Hey all. I have used Slack 12.0 just about since it was released on my old Dell laptop, and love it. I've just got a new Compaq box, and I'm having a few issues I was hoping someone has had (and fixed!) before. The box is a Compaq Presario F750US notebook, with an AMD Athlon X2 and NVIDIA chipsets/eth card. My problems are that every time I boot this box, and select linux from LILO, it runs the boot process for a while and then stops, and won't resume until I press the power button again.

then, once it boots, I try to bring up my ethernet card and use it, but I've found that with each successive reboot, the card's interface name changes and goes up by one (i.e. when I first installed, it was eth0, then eth1... right now it's eth45!). I've taken a look at my rc.inet1/rc.inet2/rc.inet1.conf files, but can't make much sense of what I need to do.

Hopefully someone is familiar with this problem? Thanks in advance for your help.

Well maybe there is an ACPI/APIC problem here, and maybe something related to BIOS. When booting from lilo, you can enter boot parameters at the boot: prompt below. For example if the name you select in the boot list is "Linux" then you can try something like

to turn off acpi. You can also try "noapic" and/or "nolapic" and see if it makes a difference.

By the way, there is a BIOS fix for this computer from last month (April 2008), which fixes a graphics corruption by disabling wireless card power management:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/s...3646603&dlc=en

So there could be something up with the handling of the card by the BIOS. I suggest that you first update you BIOS and see if the issue is gone, then try the kernel options above. You normally would want to keep ACPI on.

@llgar

Thanks so much for the response. I'll definitely take a look at shutting off the ACPI to help further narrow down the issue. The BIOS fix you linked to contained a windows utility to flash the BIOS as well as a BIOS image. I'm not dual booting on this computer and don't plan to. Is there a way to use the BIOS image and flash my BIOS from slack?

Not one that I am aware of. I, too, would like learn how to do this -- I'm almost never using Windows but my HP laptop had a couple of important BIOS fixes and I had to keep my Windows installation to be able to update the BIOS.

Btw, upgrading the kernel may also help. With pre-2.6.24 kernels I was experiencing random freezes, but mostly at boot time, on my laptop when apic was turned on. I don't know whether it was due to the BIOS upgrades or the kernel upgrade but everything runs smoothly now.

Well that's a shame. I've been taking a look at upgrading, but I'm going to wait until 12.1 stable is released. I'm hoping that it will make my life easier, but I'm not holding my breath (as far as the easy part goes). I still haven't isolated the problem with my ethernet card/interface. Any ideas on why it consistently increases its own interface number?

I can also confirm that with a newer kernel, a lot of hardware problems on my laptop (enabling suspend mode, wireless connectivity and card reader) seemed to disappear. Mine is a new Lenovo and probably a very different beast to the Compaq you are describing, but the general direction seems to be that new kernel modules seem to be fixing a lot of acpi-related issues.

good stuff. Well the good news is that 12.1 stable has been released :-D. I'm gonna spend the day upgrading and tweaking, and hopefully there won't be quite as many issues at the end of it all.

Well it turns out that all I needed to answer my prayers was the 2.6.24 kernel in 12.1. It really is beautiful. Of all the times I've installed and reinstalled and upgraded an OS, 12.0 - 12.1 was by far the most seamless (and actually pretty easy) one to date. My hat's off to Mr. Volkerding and the rest of the crew for that.

Compiling in ACPI support to the kernel solved the power button issue, and a fresh rc.d has solved my ethernet card issue. The only thing left to do is to continue to slim this baby down and get it runnin like a pro again. Thanks for the help, and thanks again to the slack guys for another round of Linux Love. peace