SuSE 8.0 Installation problems

[Susan Macchia]

Hello everyone,

Ok, so I finally found some *free* time and upgraded my machine to SuSE
8.0 from 7.3.  7.3 ran flawlessly so I am stumped by the wierdness I
saw during instalation and continue to see.

1) Update 8.0 from 7.3.  Of course I wanted a development machine.
However at least 4 times, in the middle of reading from CD, the machine
simply hung.  Lights on keyboard blinking, mouse not moving, ping from
another machine refused.  Had to do a reset and/or hard reboot each
time.  At first I thought it was the CDs but a friend of mine used
these same CDs to install on his machine w/o a hitch (and visual
inspection shows no scratches or anything).  I also thought that it
might be my switch box, so I removed that from the loop and the same
think kept happening.  I did finally get it installed, BUT, it would
freeze in differnt places: on boot, or after logging in to X, logging
into a virtual terminal - all random...

2) After some god awful number of hours trying to update/intstall from
scratch, I'm scratching my head and thinking hardware problem?  Then
why did 7.3 work fine?  So I decided to put 7.3 back on.  No problems,
flawless install and run.

3) Now I am stumped.  Is my hardware too old?  Dell Dimention PII, 400
mhz, 384MB memory, 2 usb ports, etc.  Pretty standard and been running
Linux on it for 2 years. 

4) On a spare partion, install the desktop (non-development) 8.0 to
test.  This seemed to go fine. 

5) So, decided to try the install w/o update.  Did a desktop install
and it was much better.  So now I'm thinking, finally!  But, every time
I want to build/install one of my personal apps (i.e., gcombust, nedit,
gqview, etc.), there is something missing so I have to install what I
need piece by piece (samba, gcc, g++, bison, etc.).  This goes ok.

But now I am seeing the freeze again.  Sporadic, seems to happen when I
try and multi-task too much.  I haven't seen it when booting up, only
when I am already logged into X.  I am completely stumped here.  Any
ideas?  I don't even know where to look.  This is a pretty much stock
system.  Found nothing in the SuSE knowledge base on this.  Any help is
greatly appreciated.

My keyboard is as simple as it gets.  The mouse is a simple usb
logitech mouse, with a ps2 adaptor (plugged into ps2 outlet).

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_____________________________
Susan Macchia
mailto:susan at smacchia.net
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- Running Linux - because life is too short for reboots...