Start up freeze

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I have been installing openSUSE 11.0 on a quite old laptop and formatted it to install fresh, this is my first ever usage of linux so please go easy on me. I have installed through once but when installing the packages they all started failing so I started again and this time through everything worked perfectly, the system rebooted but when loading it wouldn’t go through every time it gets to
“cs: memory probe 0xa0000000-0xa0ffffff:_”
and stops. I have run the automatic repair and everything passed on that, next I tried rebuilding the boot loader and that didn’t so I thought I’d ask you guys.

Stroby

P.S
As a side note I have also had quite a lot of screen flicker and a fair dose of strange colours while installing is this normal?

2

Try adding this to the Boot Options on the menu:

edd=off

or

pci=nomsi

If that didn’t work, check your bios setup for a “memory hole” setting of some kind, it may be labeled “O/S 2” or “ISA”. Disable that.

3

> I have been installing openSUSE 11.0 on a quite old laptop

how old and how underpowered would it be if you tried to load XP or
Vista on it?

i ask, because openSUSE 11.0 is a LOT newer and resource needy than
XP, it is also newer than Vista but will easily run on any machine
that came new with Vista.

maybe you will have better luck installing a distribution with less
system resources needs…

maybe have a look at Puppy <http://www.puppylinux.org/> or Damn Small
<http://damnsmalllinux.org/> Linux

4

The minimum ram requirements for 11.x are 256MB with 512MB recommended, essentially the same as XP. From my readings, KDE4 performs better than KDE3 (aside from stability issues with KDE4 because of how new it still is), and a bit better than Gnome. On an old machine, you may want to install XFCE instead, which is lighter weight. There are other even lighter choices. Take a look at this recent thread Suse needs more RAM then Windows? and openSUSE 11.1: Hardware Requirements.

5

What are the specs of your old laptop? RAM is more important than CPU speed because below a certain threshold, usability drops steeply. But the threshold depends on the environment you select. For OpenSUSE KDE4 512MB is decent, 256MB is barely acceptable, and 1GB is great. Kubuntu 8.10 doesn’t do as well, it needs about 768MB to run decently, and shows how well OpenSUSE has optimised things.

I’ve been playing with Crunchbang Linux recently; I like playing with small ditros. It installs and runs fine in 192MB. While running I can see from the console monitor that the idle footprint is only around 70MB, which is very good. But that will shoot up once Firefox is started. It’s basically Ubuntu with GNOME replaced by Openbox and the use of lighter apps, perhaps lesser known ones like Abiword. The desktop is quite pretty in a minimalist sense, you can see screenshots at the Crunchbang site.