SillyDog701

[iJohnE]

I swear to the almighty one that I have tried every god damn distribution you could name. And this computer just doesn't boot.

I had Ubuntu 10.04.4 with Lubuntu working. But it stopped booting. And by stopped booting I mean it has the same issues every other distribution that I've managed to install has. It just hang at boot.

The system only has 256MB of memory, so live cds usually don't boot. Except for the Debian live cds. Which boot fine.

Arch Linux installs, and I can start X. However, when I shut down the system and do a reboot it hangs at boot.

Ubuntu 8.04.4 installs and runs okay, minus the fact that A) it's outdated and B) It won't get an IP address from my router on Wifi or my laptop on Ethernet after the first reboot.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be holding this computer up? It's a dell Dimension 8250 with a Pentium 4 (2.66Ghz) 256MB of RD Rambus Ram and an nVidia GeForce 4MX 420 (it works with the NV X drivers, and I thought that first this might be what was holding it up, however even adding xforcevesa, nv.modeset=0 or nouveau.modset=0 to the boot parameters doesn't help the issue.)

Everything on this motherboard is intel excluding the USB chipset which is Via.

I'm completely at my wits end, seeing as Windows doesn't work all to well on this machine, but at least it boots.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions I could try to get this computer to work with Linux?

It doesn't have any sensitive data, and I've run DBAN a few times so don't worry about that.

If anyone can do this it's the people I know at SillyDog!

-John

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100723 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.8

[iJohnE]

*Note: I did a remastersys install from the Debian Live CDs multiple times, and I keep getting grub errors. I ran a grub rescue and it's still not fixing it.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100723 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.8

[iJohnE]

I'm going to give Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10, released October 2007) a try. And see if I can do upgrades. It's worth a try.

I don't know if it's a issue with the newer kernels or what.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100723 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.8

[iJohnE]

Well, 7.10 hangs on boot. Just like the others.

However, I think I may have worked out an issue. I had two IDE hard drives in there, and the seconday as well as the first were both set as master.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100723 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.8

[Antony]

I've always having trouble installing or running Linux since the mid 90s. (Well, I am not a Linux geek.)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8

[iJohnE]

This really is an odd issue for me, as I have run Linux perfectly on this machine before. In all honesty, I don't have the slightest idea what could be wrong.

A few people have suggested that I try updating the BIOS and then installing and see if that does anything.

This is the only machine that I've ever had an issue with Linux on. My laptop runs it just fine, albeit a few hardware issues with the older kernels; but now everything seems to work fine with it.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100723 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.8

[iJohnE]

I fixed it! The was a conflict with the onboard ethernet chipset (Intel PRO 10/100). Disabling that fixed it completely, everything boots now. Live CDs may be slow, but they boot!

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.472.63 Safari/534.3

[Ghostman 1]

You don't have enough ram, 256 is way too low to run almost any OS now days.. You need to up it to at least 1 gig..

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.18) Gecko/20110619 Firefox/3.6.18 (Palemoon/3.6.18)

[iJohnE]

You don't have enough ram, 256 is way too low to run almost any OS now days.. You need to up it to at least 1 gig..

Actually 256 was just fine to run Gnome as well as LXDE and do simple tasks. Right now I added another 512MB of ram for a total of 768MB.

It would cost me way to much money to upgrade to a gig as the system uses motherboard specific RD rambus ram. I've been looking on eBay but the problem with that is I'm never sure if it is supported by my motherboard. And if I find it on some online stores it's usually well over $400.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0

[Ghostman 1]

With 768 ram , You should be able now to run almost all of them, Just depends on your hard drive size and CPU speed.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.18) Gecko/20110619 Firefox/3.6.18 (Palemoon/3.6.18)

[iJohnE]

With 768 ram , You should be able now to run almost all of them, Just depends on your hard drive size and CPU speed.

It has an 80GB 7200RPM and a 60GB 7200RPM.

It also has a 2.66Ghz Pentium 4, with an upgrade nVidia Geforce FX 5600 something or other. It's a really nice machine now for basic uses, and will probably become my main desktop again with the sale of my DC5100.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0