[ltp] A warning - don't install Mandrake 10.1

[Greg Meyer]

On Saturday 06 November 2004 10:04 am, Nick Bower wrote:
> This weekend I made a very poor decision to install Mandrake 10.1 on a
> T42 - I thought it would be low risk becuase Mandrake 10 + 2.6.8.1
> patched kernel worked unbelievably well.
>
> However all supplied 2.6 kernels supplied hung on boot - much effort
> later and removing the nolapic option stopped it hanging.  Momentarily I
> had a bootable system.  However after I configured my network interface,
> randomly an hour later a system hang forced a reboot.  And now again I
> am locked out because the thing locks up on starting netprofile early in
> the boot process.
>
> So don't go near 10.1 if you have a thinkpad and expect a working system
> after.  I can't even boot in failsafe mode to download a new kernel
> right now.  What a joke.  Well done Mandrake!!
>
Sorry, I can't disagree with you more.  I have 10.1 on a T41 and it the most 
stable distro I have ever had on it.  Everything works beautifully, except 
for having to recompile the kernel without local APIC support to get a 
complete shutdown, because, as you discovered, the nolapic boot parameter 
doesn't work anymore.  This is a pretty widly known bug in 2.6.7mm and later 
kernels.  Whatever patch that was in the 2.6.7-mm that caused this problem 
was merged into 2.6.8, so now it doesn't work in the mainline kernel either.

xorg gets an excellent framerate with the Mobility Radeon 9000 and the Cisco 
wireless card is finally stable and automatically detected.

10.0 with a 2.6.5 kernel before that was nice too, but the details that they 
polished up in 10.1 make it worth the upgrade.
-- 
/g