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10372 discussions

Bash script to test serial ports
by Stuart Bailey 22 Feb '06

22 Feb '06

HI, I'm trying to test serial ports using a bash script. Currently I have: DATA="1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" stty -F /dev/ttyS0 ispeed 115200 ospeed 115200 stty -F /dev/ttyS1 ispeed 115200 ospeed 115200 echo -n " Sending data from /dev/ttyS0 to /dev/ttyS1:" ./send_data.sh /dev/ttyS0 $DATA & exec 3</dev/ttyS1 while read -t 2 -u 4 RESULT do if [[ "$RESULT" == "$DATA" ]] then echo " PASSED" else echo " FAILED" fi done I repeat this script for data in the other direction. This seems to work fine if a cable is connected between the two ports, and data transfers are successful. However, if the first time round, but if no cable is connected between ttyS0 and ttyS1, the first test reports FAILED, and then the script hangs. BTW the send_data script is a follows: sleep 1 echo $2 > $1 2>/dev/null I thought the read -t 2 ... should timeout after 2 seconds if no data is received. Any idea why this hangs? Also, is there a better way to test these ports? The system I am trying to test is limited - perl and awk are not installed. Many thanks, Stuart. -- --------------------------------------- Stuart Bailey BSc (hons) CEng CITP MBCS LinuSoft (Proprietor) Linux Specialist (01953) 601294 (07778) 383739 http://www.linusoft.co.uk ----------------------------------------

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64bit computing on the cheap
by Wayne Stallwood 20 Feb '06

20 Feb '06

Anybody interested in mucking about with an Alpha box ? I have a spare one now due to an upgrade, AlphaServer 1000 Big unit but not as noisy or power hungry/space heating as it looks. 1GB of RAM, complete with ECC parity modules. 266 Mhz Alpha processor (a bit faster than it sounds) 7 hot swap bays ( a selection of drives will be supplied to go in these, mostly 2.1GB units but I do have at least one 4.3 to go in there) Dat drive (untested) Had it running the Debian alpha port...it can also run OpenVMS (hobby licence is available for free still I think) and Tru64 (again you'll need a licence) or Windows NT (not much point, there are hardly any binaries available) or BSD Unit is currently set to a local (VGA monitor PS2 KB/mouse) console but I can reconfigure for serial console if required. ECU floppy included for hardware configuration and I'll shove in a Ethernet card that Debian understands easily. Any offer considered...otherwise it is going on Ebay Also may have a DSSI disk array/host adaptor and disks, depending on if I get time to wipe them...However these need the Array controllers reconfiguring (which requires a special serial lead) and I have never been able to get the adaptors to play on Debian anyway. Also they are 6x2.1GB which hardly seems worth the effort.

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 20 Feb '06

20 Feb '06

This is the automated ALUG IRC meeting reminder sent to remind you that there is an IRC meeting tonight (Monday) at 8.00pm. Historically, these used to be the only time a lot of us would be about, now the channel has some usual faces that are there most of the time (except at silly o'clock, when we might be sleeping, or on the second thursday of the month, where we might be drinking in the Reindeer), so don't feel limited to visit during this time, come visit us when ever you feel like it! The meeting takes place on the irc server irc.alug.org.uk in the #alug channel. Most IRC clients should allow you to get there with the commands "/server irc.alug.org.uk" and "/join #alug". Popular IRC clients include xchat, irssi and EPIC on Unix, and Mirc under windows. Here are some links to help you get started with irc. Unix http://www.xchat.org/ http://www.irssi.org/ http://www.epicsol.org/ Windows http://www.mirc.com (loads of help with irc for newbies!)

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FW: UKUUG Spring Conference 2006 - Durham, 21-23 March
by Alasdair G Kergon 20 Feb '06

20 Feb '06

The UKUUG's annual Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) conference will take place in Durham from Tuesday 21st to Thursday 23rd March 2006: http://www.ukuug.org/events/spring2006/ This is the UK's only conference aimed specifically at systems and network administrators. It attracts a large number of professionals from sites of all shapes and sizes. As well as the technical talks, the conference provides a friendly environment for delegates to meet, learn, and enjoy lively debate on a host of subjects. The conference itself will be preceded by a full-day tutorial on "Managing Samba 3.0", with core Samba developer Gerald Carter joining us from the US. Delegates then have a choice of two workshops on the first morning of the main conference: "LDAP in depth", or "Firewalling with OpenBSD's PF packet filter". The main conference stream will focus on systems administration: the nuts and bolts of running large computer installations. The keynote will be given by James Youngman, now of Google Inc, who will be giving us the low down on how Google's systems are put together. This year, for the first time, we have almost an entire stream dedicated to a BSD MiniCon, and are pleased to welcome Dru Lavigne who will be joining us from Canada, as well as a number of speakers from the UK BSD community. We hope you will be able to join us in Durham for what is set to be one of our biggest and best conferences of recent years. -- Ray Miller, UKUUG - the UK's Unix and Open Systems User Group http://www.ukuug.org

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FOSDEM: Brussels, Sat 25 - Sun 26 Feb 2006
by Alasdair G Kergon 19 Feb '06

19 Feb '06

The purpose of this email is to invite you to attend the 6th FOSDEM on the weekend of 25th and 26th of February 2006 in Brussels. Previous events were hugely successful with more than 3000 developers coming from all over the world to attend talks given by famous figures of the Free Software and Open Source community. See http://www.fosdem.org/ for more information. This year's speakers include: Alex Russell, Project Leader of the Dojo Toolkit Axel Hecht, Member of Mozilla Europe's Board of Directors. Crispin Cowan, Architect of the AppArmor Project David Roundy, Lead Developer of the Darcs Project Geert Bevin, Lead Developer of RIFE Greg Stein, One of the Early Designers of the Subversion Project Ian Pratt, Leader and Chief Architect of the Xen Project Jan Janak, Core Team Member of SER (The SIP Express Router) Jason Huggins, Original Author and Core Team Member of Selenium Jean-Marc Valin, Main Author and Maintainer of Speex Jeff Waugh, The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop Jon Haslam, DTrace Project Jon Trowbridge, Maintainer of Beagle Julian Seward, valgrind Founder and Project Lead Mark Spencer, Founder of Asterisk Massimiliano Pala, OpenCA Project Manager and Chief Designer Michael Meeks, OpenOffice.org Richard M Stallman, Leader of the FSF Tomasz Kojm, Original Author and Project Leader of ClamAV Uriel M. Pereira, Plan 9 Hacker And many others who will be giving talks and tutorials... Several Free or Open Source Software projects have decided to hold a meeting during FOSDEM. It is a great occasion to meet core developers in the following developers' rooms: Ada, Calibre, GNU Classpath, Debian, Embedded softwares, Gentoo, GNOME, GNUStep, Jabber, KDE, Linux on Laptops, Mozilla, Opengroupware, openSUSE, Tcl/Tk, X.org. All those rooms have an internal schedule, including talks and presentations from lead developers. Don't miss other FOSDEM initiatives like the Key Signing Party, or the LPI exams. FOSDEM's goal is to provide Free Software and Open Source developers and communities the opportunity to learn and discuss the latest developments in the Free and Open Source arena and to promote the development and the benefits of Free and Open Source solutions. The speakers mainly talk about technologies and make technical speeches. The event is totally free. This is a non-commercial event organised by people from the community. So we would like to thank our sponsors who have understood this and helped us making FOSDEM possible to happen this year again in the same spirit. Those include: O'Reilly, Google, Argon7, Canonical, ESCAUX, GNU/Linux Magazine France, Linux Magazine, Misc, Nokia, Novell, SUN Microsystems, Think Wize, Freshmeat.net, Linux Magazin, Sourceforge.net and all of our donators without who organizing such an event wouldn't be possible. We encourage you to support FOSDEM if you appreciate the event and want it to continue in the same spirit. More information about the FOSDEM 2006 support operation at: http://www.fosdem.org/2006/index/support/ We hope to see you there. The FOSDEM team pr(a)fosdem.org

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Wirelessness and XP
by Peter 19 Feb '06

19 Feb '06

Has anyone encountered anything like the following? Start out with a netgear ADSL wireless router, new laptop, XP up to date, and coming into the admin interface of the router through a wired ethernet connection on another computer. Plug in, and the wireless network is recognised immediately. However there is no authentication or security, and it is recommended to change the SSID. I change it, and reboot the device. The old SSID is now shown in XP, along with the new name as a second network. In the admin interface for the router, at the top level, the new name is shown. Further down in the stack, the old name is shown - there are two menus, one where you change the SSID, the other where you allow or don't allow multiple SSIDs. It is in the second one that the old SSID shows up. Delete the old network in XP, and try to use the new one. Can't. Delete all of them in both machines, create a new one on the device. Now no network is visible, though the admin interface says its there, and the wlan light is on. Decide to try creating a new one, on the device. The old one, now supposedly deleted, now appears and can be connected to. What is going on, asks my friend? I spent a couple of hours on this in increasing embarassment, and not understanding at all what was happening. How could it be that networks which the router thought were there should not be visible from XP, and vice versa? Why did rebooting the device not seem to work as you'd expect? The devices by the way were on the same table top, so signal strength wasn't an issue. Was I missing something blindingly obvious? Thought wireless Linux was difficult, but its nothing compared to this! Peter

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DHTML date format - where can I find a description?
by Chris Green 18 Feb '06

18 Feb '06

I'm playing with tables in TWiki and one of the parameters for a date column is "DHTML date format" which specifies the format of the date (I assume). However I can't find anywhere that documents it, does anyone have any suggestions - either where to find doucmentation or a basic description? -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Could this happen on Linux?
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 18 Feb '06

18 Feb '06

Hi Folks, I've just been reading a shocking story on R-devel (the developers' mailing list for the R statistical programming language). Quote: "Over on R-help, the old problem of floating point precision has come up again (see my example below, where calling RSiteSearch can change the results of the var() function). The problem here is that on Windows many DLLs set the precision of the fpu to 53 bit mantissas, whereas R normally uses 64 bit mantissas. (Some Microsoft docs refer to these as 64 bit and 80 bit precision respectively, because they count the sign and exponent bits too). When R calls out to the system, if one of these DLLs gets control, it may change the precision and not change it back. This can happen for example in calls to display a file dialog or anything else where a DLL can set a hook; it's very hard to predict." In other words (if I understand aright), certain programs or processes can change the way the CPU functions when doing floating point arithmetic with the result that other programs will subsequently operate in a different FP environment and get different answers. I'd like to think that Linux was immune to this kind of thing, but can't see an a priori refutation of the possibility. What are the informed views on such a question? Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 18-Feb-06 Time: 16:12:56 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Anyone for Fat Cat tonight?
by David Noble 17 Feb '06

17 Feb '06

Anyone for Fat Cat tonight? --Daven

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Belkin PCI wireless card
by Ian bell 17 Feb '06

17 Feb '06

I am having some trouble configuring a newly acquired belkin wireless network card. I have it working but it is a kludge and I don't know why it works so I would like some advice. I have sorted the kernel module (rt2500.o) and I have added modprobe wlan0 to the end of rc.modules tp load it. It loads ok and I can ifconfig to my heart's content but it won't connect to my wireless router. I ran netconfig to set up dhcp but the client dhcpcd does not seem to get run. Running from the console does nothing but await the timeout. route shows just the local loopback. However, by accident I discovered that if I ran kwifi and configured the card to look for my router in infrastructure mode, then if I run dhcpcd wlan0 everything works. route shows that dhcp has made the necessary connections. OK I can do this manually every time but I don't understand what it is that kwifi is doing. Obviously there is a step I am missing somewhere. Can anyone help? I am running Slackare 10.1 Cheers Ian

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Colour lasers
by Barry Samuels 16 Feb '06

16 Feb '06

I want to get a colour laser printer but find the offerings rather confusing. Can anyone recommend one to work with Linux from experience? I want it to be capable of producing good prints from digital photographic images as well as general documents. I know that any Postscript printer should work with Linux but I remember seeing someone on ALUG say don't get one which uses Postscript as a layer over the printer's native language because it makes printing slow. A number of printers describe 'Postscript emulation' or 'Postscript simulation' - is there any difference? Are these the slow ones? Very often it is not clear whether a particular printer is true Postscript or not. What would I have to spend to get a true Postscript printer? Which ones should I avoid? -- Barry Samuels http://www.beenthere-donethat.org.uk The Unofficial Guide to Great Britain

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How to become another user, without password, but keep environment?
by Chris Green 16 Feb '06

16 Feb '06

In my role at work at the moment I frequently have to become other users (mostly build management logins rather than specific user logins). To make this easier for myself I put myself in the user's .rhosts file so that I don't have to give the password every time I become the other user. This is inside a small[ish] development group so this doesn't raise any difficult security issues really. However if you 'rlogin -l newuser hostname' you get newuser's environment. This is OK sometimes but often is a bit of a pain because I need to reset DISPLAY to get X applications to work on my screen and I also lose my favourite editor, etc., etc. So is there any way to preserve the environment in the same way that would happen if I did an 'su newuser' but, on the other hand, allow me to login in without entering the password (as I can with rlogin)? I can thing of various nasty scripting ways of doing it but su is so close to what I want it seems a pity to re-invent an almost invented wheel. -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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Firewall routing problems
by Stuart Bailey 16 Feb '06

16 Feb '06

Hi, I have a customer who is try to give me access to some data for testing, on one of their server, port 5000. If I telnet to their port from my server, I can't get a connection, unless I disable my firewall - not something I like to do. If I look at a tcpdump for port 5000, I can see the connection going out to the internet (5000 is enable in my firewall), and I can see that the masquerading ports are in the same range as when I send SMTP or HTTP packets - which work fine. Any ideas what else can be causing the problem? I'm using Guarddog to configure the iptables. Many thanks. Stuart. -- --------------------------------------- Stuart Bailey BSc (hons) CEng CITP MBCS LinuSoft (Proprietor) Linux Specialist (01953) 601294 (07778) 383739 http://www.linusoft.co.uk ----------------------------------------

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Hosting questions
by Chris Green 15 Feb '06

15 Feb '06

My wife wants to register a set of domains for a small (long term) project she's thinking of starting. I've checked and a nice set of 'same name' domains are available as .com, .co.uk and .biz. The question is should I just register the domains and host them on the home Linux system or can I get a reasonable deal from anywhere for hosting and registration all in one go? Can anyone recommend a single registration company/site which can do all these TLDs at a reasonable price? I've used Just The Names for my isbd.ltd.uk domain and they are reasonably priced for .com and .co.uk but they're expensive for .biz. If I host them on the home system (which already hosts isbd.ltd.uk forwarded from Just The Names) is it possible to 'virtual host' a number of domains even when they're registered with (possibly) different companies? -- Chris Green (chris(a)areti.co.uk) "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."

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[OT] Fault puzzle
by Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 14 Feb '06

14 Feb '06

Hi Folks, Your experience may help here. Today I was phoned by a friend who'd switched on her PC only to get the message "Operating system not found", together with the observation that "DHCP" and "MBA" had come up on screen. The only special circumstance was that the machine had been left unused and switched off for just over a week. So I went round and had a look. Switch on, and enter Setup. Check Boot Order: Floppy, CD-ROM, HDD, Network, and MBA-UNDI. So decided that this was consistent with failing to boot off HDD and proceeding to try booting off the network ("DHCP") which failed (since no network) and then "MBA-UNDI" (whatever that is). So tabbed over to IDE setup to see what whas there, or not. Apparently the HDD and its parameters showed up OK. So quit Setup without saving and let it re-boot. Success: clean boot off HDD. Repeatable -- shut down, switch off, disconnect from mains, re-connect, switch on -> clean re-boot as if nothing had ever happened. Provisionally, therefore, thought that the week's off-time had resulted in the CMOS battery draining, so that it had lost its data which were somehow restored when I went into Setup and poked around. But then it occurred to me that if that were so, then the CMOS clock should have the wrong time (e.g. some hours or days slow). Not so: in fact it was 5 minutes fast. So that seems to not favour my hyptohesis. Leaving me wondering what might really have happened. The only thing I did was have a look inside the Setup and re-boot, not altering a thing. Any ideas? With thanks, and best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 13-Feb-06 Time: 22:00:00 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Netmasks and IP addresses for dual homed hosts
by Peter Onion 14 Feb '06

14 Feb '06

All of my boxes have got ethernet AND wireless interfaces and everything works fine, but I want to move to using "zeroconf" networking so I don't have to maintain /etc/hosts files on every machine (or go to the bother of setting up a proper DNS server). I've got the avahi daemon working and nss-mdns is working for resolving ".local" host names. Now seems like a good time to review the way I've allocated IP addresses to hosts. My ADLS modem/ethernet router/WiFi access point is a Dlink DSL-G640T which has the address 192.168.1.1 How would you assign addresses to hosts that have wired and wireless interfaces? BTW at home I normally run with the Wireless interfaces turned off but use them if I take machines "away from home" so I don't have to bother with network cables and hubs etc. However laptops sometimes gets used with wireless interfaces at home. Peter

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How to create an email autoresponder?
by Ian Douglas 13 Feb '06

13 Feb '06

Hi Folks, My little business currently has an automated brochure service describing the products we sell. The company has an "info" email address to which people can send keywords and receive an automatically generated email response describing that particular product. At the moment this "autoresponder" function is carried out by an ancient PC chugging away in a forgotten corner running Microsoft Outlook Express and using this program's message filtering rules to select and return the appropriate email/s in response to the keywords in incoming emails. It seems to work quite well and reliably but I was wondering if there was a Linux email prog which we could run on our fileserver to do this? I looked at this a year or so ago and found that although kmail (for example) could filter messages on keywords in the message body it was unable to respond by using this keyword to select an appropriate email reply (out of a possible 20) and actually send it (although kmail may have improved since then). Do any ALUGers already have a Linux based automated brochure service / email autoresponder running on their server? If so could you pass on some tips on how you set it up? Best wishes, Ian.

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Weekly IRC reminder
by Brett Parker 13 Feb '06

13 Feb '06

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Ignore last mailing
by robert 12 Feb '06

12 Feb '06

Hi i write this to inform you that since i sent out HELP WITH TARBALLS i have now got my snes9x up and running on Linux.Thanks Robert

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HPLIP and PSC 500
by Dan Hatton 12 Feb '06

12 Feb '06

Dear All, Is anyone having any luck using the HP PSC 500 all-in-one printer and scanner (or any other HP all-in-one on a parallel port) under Linux? If so, please can you tell me how? The story so far: Once upon I time, I was printing and scanning happily, using the hpijs back-end to CUPS and the hpoj back-end to SANE. Then scanning stopped working, apparently due to the bug described at <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=339584>. About three weeks ago, I decided to deal with this by migrating to hplip's hpaio back-end to SANE, but have had no joy. Functionality seems to have steadily deteriorated since then, perhaps with successive upgrades to the SANE version in Debian Testing; at first, the scanner would freeze part-way through scans above a (low) critical resolution, then the scanner would freeze part-way through all scans, whatever the resolution, now SANE front-ends can't see the scanner at all. I note in passing that the list of available devices in CUPS contains the line "hp no_device_found," and I'm having to get printing to work using "Parallel port #1" from this list, which I suspect means I'm, in some sense, bypassing hplip, even though I'm using "HP(HPLIP)" as the model/driver option. I think this may have something to do with the following messages in syslog; maybe the first two lines represent two things happening in the wrong order? The first one seems to occur during loading of kernel modules, and the second on running of /etc/init.d/hplip start. Feb 11 19:21:36 (none) hp: unable to open /var/run/hplip/hpiod.port: No such file or directory: prnt/hpijs/hplip_api.c 84 Feb 11 19:22:04 (none) hpiod: 0.9.7 accepting connections at 32770... Feb 11 19:27:02 (none) tcpspy[4527]: disconnect: user hplip, local 127.0.0.1:52646, remote 127.0.0.1:32770 Feb 11 19:27:02 (none) tcpspy[4527]: disconnect: user hplip, local 127.0.0.1:32770, remote 127.0.0.1:52646 Any ideas are welcome. -- Thanks very much, Dan Hatton

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New Laptop Success
by Peter Onion 12 Feb '06

12 Feb '06

If anyone is thinking about a laptop for linuxhere is asuccess story....... There was a time (not so long ago) when installing Linux on a laptop was a bit of a lottery with respect to getting drivers for all the hardware. I decided my trusty old Dell Latitude was up for replacement, and having just built a desktop with a AMD64 mobo I decided to go for a similarly powered laptop. For several reasons I decided on one of these http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/nbrange.html?CSF After a bit of a delay ( and some trouble with UPS (that's the courier firm! )) it finally arrived yesterday. I've installed SuSE 10.0 from DVD and EVERYTHING WORKS, even the built in wifi that uses a chip set I'de never heard of before! As with my other boxes I've added the ATI proprietry X server to get openGL support (1280x800 is nice!). Peter

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Help with tarballs
by robert 11 Feb '06

11 Feb '06

Hi i would just like to ask anyone if they know about installing snes9x emulator tarball as it seems a little different to the tarball i install on Gentoo. Thanks Robert

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Re: main Digest, Vol 8, Issue 15
by David Noble 11 Feb '06

11 Feb '06

re: the laptop- did it come with wireless drivers for Linux; or do you still need to use ndiswrapper?

2 1

Where to find script
by Paul 10 Feb '06

10 Feb '06

A little titbit for JT arising from a conversation at the meeting earlier... The script utility can be found in bsdutils in Debian's packaging system. Regards, Paul. -- From the Klingon book of C: Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' - they have 'arguments' - and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.

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i686 kernel on P4M
by Wayne Stallwood 09 Feb '06

09 Feb '06

P4M's should be i686 compatible shouldn't they ? I noticed the other week that the Ubuntu installer had selected the i386 kernel build on my Thinkpad...thinking that this was a mistake on the part of the installer I changed this to the i686 one (moving restricted modules over to i686 as well after my wireless broke) Since doing that I have experienced a couple of hard lockups...two when running Mozilla Firefox and one when using VMware Player (The VMware kernel modules taint the kernel but they don't usually give me any bother) Similarly I have never heard of Firefox crashes killing a whole machine. Moving back to the i386 kernel I cannot repeat these problems. My understanding is that i686 was everything from a Pentium Pro upwards..the P4M being based on the PIII core I thought this would be fine, but maybe there are some instructions not implemented on the P4M...Any thoughts ? My Music server (A real PIII) is running the i686 kernel and is rock solid.

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