Hardware?

[Stoofer]

I've been slaving away over a hot PC for days now and I cn only conclude my hardware is faulty. What others are doing doesn't work for me. I have two deals going on but I want to prove it for real before I fork out for the bomb.

1. I think I have faulty ram. I get random crashes that lock everything. I have used RD 7.0, MD 8.8 and now slack 9.0. I get random crashes in the gui in all three distros, with no indicated problems in either /ver/log/... or dmesg. I think my ram is croaking the kernel and giving it not option to scream a message before it folds. It there some ram testing program or something I can run which will say " yes dimm 2 chip 3 block 4 subblock five capacitor has failed and is reporting 1 in all cases"? Even if it says "yeah you got crap ram" is ok, I just don't want to any more time fiddling about. Since i don't get crashes at the command line I think it might be the graphics card ram that is poo. Sometimes in X I get a colour palette swappage shortly followed by (2-3 mins) a crash. Or I get pixels of the mouse pointer appearing 1cm to one inch left, right above or below of the pointer, again shortly followed by a crash. So would such a piece of software test the ram? I have done a recompile of the kernel (checking target=localhost) but not X.

2. I cannot get any joy out my serial ports. In terms of palm m105 connectivity, that is. I have messed about in md and slack on this one. no mileage. Checking /dev/pilot and/dev/tty0 and /dev/tty1. Also made sure the serial ports (the com port ones - I have been asked!) were active in the BIOS. I think they are 3f8 for com1 and I can't remember the other but /var/messages is apparently recognizing the 3f8 and the other one, so I think it if a soft ware thing I can tweak. Any ideas?

Slack 9.0
VIA KT3
256 Meg DDR
on board sound (AC97)
seagate 40 gig
Geforce 2 (no tv out) 65536k ram
16x10x40 cdrw

Cheers in advance

[hard candy]

For the memory:
Memory tester (http://www.livejournal.com/community/linux/423216.html)
Memtest may be available for slackware, it's definitely part of debian so you may have to make a debian bootdisk.

[hard candy]

Here's the Memtest link
Memtest86 (http://www.memtest86.com/)
It doesn't seem as if you'll need a debian bootdisk.

[Stoofer]

Cheers dude,

That was really helpful. 2 hrs of running memetest, all 11 tests 8 times with no errors lead me to believe my ram is ok. I tried the geforce 2 in my mates motherboard and his machine would not even boot. So I booted the geforce in favour of my trusty old Voodoo3 pci!!!

And it works fine.

So the PSU that I bought went to my mate, since his is blatantly dubious.

memtest is sweet

Thanx

Chris L

[AngryPuppy]

Originally posted by Stoofer
2. I cannot get any joy out my serial ports. In terms of palm m105 connectivity, that is. I have messed about in md and slack on this one. no mileage. Checking /dev/pilot and/dev/tty0 and /dev/tty1. Also made sure the serial ports (the com port ones - I have been asked!) were active in the BIOS. I think they are 3f8 for com1 and I can't remember the other but /var/messages is apparently recognizing the 3f8 and the other one, so I think it if a soft ware thing I can tweak. Any ideas?


Check the permissions on these devices... you may be getting locked out. I honestly can't remember what I set mine to , but you can experiment with chmod +777 /dev/ttyS0 (and ttyS1) and if that works, adjust the permissions down until you lose functionality.

Terry

[Stoofer]

is definitely the solution (I would like to add that is the correct spelling of definitely, since it stems from finite)

I think I may have discovered this and posted it somewhere.

That is a good solution.

Cheers mate.