I installed suse 9.0, 64-bit version, on a gigabyte k8 triton motherboard with 1.5G ram,

David, I'm running almost exactly the same configuration: * SuSE 9.0 (installed via FTP) * Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro Motherboard (K8 Triton Series) with nForce3 150 chipset * 1 Gb RAM (Corsair) * AMD Athlon64 3200+ CPU * ATI Rage 128 Video * Western Digital 160Gb ATA-100 drive First of all, you have to be very careful with getting RAM that will work with this motherboard. See the article at Tom's Hardware: http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20040112/memory_performance-11.html I suppose this is not the greatest motherboard, but with my Corsair memory, it does work. I'll assume you've got your hardware together. In that case, my experience shows you will almost certainly not get a working system without majorly upgrading the kernel. Mine crashed constantly until I upgraded. It wasn't a problem of any one application or the other, but rather of the kernel and motherboard combo. Consider the following message on the nForce3 Chipset, as of Sept. 17, 2003: http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0309.2/0447.html

"Re: [PATCH] 2.4.23-pre4 support for new nForce IDE controllers" This adds support for some new and upcoming NVIDIA nForce IDE controllers to the combined AMD / NVIDIA IDE driver. I've also added support for udma6 (Ultra 133) as a separate patch that depends on this patch

SuSE 9.0 runs the 2.4.21 kernel, which (I assume) does not have the patch. It crashed like crazy on me. It would work for a while, then hang up while making a short "zapping" sound through the speakers, like a mosquito zapper (if I had sound turned on). If I accessed the hard drive a lot, it would crash more. This happened even when I turned off DMA, used the VESA Framebuffer driver for video, and turned off audio (i.e. didn't load the driver in the kernel). It even managed to crash a 32-bit installation on the same computer, although not quite as fast. I finally fixed this problem by installing the 2.6.1 kernel, downloaded from www.kernel.org. Of coruse, you first need a stable system from which to compile the kernel (mine crashed way too much to compile the kernel). The problem is that NONE of the SuSE 9.0 systems (32-bit or 64-bit) is stable enough on this hardware to compile a kernel. I installed Gentoo on a separate partition (took an evening, I learned a lot), and then used that to compile and install my SuSE kernel. Alternately, you could try using the pre-compiled binary I made for myself (see below), see if that gives you a stable system. To compile and install, I did the following (this assumes some familiarity with how to recompile and install a Linux kernel): 0. Build a basic Stage3 Gentoo system with 2.6 kernel. I mounted my SuSE system partition as /SuSE64. Basically, you need to run the 2.6 kernel SOMEHOW because otherwise your system will crash while compiling. 1. Download the experimental 2.6.0 kernel source from SuSE, as of last summer: ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/x86_64/supplementary/Kernel-2.6-Test/kernel-source-26-2.6.0test3-0.x86_64.rpm Look in the README file: it suggests you also download modutils, mkinitrd and aaa_base, which I did. 2. Untar the source of the 2.6.1 kernel into /usr/src, as per the 2.6.1 kernel documentation. 3. Copy the .config file from the test 2.6.0 kernel to the 2.6.1 kernel directory. 4. Run make menuconfig in the 2.6.1 kernel directory. 5. Make sure the drivers required to boot are installed permanently (not as modules) in the kernel. For me, this was the ext3 and ReiserFS filesystem drivers. There may be others; the kernel will complain upon bootup if you don't get them right, then you can fix it. ALTERNATIVE: You can set up an initrd RAMDisk. I'm not quite sure how to do this, but probably that mkinitrd RPM from the SuSE mirror will be helpful. Then you can leave ext3 and reiserfs and stuff as modules. 6. Compile and install the kernel: a) make (make dep is no longer required for 2.6 kernels) b) Check the Makefile to see where the kernel will be installed. Generally, this will be in boot. Change it to /SuSE64/boot. Make sure the "make install" will not overwrite your current SuSE kernel (you can change installation to /SuSE64/boot2 to see what it will do, then change back to /SuSE64/boot and install again). b) make install. It should install as /boot/linux-2.6.1 c) Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst for your new kernel. You can do this by copying the line for the current SuSE bootup, changing the filename of the kernel, and deleting the initrd line (assuming you're not using an initrd). Make sure you don't disturb your old bootup procedure, in case you need to boot back into the old kernel! 7. Well, this worked for me. Once I booted up, I no longer had ethernet, audio, etc. I'm not sure what I did wrong. But basically, I read the Gentoo documentation on how to set those things up and it worked. The upshot is that the kernel module auto-loading somehow no longer works on my SuSE system. I've fixed that by manually loading the modules I know I'll need at bootup time, then devices sort of work. I've done this in /etc/init.d/boot.local: -------------------------------- # Hack: get my ethernet working modprobe r8169 # Hack: for sound modprobe snd-intel8x0 # Hack: for parallel printer (see Gentoo docs for usb printer) modprobe lp modprobe parport modprobe parport_pc modprobe lp ----------------------------------- You should definitely use the first two modprobe lines, since those are for devices on the Triton motherboard. You should use the last set of modprobes only for a parallel port printer. There are tons of device drivers from the old kernel that are no longer loaded. I suppose it will be an individual process of figuring out what I need to load for CD burning, etc. Running lsmod in the old kernel helps, since that shows what it loaded. Also, there have been some changes since 2.4: 1. CD burning uses different modules than it used to. I haven't investigated yet. 2. I've heard that the /etc/modules.conf system has changed. Maybe that's why SuSE module auto-configuration stuff no longer works for me, since it's expecting a 2.4-type kernel. No matter, the system works for me now and it hasn't crashed even once since I switched to the 2.6 kernel. I'm running at DMA ATA-100 mode (the max for my hard drive), and am using the proper XFree86 driver for my graphics card (ATI Rage 128, but no 3-D for now). Sound and printing both work (after a bit of heartache). ---------------- Rather than compiling your own kernel, you might also try the kernel that comes with the new bootable CD with SATA drivers, announced by Andreas Jaeger January 22 on the suse-amd64 e-mail list (see attached/below). Since this is a 2.4 kernel, it will almost certainly not break the auto-configure stuff I noted above. However, it might also not solve the problems with your motherboard. I've experienced total stability since I switched to the stock 2.6.1 as described above. I can also make available the binaries for my 2.6.1 kernel, see if they work for you. That would simplify the installation process, and your current SuSE kernel would probably run for long enough to avoid crashing while you copy the binary. No warranty is expressed or implied. One final note: I advise against using ReiferFS at this point with 64-bit systems. Gentoo has noted a few problems with it (see the Gentoo web site). For now play it safe, use ext3 instead. Best of luck, -- Bob On Sat, 2004-01-24 at 21:29, David Joyner wrote:

Hello:

I installed suse 9.0, 64-bit version, on a gigabyte k8 triton motherboard with 1.5G ram, AMD64 athlon 3000+ cpu. Installation went completely smoothly, with suse automatically recognizing the onboard sound and ethernet, gforce3 video, LG dvd-rom and LG cdrom.

However, some odd things began to pop up: gftp (which I love) crashes. I tried to reinslall from the rpms on the CDs of the non-64 bit version of suse 9.0, which I also have. (I thought maybe the dvd disc was corrupted.) It failed too. xftp crashes. (The text-based ftp however works.) Another program I use a lot, kdvi (kde's dvi previewer for latex documents), also crashes:-(. I've recently been having problems wth kmail, and had to switch over to mozilla. I'm not sure if that's related though.

Do you have any suggestions? Ever heard of anything like this? I called suse tech support. They were very nice but didn't know anything.

- David Joyner