Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computers. Show all posts

Thursday, November 25, 2010

A Solaris Puzzle

I wrote about issues installing an operating system on some new hardware a few days ago. Since then I've done more exploring. A subsequent attempt to install Ubuntu 10.10 on the same box was a success, right up to the part where you reboot from the newly-installed system. That was a total failure and required power cycling to escape.

Then, several restarts later (due to my lack of speed on the DEL key), I managed to get at the BIOS. I decided to start from scratch, and loaded the safe defaults. Then I went through and tweaked it carefully (and very conservatively). After that, it booted fine. To be sure of this, I rebooted it (both warm and cold) about 30 times. All good. Then I left it to its own devices with a bunch of stuff running for a couple of days. Still good.

Then I tried again to install my Solaris-11 system, hoping that it would work on the new setup. No joy at all. The installer crashed, several times, in exactly the same place as before (i.e., long before getting close to actually installing anything). I really wanted to be able to use ZFS, which I think is a wonderful file system, but it seems impossible for me to install Solaris on any reasonably up to date hardware that I have available. I think I'm over this now and will wait for some other operating system that I can bear to use offering native ZFS.

Friday, November 19, 2010

Computers Can Make You Mad

I've just put together a new computer. It starts up fine. It reads a CD with an operating system I want to install just fine. The installer runs fine until we get close to actually doing something. Then it crashes. This is repeatable. I re-burned the CD in the drive on the new machine and tried again. Same deal.

I'm now running memtest86 over the 24G of memory in case the problem is there. So far, it has made seven complete passes without detecting anything. I will let it go until it says it has completed a full test sequence, but I'll be surprised if it finds anything now. If it's not memory, it's a bit hard to guess where the problem is. Since we never get as far as writing on a disk, it's not going to be there. Nor do we use the network.

The machine is certainly almost OK. Maybe even quite OK. It certainly seems to run Linux as I'd expect, although I haven't attempted exhaustive tests yet. Testing is so slow and so boring and gets in the way of everything else I'd like to be doing. And it's Friday.

My spouse has decided that we need a weekend away in a luxurious place far from the normal world. This seems like an excellent plan. Maybe the computer will reveal something useful next week. I'll be running out of time to claim DOA status for the bits by then, so that might affect my sleep tonight. On the other hand, losing sleep over a box of bits is probably unwise. Consider this as a muted scream.