[CS-FSLUG] Machine dying?

[Ed Hurst]

While I am waiting for a replacement drive for the laptop, I have been 
playing with other OSes for my desktop. I can't get anything Linux so 
far to work. Here's the profile:

MicroStar K7T Pro 2 mobo
Athlon 750
512MB RAM (Kensington, single stick)
Asustek graphics card, Nvidia Riva TNT2 chipset, 32MB VRAM
3Com 2976 (reads often as USR 5610) 56K VoiceModem

Everything else is the usual standard stuff. I've tried several versions 
of Knoppix. Anything with the 2.6 kernel gives bad video corruption, 
and the most readable of them presented each line of text in 
quadruplicate during boot. X worked okay, but not one of them could 
detect my modem. I went so far as running lspci and entering the proper 
values in setserial commands. This modem under FreeBSD defaults to 
COMM5 and irq 10. That happens with Knoppix 3.4, 3.6 and 3.7.

No version of SUSE will display properly after the initial splash. I get 
a horizontal hash that repeats parts of the screen. When I blindly hit 
the "text" option and got a clear console, hitting ENTER for boot 
immediately dropped into harddrive boot (which is FreeBSD 4.11 right 
now). This happens with 8.2 & 9.1; 9.2 simply sends a signal that is 
out of range for my monitor. Please note that SUSE has *always* missed 
detecting this monitor (Samsung 900DF 19" CRT) calling it an LCD.

I had Debian disks, but they were too badly scratched to work reliably.

I do not have at this time access to any download facility to burn any 
other distros. This machine has received FreeBSD 5.3 and now runs 
(better, I might add) with 4.11 without complaint.

My interest is to get another harddrive and perhaps dual-boot, but 
nothing will even get past boot except Knoppix. If it can't detect the 
modem (using every option offered in KPPP: ttySx, etc.) I have no use 
for it.

-- 
Ed Hurst
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