BIOS tweaking leads to successful Linux install

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

Thursday, 6/15/00
Power supplies and Linux installs… I swapped out a power supply last night for Steve DeLassus (there’s something mildly amusing about an electrical engineer asking a journalist for help with a power supply issue), and I installed Mandrake 7 on one of my PCs so I could get ready to mess with Apache. It kept dying during install, so I reset the BIOS defaults, after which it worked fine. Probably it was memory timing sensitivity but I didn’t feel like messing with it. Linux is much more sensitive to such things than Windows, which may explain some people’s installation difficulties (I think nothing of messing with my BIOS settings until I get it right, but some people understandably never think to check those). Loading BIOS defaults, or, better yet, safe defaults if available, may tame the beast.

Apache… I’m not going to say I can change the world, but some of the things you can do with Apache are totally out of sight. I can’t wait until I can type well enough again to really start experimenting. I’m no pioneer in doing these things, but if I start explaining how to do them, then I will be. If you think I’m looking at this to be one of the big selling points of the next book, you’re dead on.

Until next week…

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