Hi,

I have been trying to use only linux since the release of Mandrake 8.2. But, my experience wasn't that great. I found it buggy and slow. So I went back to Windows. Then I tried another time with Mandrake 9.1. It was a little better than with 8.2 but it was still not perfect. I went back to Windows again. Now, I just installed Mandrake 9.2 and I'm decided to leave Windows. But I'm still having problems with it. I hope you can help me.

I wanted to do a security update after the install. So, I opened Mandrake Update. All went fine when suddenly, the update stopped. I waited a few minutes to be sure it wasn't just a connection problem. But it was still stopped. So, I closed Mandrake Update and opened it again. An error message appeared: urpmi database locked (something like that). I supposed it was due to the fact that I closed Mandrake Update while it was updating. So, I rebooted.

For my second attempt, I decided to try urpmi directly. So, I did: urpmi.update -a then urpmi --auto-select. Everything seemed to go OK. But, suddenly, it froze totally. My hole computer was frozen. So I did a hard reboot . I tried it 2 times, and it did the same thing.

I would like to know what to do to solve this problem.

If you need more info, just ask it.

Cheers,
Spy5600

Here's a little update on my status

At first, I thought that it was urpmi that was locking up my system. But I searched and found that it was maybe something else. I found that I was (maybe?) using the wrong kernel. When LILO starts, I can choose between "linux" and "linux-enterprise". I always chose "linux". But I found that "linux-enterprise" was compiled with HIGHMEM. So, since I have 1GB of memory, I thought that using the "linux-enterprise" kernel might solve the problem. So, after that, I used the "linux-enterprise" kernel. Everything looked fine and I was able to update using urpmi.

But, with no apparent reason, it locked up again. I was doing nothing special (just typing some text). So, I have no clue what could cause the system to lock up.

Do you have any idea of what could cause lockups? If you need more info just tell me what you need. I suppose there're logs somewhere that I could use to diagnosis but I have no idea where it is and how to use it.

Spy5600

HIMEM is not required fot RAM<4GB
(i thinkso . correct me if i'm wrong)

better go back to normal one.

If I had to guess (and at this point I do, hehe), I'd suspect the NIC driver is causing the lockup. I'm not familiar with your mobo, but if you know what chipset it uses (VIA, ALi, Intel, nForce) googling may yield some info. I assume you're using an integrated network card, since you don't list a seperate one in your tag.

Yes, I use the onboard NIC. My motherboard has a nforce2 chipset. There're 2 onboard NIC on it: the nforce2 integrated and a 3com. I use the 3com and during the install, the installer chose a 3com driver (don't know if it's the good one but it works).

I didn't install any driver for my chipset. Also, I use the default video driver (not the nvidia one). Maybe this is what causes the lockup?