Bobulate
Home [ade] cookies
Debugging hardware
I mentioned that I had one machine that wouldn’t run OSOL 2009.6, so I did a little hardware debugging on it. Step 1 is, of course, removing all the bits that aren’t essential. So I stripped the machine down to two sticks of RAM on the motherboard and a CD drive, and lo! It booted and behaved normally. Step 2 was adding back RAM until it was full again (at 6GB). The reason to strip RAM at all is that I’ve had bad sticks in the past and some OSsen are picky, so I figured stripping down was possibly useful. And, having repopulated the RAM banks, things were still OK. So it must have been one of the two extra NICs — an RTL8100 and an RTL8169 — in the PCI slots. Left them out for now, since the on-board NIC was now supported. Chalk up another problem worked-around and not really fixed.
I have a stupid early train to Germany tomorrow, so just a few short notes on KDE 4.3-beta on OSOL: all graphicsview things seem broken. Using the raster renderer doesn’t help. Icons are not found — at least not the oxygen ones that I thought would come with kdebase-runtime, but I can use the Tango ones installed on the system. Plasma crashes. Even konsole crashes a while after plasma and kwin do. KMail is busy pulling in 500MB of disconnected IMAP, nothing bad happened there yet.
While pstack(1) would have been an obvious tool to apply to any of the crashes, that’s something to look at some other day. For now, it’s enough to have finished round one of compiling. [[ At GCDS there will be lots more time for polishing, for sure. ]]