, that is a letter 'l', not a numeric digit '1'. Execute it as superuser, or it just immediately returns w/o printing anything.

Puppy Linux and Sidux-(XFCE version) are two distros that work well on my system. Your system, resource wise seem similar to mine. There's also Slitaz (only 30 MB) - you'd be impressed and surprised how well this one works. If you try any of these, please let me know. I'm curious to know if the three distros are up to the task of working with Dell. Thanks.

My Box:
Sony Vaio PCG-GRT250
Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 - M CPU 2.20GHz
512 MB memory
nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 420 Go] (rev a3)
40 GB total hard drive space

Both your machine and perso's are sufficient to run modern major linux distro's ... it's just that live sessions might be kinda heavy to run without swap with only 512 ram...

And about the kernel compatibility, I don't think this is the problem, as both xubuntu and ubuntu releases use the same kernel....

apic problems might be a good candidate ;)

by the way, where are we now ?

I guess I should have mentioned that Slackware 13.0 runs fine on my laptop, but I don't think Slackware is an appropriate distro for perso right now.

I agree that it should not be a problem to run a modern distro –especially when I can run Mandriva 2009.1 but on the other hand that is the only “modern” variant that’s able to boot.

When it comes to the kernel issue – the problem is not that Xubuntu works and Ubuntu does not, but that Xubuntu 8.04 works but not 8.10 and 9.04. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t tried Ubuntu 8.04 only 9.04 and that one doesn’t work. Since 8.04 has a different kernel (at least that’s what I thought) than 8.10 and 9.04 I got a feeling that this might have something to do with it.

And yes I have a feeling that apic is causing some problems, but it feels like it’s only part of the problem. For instance Mandriva works without changing the apic settings, Mint starts sometimes when I use acpi=off and noapic, but almost never if I don’t change this, SUSE and Xubuntu (8.10 and 9.04) doesn’t start whatsoever.

mejohnsn – I will try the fdisk command when I get home tonight. Since I live in Sweden it’s now over 8.30 am and time to work.

I think you are absolutely right.

perso, did you partitioned and added swap, then tried over ?
we have to finish a point at a time .. we can't check all these possibilities on the same time ...

Kubuntu, Xubuntu are very similar, Mint is an Ubuntu-derivate,
(Suse never worked with me)
Fedora is different to the once before.
I think the only way is to try some more LiveCD/DVDs

I myself had excellent experience with:
openmamba (KDE) / RPM (APT)
Mandriva (GNOME, KDE) / RPM
SAM (XFCE) / RPM
SaxenOS (LXDE) / TGZ
Knoppix (LXDE) / DEB,
Puppy (JWM) / PET,

Another option would be to disable ACPI in BIOS and give it a try.



Acording to this thread, Suse 9.2 runs on Dell Dimension 4300. So I would try following versions:

Suse 9.2
CentOS 5.x (Yeah, it is not quite desktop type of distro, by I am using it on my MSI VR601-X and I made everything work like a charm, and it is based on Fedora Core 6, and kernel is then enhanced by backporting many new stuff)
Fedora Core 6 & 7
Any older version (roughly from 2004-2005), and then work your way up the timeline.

Also, there are many LiveCD distro's that does not want to boot on some types of PC's, for various issues. My recommendation is to try to install full version and avoid LiveCD variants.

So now I'm back home and it's time the fdisk command. I booted with the Xubuntu 8,04 Live CD - and the output is:


To me this looks ok. I decided yesterday to reinstall Mandriva, but Mandriva did not like the fdisk command, thats why I used the Xubuntu Live CD.

Yes I did. I then tried to install Xubuntu 9.04 (directly and not open a Live session first), but without any luck. I then reinstalled Mandriva, since it's been working before. And it worked again - thats nice.

It's a bit of a mystery to me. I can accept that my old machine does not like newer distros - but why is Mandriva the only one working? First I thought it was only new distros from the "Ubuntu world" that didn't work, but as we seen this is not the case. Anyway I'm happy with Mandriva as long as I don't have to mess with my wireless card.

I just tried openSUSE 10.2 and that one also works – at least as far as starting up Live, and since this has been a hard part for many distros so far, I'm confident that it would work to install it too.

With this I think that I will close this issue – it looks like it's just a matter of newer distros and my Dell not working together properly (Mandriva is the exeption).

I would like to thank you all for your efforts and inputs – it was truly great to get so many good responses on my problem.

Now I will be using Mandriva for a while, and at least I know that Xubuntu (probably also Ubuntu) up to 8.04 works, and openSUSE up to 10.2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubuntu_releases tells you the kernel version with each Ubuntu release.
if you open a terminal in any linux distribution that works you can enter the command uname -a the kernel version is the first thing shown.
For instance
Ubuntu 7.10 used kernel version 2.6.22
Ubuntu 8.04 used kernel version 2.6.24
Ubuntu 8.10 used kernel version 2.6.27
Ubuntu 9.04 used kernel version 2.6.28

As I understand it Mandriva 2009.1 used kernel 2.6.28 then 2.6.29 which you are able to get running although with netapplet probs.
Now it is still possible that the later kernels don't fully support your Dell but less likely because Mandriva runs ok ish.
I'm using an Amilo laptop to write this and once I moved from Ubuntu 7.10 I had to update the computer bios to the latest version to get Ubuntu 8.10 installed.
Don't be deterred try to narrow down the problem it may be hardware run a memory check if you haven't done so

Thank's johntait1 for useful information. I will because of this investigate a bit further. Mem check has allways shown ok results so far, so that should not be the problem.

I also just checked the kernel in Mandriva and as you said it is 2.6.29 so that's a bit strange. Maybe it's something completely different.

Well I like Mandriva pretty much so I think I'll keep it for a while anyway.

Different distributions have kernels that does not have same modules active. For example, Red Hat publishes it's RHEL (and CentOS) kernel pretty slim and without some modules (sometimes needed), to be faster. But that's why CentOS has centosplus repository with full blown kernel, with all of the modules active. I use those, just to not think about what is active and what is not.

Mandriva is still a fine distro.

Just to add (probably nothing) to the conversation, I would try Debian Lenny net install cd. Some may say Debian is much like Slackware - a bit too advanced for a new convert, but I figure you're going to have to learn your new system anyway, might as well jump in with both feet. :)

HTH
Dave