Problems Installing Ubuntu on a Pentium Core 2 Duo
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From: John Taylor on 5 Feb 2007 04:02 Hi, My son has a Machine with an Intel Motherboard and Pentium Core 2 Duo processor. He currently has XP installed and has the Gimp running on it, but I am attempting to lure him back from the dark side by installing Ubuntu. (He only needs it for the Gimp, and Web browsing so Linux should be a sure fire winner ! ) I've made an ISO CD (which I have used to install other machines with no problems), and it boots up OK to the menu. However, which ever option we select it fails to move to the next stage. We Get: Uncompressing linux... OK, booting the kernel. And then everything just stops, and it needs a hard reset to get the machine back. Any ideas ? Do I need to enter any magic runes to get it installed ? I've done a quick google, and everyone seems to be using Pentium Core 2 Duo's without any issues. Cheers JohnT
From: Bruce Stephens on 5 Feb 2007 05:25 John Taylor <john(a)example.com> writes: [...] > I've done a quick google, and everyone seems to be using Pentium Core > 2 Duo's without any issues. Sure, I've got one. The issue's more likely the motherboard. The one I've got, the Intel DQ965GF has some less well supported bits. Perhaps surprisingly, the problem's not the SATA controller or the graphics: it's the IDE/ATA controller (and the ethernet, on kernels before 2.6.19). So the difficulty I had was reading the CD. Eventually I gave up on Ubuntu. I managed to install KNOPPIX using the magic kernel flags "all-generic-ide pci=nommconf". Then, using a PCI ethernet card, got a Debian netinst kernel, initrd, and image, and managed to install Debian testing (etch). That installed a new kernel which knew about the onboard networking, but still didn't really support the IDE. A newer kernel (2.6.20-rc6, though I suspect 2.6.19 would have done) included generic support for the marvell ATA chipset, and that fixed the final problem. So anyway, it's not the Core 2 Duo that's likely to be the problem: it's some bits of the motherboard. Probably it'll be possible to get it to work, but that's what you'll need to google for. A beginning would be to get a live cd booting, so you can do "lspci"; however, that's not necessarily trivial.
From: graham on 6 Feb 2007 05:23 On Mon, 05 Feb 2007 10:25:15 +0000, Bruce Stephens wrote: > John Taylor <john(a)example.com> writes: > > [...] > >> I've done a quick google, and everyone seems to be using Pentium Core 2 >> Duo's without any issues. > > Sure, I've got one. The issue's more likely the motherboard. The one > I've got, the Intel DQ965GF has some less well supported bits. Perhaps > surprisingly, the problem's not the SATA controller or the graphics: it's > the IDE/ATA controller (and the ethernet, on kernels before 2.6.19). So > the difficulty I had was reading the CD. > The same problem with Ubuntu occurs with the Intel 865G chipset. I could install suse 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2. The 32 bit versions worked flawlessly but the 64 bit ones needed a bios adjustment to prevent lockups on exiting X windows.
From: John Taylor on 6 Feb 2007 06:53 graham wrote: > On Mon, 05 Feb 2007 10:25:15 +0000, Bruce Stephens wrote: > >> John Taylor <john(a)example.com> writes: >> >> [...] >> >>> I've done a quick google, and everyone seems to be using Pentium Core 2 >>> Duo's without any issues. >> Sure, I've got one. The issue's more likely the motherboard. The one >> I've got, the Intel DQ965GF has some less well supported bits. Perhaps >> surprisingly, the problem's not the SATA controller or the graphics: it's >> the IDE/ATA controller (and the ethernet, on kernels before 2.6.19). So >> the difficulty I had was reading the CD. >> > The same problem with Ubuntu occurs with the Intel 865G chipset. > I could install suse 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2. The 32 bit versions worked > flawlessly but the 64 bit ones needed a bios adjustment to prevent lockups > on exiting X windows. Can't find much about which motherboards are supported by which distro :-( The intel website just says that linux works for that MB (not which distros). However, the shop where we bought it think that Fedora might work. Bit of a shame, just moved from Mandrake to Ubuntu. Now we'll have to move back to a redhat style distro again :-( Bit of PITA - XP installed without problems :-( On the plus side, (on a different machine) I did get my new HP printer (C6180) working with ubuntu in less than 15 mins, when it took 3 days and numerous support calls to get it working on win2k :-) Regards JohnT
From: Bruce Stephens on 6 Feb 2007 13:43
John Taylor <john(a)example.com> writes: [...] > Bit of a shame, just moved from Mandrake to Ubuntu. > Now we'll have to move back to a redhat style distro again :-( Why? Debian comes with a range of installation methods, including installing using a preexisting grub or lilo. So once you've got *any* GNU/Linux installed, it should be possible to install at least Debian; I didn't try installing Ubuntu in that way. [...] |