FC2 on digital server 3000 (model 3300)

[Jay Estabrook]

On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 09:51:40PM -0000, Simon Tierney wrote:
> 
> I installed FC2 on this machine and the display 'crackles' when I move the
> mouse around (as well as some other buggy behaviour).

I did warn about that (I think I called it "noisy"); it has been
associated with the S3 Trio64 drivers when run on Alpha for quite a
while (since XFree86 4.1.0 or so, IIRC). I believe it to be artifacts
caused by insufficient and/or inappropriate use of memory barriers in
the S3 driver code. Since S3 cards have never been a high-volume item
on Alphas, none have taken the time to fix this. Other cards are apt
to behave normally, such as Permedia 2 (ELSA Gloria Synergy) and
Permedia 3 (3DLabs VX1), or any of the Radeons (though 7000 can be
problematic).

> During Installation
> I got the message Xorg-X11-font-utils-6.7.05 missing / cannot be opened;

Some missing RPM, perhaps, though I do seem to remember seeing that
message when there was some difficulty reading an RPM from the CD, and
hitting <return> would cause it to try again. Check to see if it really
was installed by:

	rpm -q Xorg-X11-font-utils

> During bootup:
> 
> Error: Isp1020 has no error handling

A "nag" message because the QLogic driver is unmaintained and has not
been updated to follow the 2.6 rules for error handling inSCSI drivers.
It should still function OK, but you will see those messages on every
boot... :-\

> Updating /etc/fstab
> Error /etc/updfstab.conf no such file
> no mountpoints defined

Yes, I see this one also, but it's doesn't appear to be fatal. As
Jon mentioned, there's no entries made in /etc/fstab for floppy and
CD, so do it by hand via:

/dev/fd0     /mnt/floppy           ext2    noauto,user     0 0
/dev/cdrom   /mnt/cdrom            iso9660 noauto,user,ro  0 0

> Is there an FC3 for alpha that addresses these issues?

No.

> there is no /etc/fstab is this anything to do with SELINUX?

I don't think so. Do you mean that there is no /etc/fstab file at all?
THAT would be very unusual...

> The system does seem rather erratic, xscreensaver reports Xlib: connection
> to ":0.0" refused by server
> Xlib: no protocol specified
> 
> and
> Error: can't open display: 0.)
> xscreensaver: 21.40:36 0: child PID 11382 (rd-bomb) exited abnormally (code
> 1).

Were you trying to run the screen saver as root? It doesn't like that.

> (Naturally I typed this all out because I couldn't get the network running)

There was a problem with getting the network started? I haven't seen that
in over 20 installs of the AC-0.9 CDs. Can you give any more details?

> Should I re-install RedHat 7.2 (which seemed stable)? any advice would be
> welcome.

7.2 IS very old these days, but it's been very stable for me for years.

On the other hand, with a different (ie more stable) graphics card
(see above), I've found AC-0.9 to be pretty good and reasonably stable
(one box has been up 30 days), though it does feel a bit "sluggish"
compared to 7.2 for some reason.

Good luck.

 --Jay++

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Jay A Estabrook                            HPTC - LINUX support
Hewlett-Packard Company - ZKO2-3/N30       (603) 884-0301
110 Spit Brook Road, Nashua NH 03062       Jay.Estabrook at hp.com
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