[Gllug] Decent 64-bit linux distro

[David Coles]

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.

--
David

On Fri, 30 Jan 2009, M.J. Smith wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> Can anyone point me to a decent 64-bit distro?  I have recently acquired 
> a Core 2 Duo Dell (Inspiron 530) and have had a series of problems with 
> all the 64-bit distros I have tried.  I have Fedora 10 installed at the 
> moment, which holds for ages when booting trying to start eth0 and 
> usually fails, and I have sometimes been able to get it to start using 
> the command line and sometimes not.  Ubuntu Intrepid, when I loaded up 
> the desktop disc, would load the network when I requested it, but its 
> installer would not handle the LVM filesystems that Fedora 10 had set up 
> by default, and the alternate installer-only disc would not even boot, 
> putting up a series of error messages relating to USB and the disc 
> controller.  OpenSUSE 11.1 would not bring up the network either during 
> installation, and when I'd finished the configuration, it baled out with 
> an error saying it couldn't create a LVM filesystem.
>
> Can anyone tell me how to fix my network problem?  It's not my wires or 
> my router, because Windows Vista handles it fine.  My network interface 
> is an onboard 10/100 affair, which I presume is Intel.  I have done some 
> searching and found that people were having problems with Ubuntu Feisty 
> with Dell network interfaces in 2007, but surely the same problem should 
> not be reoccurring nearly two years later, on what is standard hardware 
> in the UK on the lowest-priced PC kit?
>
> Does anyone else get my impression that the 64-bit versions of the 
> popular distros are afterthoughts which aren't tested properly?  I can't 
> believe the installer for a major distro simply could not handle LVM 
> filesystems.  Does anyone have a fix for these issues or should I just 
> install the 32-bit version?
>
> Regards,
>
> Matt Smith
>
> -- 
>
> http://www.blogistan.co.uk/blog
>
>
>
>
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