What distro do you run?

[xilman]

Originally Posted by xilman

I assume so and yes, respectively.

The nearest I've yet found on Google is someone having similar symptoms on a dual-Opteron box. His BIOS had a disabled APCI setting. I took at look at my BIOS, couldn't see anything immediately wrong and, anyway, XPHome Does The Right Thing. It is a pity it's such a repulsive operating system.


Paul

Looks like the bogosity with the clock was cured when I enabled some obscure setting in the BIOS. The names on the BIOS screen were absolutely meaningless to me, so it was with some trepidation that I toggled the value.

Still have to remove and replace the powercord to get the machine to reboot though.

However, I now have a machine that rund GMP-ECM at one hell of a rate.

Paul

[paulunderwood]

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...04/07/3/198185 has:

I managed to power off :)

I read through some other posts about acpi, I knew that in mcc -> bootloader I had ticked acpi=enabled.

but I added " acpi=force" into lilo just out of curiosity, and what do you know....it worked, I now see all the programs shutting down.... halting system....and off :)

I edited lilo from the kde control center and added 'acpi=force' to the append line.

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.3-7mdk
label="263-7"
root=/dev/hda5
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.3-7mdk.img
append="devfs=mount resume=/dev/hda6 acpi=force"
read-only


then ran 'lilo -v'

rebooted and shut down.

Paul, are you using Grub instead?

You've switched off "plug and play" in the BIOS haven't you?

I know the following is RedHat but http://www.redhat.com/support/resour...-hardware.html says:

Question:

Whenever I try to shutdown my machine or reboot it with the commands (reboot, halt, shutdown -r now, or shutdown -h now), the shutdown process executes correctly, but then the display blanks and the system hangs. Only way to recover is to use a hard reset.

Answer:

At the point the system hangs, the control has been handed back from Linux to the firmware, and it is up to the firmware to reboot the system correctly. There are some possible workarounds as Linux lets you pick multiple reboot methods to try and deal with broken BIOSes or hardware.

At the LILO: boot prompt, you can specify:

reboot=X,Y

where X is either

hard - reboot by reset line

bios - reboot by bios vector

and Y is either

warm - warm boot (similar to [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[Del])

cold - cold boot (similar to power on)

So if you boot with

LILO: linux reboot=bios,warm

Linux will reboot by the BIOS vector with a warm reboot.

You can hopefully find a boot sequence that does not trip the bugs in the system BIOS. The append="reboot=..." option in /etc/lilo.conf will let you set it by default by adding:

append="reboot=bios,warm"

into lilo.conf for the Linux image.

Then rerun /sbin/lilo -v to write the change to your boot device.

Also this has a bit about "APM" which might be relavent http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...04/09/2/228369

are you loading the apm module? try /sbin/modprobe apm and then see if the shutdown or reboot freezes. if this works, then uncomment the same line in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules.

But hey, why would you want reboot a Linux box anyway?

[xilman]

Originally Posted by paulunderwood

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...04/07/3/198185 has:
...

But hey, why would you want reboot a Linux box anyway?

Thanks for the pointers, I'll check them out. BTW, the clock drifting hasn't been fixed; I was mistaken. However, I now have more errors in my syslog which I can use to help diagnose the problem.

As for rebooting, I know you're not entirely serious but there are very good reasons for rebooting any kind of box, Linux or otherwise. Installing and configuring an OS is one of them! Another important one is when patching any of several varieties of security vulnerabilities and one wants to be certain that all in-memory copies of the vulnerability have gone.

I also recognize the implied dig at other operating systems, suggesting that Linux is better than them. My personal experience (which goes back 25 years, most of which I've spent as a sysadmin) is that Linux needs rebooting about as often as most modern operating systems, by which I mean FreeBSD, MacOS X, Sloaris and Windows XP Pro / 2003 Server.

Sometime if we want to swap horror stories, I can tell you about Unix boxes that were as unreliable as any Win9x system. One in particular had such a bad memory leak that we ran prophylactic reboots three times weekly, just to keep it somewhat usable. Other bugs ensured that it crashed or had to be rebooted over and above the scheduled shutdowns.

Paul

[xilman]

Originally Posted by xilman

Thanks for the pointers, I'll check them out. BTW, the clock drifting hasn't been fixed; I was mistaken. However, I now have more errors in my syslog which I can use to help diagnose the problem.l

That's another bug dealt with

Much Googling turned up that the ATI chipset is seriously broken (no surprise there) but that adding no_timer_check to Grub's kernel parameters would make things behave themselves.


Paul

[Peter Nelson]

Xilman wrote "Trying to install amd64-gentoo on a 3500+ box and having a frustrating time of it"

Paul, have you tried the 64 bit version of Suse and do you get the same issue with it?

64 bit version of Suse 10 OPENSUSE can be downloaded via opensuse.org links.

As the servers for Novell Suse and Opensuse are quite busy with downloads may I suggest you go with Opensuse, and further that you perform the download using the distributed bittorrent technique rather than ftp/http.

It's five CDs but you may find your problem goes away because Suse have had quite a bit of 64 bit experience with previous versions 9.X.

As for the other problem, make sure ACPI is enabled in bios, make sure you installed the ACPI version of the linux (on some distros like suse its an option).

For me the command

shutdown now -r

does as requested and does not just shutdown but restarts the machine and reboots as requested. I assume this is what is trying to be achieved rather than just shutdown and halt (freeze).

[paulunderwood]

I am slowly converting most of my boxes to Debian because it can have a small footprint and is easy to ugpgrade with apt-get or aptitude using ssh.

My desktop is now Ubuntu which is dead easy to install and has a vast array of programs available to download and install at the click of a button.

I have box that is Gentoo (and will not be emerging gnome on it )

I also have one multi-boot box that has Mandrake2006, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Linspire5.0, Gentoo and Slackware. I am going to install Fedora, FreeBSD and "Slowaris" on it too

Maybe I try some others later...