Above are the problems. Any thoughts on the above are welcomed.
Below is a more detailed description.
I recently upgraded from a 386dx40 to an intel pentium 60, originally purchased
by someone else in a gateway system.
First, I discovered that processes would die sparatically, and finally, the
system would lock up, and I would reboot. Finally there were crc errors
with kernel images when I was rebooting. I discovered that it was the processor
overheating. So with a cpu fan, the machine is now functioning alot better.
However, everytime I have left the machine alone for over an hour, it has
locked up solidly so that even the dumb terminal doesn't respond. Once I could
still flip vt's, but most times the vesa power saving has kicked in and when
I press a key on the keyboard, the monitor doesn't come back on....numlock
doesn't even work, and the machine doesn't respond when pinged over ethernet.
Thus, I conclude that it is locked up. I have also noticed this behavior with
the gateway p120's on campus. Is this a known behavior of Linux, or is it
hardware just stopping? I'm getting a bit worried about this, especially
since the same motherboard in the gateway case didn't ever lockup.
Then, I tried using the serial ports. They are 9 pins jutting out of the
motherboard in two rows of 5 pins each, one pin is missing to make 9. In the
bios, I can enable the serial ports or disable them. When I enabled first one,
then both, I tried plugging both my dumb terminal and my mouse into both
serial ports, to no avail. Somehow I generated 76 interrupts on irq3, which
seemed to occur as I was plugging and unplugging the cords every once in a
while, one or two interrupts at a time. Anyone with gateway motherboards and
any suggestions, I'm all ears. And yes, the cables I was plugging into the
motherboard work. They work fine when I put my ide controller, disabling the
ide and floppy part, into the motherboard and plugged the cables into the
ide controller, and am now using a mouse and dumb terminal off of the ide
controller. I'm not happy, as my isa slots are full, and I'd like to plug
my soundcard and cdrom sometime.
Also, I've a 'mouse adaptor' (6pin mini din male -> db9 male) which I thought
would allow me to plug my serial mouse into the ps2 mouse port. Am I crazy,
or should this work? It appears that the psaux module only initializes
when I have a real ps2 mouse plugged in, and even if I switch to the serial
mouse after loading the module, it still doesn't work.
Any suggestions welcomed..
-- Todd Fries...tfries@umr.edu http://www.umr.edu/~tfries