Hi guys
I’m working on an oldish laptop (evesham 7251P, but can’t find any info on it in that name, seems to be the same as the Mitac 7251P).
Using opensuse 11.2, latest gnome and kde (although KDE doesn’t seem to be working that well, only shows gnome icons for a start!) with everything kept upto date.
I just took out the only ram chip (256) and put in a new one (512).
However, the computer (bios and OS) reads it at about 640M.
Also the first few boots wouldn’t take me to login screen, just runlevel5 for text based login so I couldn’t choose session type.
Also certain programs, thunderbird & kile so far, often give segmentation fault and crash, and google chrome just crashed randomly.
I think iceWM also logged out randomly of its own accord one time.
Basically it seems to be messed up.
There’s a chance that the motherboard won’t take 512M, but I’m pretty sure I read it can.
When I put the 256 back in everything ran fine and the computer recognised it as 256, not some other value.
What sort of fault does this look like? Is it faulty RAM? Is it a SuSE/hardware fault? How do I find out?
Many thanks, please say if I haven’t included any info I should have.
Ben
Does the BIOS say it’s 640 instead of 512? Wrong, very wrong. Either faulty RAM or the BIOS is not capable of detecting it properly. Updating the BIOS firmware could solve that, but this seems a bit of an exotic brand (to me ).
bendare wrote:
> oldish laptop … KDE doesn’t seem to be working that well …
> What sort of fault does this look like?
first, make sure your hardware is strong enough to run the
software…i can’t see where you said which version you are trying to
run, but the following is for openSUSE 11.2:
System Requirements
- Pentium* III 500 MHz or higher processor (Pentium 4 2.4
GHz or higher or any AMD64 for Intel* EM64T processor
recommended)
- 512 MB physical RAM (1 GB recommended)
- 3 GB available disk space (more recommended)
- 800 x 600 display resolution (1024 x 768 or higher recommended)
since your machine does NOT have the minimum recommended RAM to
operate openSUSE 11.2, i would suggest if you want to put Linux on
that machine that you select a ‘lighter’ less resource needy version…
take a look at my “standard reply” on that subject at
http://tinyurl.com/ylf8zq9 (it includes a rather lengthy list of
distros that target older/weaker machines)…
–
DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
posted via NNTP w/TBird 2.0.0.23 | KDE 3.5.7 | openSUSE 10.3
2.6.22.19-0.4-default SMP i686
AMD Athlon 1 GB RAM | GeForce FX 5500 | ASRock K8Upgrade-760GX |
CMedia 9761 AC’97 Audio
Thanks Knurpht and DenverD.
knurpht - I guess I should check out my end before going back to the ram seller, so I’ll look into doing a firmware update. Any hints on best place to start?
DenverD - You’re right, the machine is a little weak for 11.2. But I’ve been using iceWM with 256M and been getting on relatively fine, if not a little chuggy. I know that’s probably partly responsible for the KDE failures but that’s not my big issue right now. I will however look into better linux for my system in the long run.
Ben
By the way, it’s a 7521P, not a 7251P.
Depends on the CPU, but I’ve managed to install 11.2 on a 1000 MHz Duron, with 256MB. A text install that is, but it ran fine. LXDE works as well. Maybe you’d better download a LXDE LIveCD. If it runs, it will install as well.