[wellylug] Mandrake Question

Donald Gordon don at dis.org.nz
Thu Jan 29 12:15:14 NZDT 2004


On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 11:15:57 +1300
Tim Wright <tim at mcs.vuw.ac.nz> wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> I'm having a couple of issues with Mandrake 9.2. I was wondering if anyone had 
> any ideas what's happenning.
> 
> The computer is an old one, probably a pentium 2 (it's in the wairarapa, and 
> I'm in Wellington) with 196MB ram (i upgraded the ram to put linux on it). 
> It's got a USB mouse. It's got a winmodem, that is working.
> 
> Initial problems were mouse (not keyboard) lockup in X. Sometimes a 
> CTRL-ALT-BckSpace  would return control of mouse, sometimes not, and a reboot 
> was in order. I've noticed another installation of Mandrake doing a similar 
> thing with a USB mouse. However, it's got worse.

Possibly hardware trouble - an iffy cable, for example, or massive
buildup of gunk on the rollers.  Have you tried using another mouse?

> Here's the current problem report (written by my mum:)
> 
> > No it doesn't print out anything - when I first turn it on in the
> > morning - it more often than not - after it is almost ready for me to
> > use - a little buzzer goes and it flicks onto the white screen with all
> > the writing - almost a reset - then it goes through it all again -
> > otherwise I have to reset it myself - after a while the mouse cursor
> > will disappear altogether, or freeze - and I reset it.
> > It is very slow to warm up in the morning - a good 15 minutes.
> 
> "the white screen with all the writing" is probably a text console. "goes 
> through it all again" is probably KDE initialising.

The "buzzer" is possibly the monitor syncing to the new (different
resolution) video signal.  Looking at the XFree86 log (/var/log/X* is
probably close enough) may be a good idea.

> Any ideas...or does anyone have disks for a different distro that I can use? 
> (I'm a Debian geek, but don't want to put that on a computer with a slow 
> network connection:)

I have a debian woody CD (just the first one) I can lend you :-)

> I've asked mum to send down the X config (told her to attach 
> /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to an email), so will post that if and when if comes 
> through. Otherwise...what are your thoughts.

It's likely to be hardware trouble :-(

donald




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