[ltp] Experience from updating RH 6.2 to RH 7.0 on TP 770X

[Friedemann Baitinger]

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On 21 Nov 2000, Jon A. Solworth wrote:

> Markus Alt <altmark@de.ibm.com> writes:
> 
> > Friedemann Baitinger wrote:
> 
> > > Unfortunately at the time of my writing I had not try a suspend/resume
> > > cycle. After I have done so I am now back to my old setup using
> > > XF86_SVGA binary from my old RedHat 6.2 (!) installation. Reason: same
> > > experience as yours. System didn't survive a suspend/resume cycle.
> > 
> > Does this also occur when suspending from a text console (i.e. not from
> > within X)? Reason why I ask is because I have exactly this behaviour
> > with XFree86 4.0.1 on my system (600X, SuSE 7.0): When suspending from
> > within X, the system is frozen after resume. When switching to a text
> > console before suspend, everything is fine.
> 
> Well, I didn't check from the console (Other than to set the RedHat 7.0 switch
> to terminal apm variable).  But it was fixed when I changed Xservers so I
> would guess that it is related only to the Xserver.

I used the switch-to-text-mode method also in my pre-RedHat 6.2
setups. With the X-server that came with 6.2 I was able to do perfect
suspend/resumes while running under X.

But with XFree86 4.0.1 driver as it ships with RedHat 7.0 my 770X
behaves in a non-deterministic way. In 6 out of 10 cases, when starting
the X-server using 'startx' the system completely hangs and I have to
press the power off switch for at least 3s to turn the system off. In
the remaining 4 cases it comes up as expected. Out of those for cases, 3
show the suspend/resume problems.

In essence, I consider this a mess and as reported here previously: take
a binary XF86_SVGA server and use it in the X environment as it comes
with RH 7.0 and it works as expected.

Let me mention a different topic but a topic which is somewhat related
to the discussion:

In the context of playing with the machine I'm sure everyone of the
people on the list have experienced more than once that their system
crashed very badly and they had to undergo extensive filesystem checks
on reboots. For this (and other reasons) I have spent some time lately
to build a standalone bootable CD-ROM with a fully functional Red Hat
7.0 installation. It supposedly works on a wide range of PCs from Laptop
to desktop, IDE, or SCSI as long as the machine has 64MB RAM (or more).

What it does is it boots an initial ramdisk from CD and from there it
loads a root filesystem to /dev/ram (40MB) and mounts this as the root
filesystem. Then it runs normal init scripts and mounts symlinks '/usr'
to the CD.

The system runs 'kudzu' which, as RedHat users know, detects and
configures new hardware before initializing the system. As a result you
have a fully operational (including networking and X11) system without
the risk to trash your disk. Actually with a ThinkPad I usually
physically remove the disk before I even insert the CD mentioned
here. Would anybody want to use such a setup? I have a gzipped iso-image
of about 120MB available and could make it available on my webserver
under:

    http://baiti.net/tp770x

Let me know if you consider this worthwhile to be shared.

PS: It has Burt's latest Token Ring fixes and it works in Ethernet and
Token Ring networks automatically (assuming there is a DHCP server
available somewhere).

- -- 
Friedemann Baitinger      fb@baiti.net       http://baiti.net/fb/
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