What happened while I was asleep?

[Alan Dayley]

Robert N. Eaton wrote:
> Over the past two or three months, I have had trouble with my computer. 
> At first it just acted flaky with the internet, then I had trouble 
> booting Linux, then WinXP wouldn't boot either.
> 
> It turned out that the boot sector of hda got trashed. Changed 
> harddrives, reloaded WinXP, tried to re-install Xandros (the distro I 
> had been using for the last couple of years) no luck; tried to install 
> Fedora Core 6 (which I had painstakingly downloaded, did all the file 
> checks, and burned to six CD's in WinXP) again no luck. It congratulated 
> me on a successful installation, and told me that it was creating a Grub 
> file, and that was the last I ever saw of it. When I re-booted we went 
> directly to WinXP, did not pass go and _really_ didn't collect two 
> hundred dollars.
> 
> Not to be discouraged, I installed a copy of Kubuntu.  It installed, but 
> I couldn't make it access the internet very well. I downloaded an 
> updated version of Kubuntu, installed it. Still problems with the net 
> and no access to my AOL email service.
> 
> A little discouraged, I said to heck with Kubuntu and bought a copy of 
> Fedora 7 from Cheap Bytes. It installed flawlessly, and even better, 
> allowed me to choose between Fedora 7 and WinXP.
> 
> HOWEVER, Fedora 7 acts like just like the two Kubuntus as far as the 
> internet access is concerned.  Firefox (the default browser) is 
> crippled. It willingly connects to www.userfriendly.org, but not to 
> www.google.com.
> 
> There are several default lists of web sites available in Firefox. It 
> could access _some_ RedHat, Fedora.org, and some on other drop down 
> lists, but _not all_. I could discern no pattern to its likes and 
> dislikes. In the past ten years, I have NEVER had this much trouble 
> connection to the internet, nor to my email account. Yes, I moved from 
> one apartment to another, and changed providers from cox.net to Qworst, 
> but Xandros handled the changes with aplomb.  It worked perfectly for 
> months until hda started gagging.
> 
> Now plenty discouraged. What the Hell happened to Linux while I was asleep?
> 
> Bob Eaton

Test your memory.  I had bad RAM in a system a couple of years ago.  It
manifested as weird problems and hangs and then difficulty booting, etc.
 The biggest headache of the adventure was the slow corruption of the
hard drive file system resulting in the loss of some data.

Because Linux actually makes full use of your systems resources, it uses
all you RAM and expects RAM to perform correctly.  Windows is far more
"quietly tolerant" of RAM errors even though the RAM will continue to
corrupt things under that OS too.  At least that has been my experience.

Boot a Linux install CD and choose the memory test option.  Let it run
at least a full pass.  Any error at all can be a problem for the OS and
you should remove the offending module to run with less RAM or replace it.

Alan



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