Gentoo floundering or Hardware Failing?

Caeberos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 109

I am sitting in my dorm room now typing this on my main gentoo desktop.

It is:
Amd Athlon XP 1700+
Gigabyte GA-7VRXP rev. 2
512mb ddr 333
ATI All-In-Wonder Pro
Sound Blaster 512

I am not sure what is going on with this machine but I am always having issues with it and linux, gentoo is the only version I have used for a long time, but the issues are fairly strange. Once in a while I have compilation error, they usually go away when I try to compile the package again, and most modules don't appear properly. LIRC and the at76c503a driver never load properly. On the floor next to it I have a shitty Dell, 1.4 P4 with 128 megs of ram that can always initialize these devices perfectly. I really have no idea what the problem could be. I know it is not the LIRC cicuit or the wireless USB adaptor. I think the hardware is failing but aside from a gut feeling and a few kernel errors I don't know.

Has anyone else had similar issues or can think of anything I can try to figure out what is wrong?

nephros · Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 6:28 am Post subject:

Round up the usual suspects:

Bad or failing RAM: run memtest86+ on it for a couple of hours

Bad PSU: check it's rated powerful enough for your hardware. Maybe blow out any dust with compressed air.

You're not overclocking are you?
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Caeberos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 109

I don't have any compressed air at the moment, but I will get some when I can

No I am not overclocking, why bother?

I will try running memtest86 off the livecd when I get back to my room, I will post what comes up

-Cae

Caeberos · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Mar 2004 Posts: 109

memtest 86 produces no errors after 2 hours of testing

renrutal · Posted: Thu Nov 03, 2005 10:28 pm Post subject:

It could be so many things...

From personal experience, my problems with hardware stuff have almost always been kernel misconfiguration. More devices compiled-in than it should be, wrong versions, things loaded as module and not loaded @ /etc/modules.autoload.d, etc. Some options might conflit with others.

I sugest reviewing what you have installed, see what lspci and other ls* tools report to you.