SuSE 8.0 Installation problems

[Net Llama!]

Could be failing memory.  memtest86 it!

Susan Macchia wrote:
> 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).

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo: 		    http://netllama.ipfox.com

   4:00pm  up 38 days, 21 min,  3 users,  load average: 0.49, 0.31, 0.35