[Gllug] Decent 64-bit linux distro

[Matthew Smith]

David Coles wrote:
> Hi Matt.
> 
> Your experience sounds so bad that I can't relate it to any that I have 
> had with 64bit GNU/Linux and would have to suggest that it is a hardware 
> problem. Modern PCs have ACPI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACPI) BIOSes 
> and apparently they can behave differently depending on what OS is running 
> (don't ask me why anyone thought this was a good idea) and some will give 
> duff information to Linux apparently. According to this post:
> 
>    http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=210195
> 
> your machine probably has a Foxconn motherboard in it and I have heard 
> that these are one of the worst offenders for ACPI badness under Linux.
> 
> This may well explain why everything is good under Windows and totally 
> broken under Linux.
> 
> Try booting with the 'acpi=off' and possibly the 'noapic' switches when 
> installing and make sure it's in your GRUB setup. If this results in a 
> more stable system then blame your mobo.

Thanks.  Apparently the Linux kernel developers have solved this
particular problem by having the kernel pretend to be Windows (rather
like some browsers can pretend to be MSIE), and that this behaviour was
established in kernel 2.6.24 and mine is 2.6.27.  To my knowledge, the
issues aren't ACPI related (e.g. the power switches off when you shut
down).  It's solely a problem with being often unable to get a network
connection.  I found that this was probably a driver issue, and the
problem seems to have been solved since I started using the e1000e driver.

BTW, can I use rmmod and modprobe when running installers, as with
OpenSUSE?  Fedora seems to have a broken freetype, with different
applications using different rendering settings even though they use the
same toolkit, and sometimes you find some fonts displaying correctly
(e.g. DejaVu) and others looking awful with coloured pixels everywhere
in what should be grey, and this is true even if you install the
"fedora-cleartype" RPMs.  The GNOME font rendering dialog doesn't seem
to fix this (e.g. by turning subpixel smoothing off) or bring consistency.

Also, is the SUSE LVM problem I alluded to in my original post a driver 
issue, or just a bug in their installer?  (The partitioner did see and 
allow me to edit my LVM partitions; it just failed when it came to 
actually formatting my LVM root partition.)

Regards,

Matt Smith

-- 

http://www.blogistan.co.uk/
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug