RE: Digital Venturis P166 thin clients problems

Hi Tim - Thanks heaps for the advice.  I've boosted the ram disk size to 16
M then 20 M and its still doing exactly the same.  The same NIC works fine
in a generic clone machine with the same specs, so I feel (unproveably) that
it is probably the realtek NIC arguing with the machine somehow.

My next plan is to burn the PXEs ISO image to CD, then try booting that and
see what happens.




-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tim Bates
Sent: Tuesday, 17 February 2004 7:16 p.m.
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [pxes-devel] Digital Venturis P166 thin clients problems


Im using one of these boxes for a client at the school i work for. The
onboard video does crap up soemthing shocking.

Anyway, I think the one Im using has only got 24mb RAM, but the trick is
still that you need to adjust the RAMDISK setting. You need a nice mix of
free ramdisk space and free system ram. I cant remember what I used for the
ramdisk size, but I have a feeling it was around 12mb. You have plenty of
ram to spare though, so go for 16 to start with and if it fails still, try a
slightly higher amount.

My numbers here might be way out.... I havent looked at the config file in
over 3 months (was school holidays).

Tim




----- Original Message -----
From: "Craig Falconer" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 3:59 PM
Subject: [pxes-devel] Digital Venturis P166 thin clients problems


Gidday all.

I have just received 30 of the above machines for use as thin clients.  They
are intel pentium 166 with 32 Mb ram, and on-board S3 Trio video.  They have
no onboard network card.  So I put in a standard video card (S3 Virge) and
network card (new Realtek 8139 with PXE boot rom) and powered on.

The machine loads the kernel and initrd fine, then proceed to boot the
kernel.  I get down to

...
hid-core.c etc etc
mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
8139too Fast Ethernet driver 0.9.26

and there it stops and freezes.  Keyboard LEDs stop toggling at that point,
keyboard doesn't respond and I can no longer scroll up with shift-pageup

I've tried many different realtek NICs, as well as changing the mouse from
serial to ps/2 to none.  Interestingly, the machine has no USB ports.  After
further research I found this error at the very top of the kernel boot data

Failed to free base memory, error 0015-0001-F00FE6E

Can anyone advise me on what else to try?

Google offers only
http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/syslinux/2003-July/002322.html which is
similar, but no answers





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