Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1002 mails)

[Karl-Heinz tm <karl-heinz_tm@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Thursday 14 July 2011 2336:49 Felix Miata Felix Miata 
> <mrmazda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On 2011/07/14 16:29 (GMT+0300) Stan Goodman composed:
> > > my venerable Pentium 4 motherboard died yesterday
> >
> > Died how? Many motherboards supporting P4 chips were built using
> > defective caps. Typically cap replacement puts them back in service,
> > and as long as your eye/hand coordination and vision aren't too bad,
> > it isn't too hard to do. There are howtos describing the process.
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague describes the problem
> > and may have a howto link.
>
> I'm very good, in fact, with a soldering iron etc., but I thought it was 
> time anyway for a new board. As for capacitors, nothing that fails only 
> after nine years can be said to have been defective.
>
> How it died was very sneaky. The first step was a  popped-up notice that 
> the amount of RAM had changed. I removed the RAM cards and cleaned the 
> contacts thoroughly. The following day, it wouldn't boot at all because 
> it didn't see the HDs. I interpreted this as meaning that some 
> connections had become intermittent, and that the time had come to 
> retire the board, the BIOS date of which is 2002 (which you remarked 
> about recently), so it deserved to go out to pasture (retirement to stud 
> is not available to MBs).
>
> > If you're using the same case and PS for the new motherboard, better
> > open up the PS and inspect for possible bad caps. You wouldn't want
> > to risk damaging the new one and have to install all over again soon
> > or suffer downtime for warranty replacement for an easily avoided
> > problem.
>
> I am indeed using same case (but little else other than HDs). The PS had 
> been replaced only about two months ago. Since the new board doesn't 
> support  ATAPI, the DVD drive is new. There is no support for floppy 
> drive, which was anyway a nostalgic feature of little utility..
>
> Over the weekend I will google to see what Tumbleweed is, and likely try 
> it out.
You may want to ckeck out this page:  http://en.opensuse.org/Tumbleweed. 
It has all the information needed for people who want to try the Tumbleweed 
repo.
 
Special concern if you are using Virtualbox (which is what I actually do):  it 
is not 
explained in detail on the above opensuse page, but the effects of Tumbleweed 
on 
Virtualbox use are as follows:
1) the opensuse version of Virtualbox cannot be used, rather the download 
version 
from virtualbox.org needs to be installed
2) you have to recompile the Virtualbox kernel module each time your kernel 
gets updated from the Tumbleweed repo.  This however is straightforward as 
Virtualbox pops up an error message that tells you what to do in this case.

BR, Karl-Heinz
> -- 
> Stan Goodman
> Qiryat Tiv'on
> Israel
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