Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Good grief, when did Linux get difficult to install? First I start with an Ubuntu cd I have to hand, which doesn’t contain gcc. What? Whats that about? What kind of linux user doesn’t want a compiler? And virtual PC is showing pixels three times wider than they should be, which means my 800×600 desktop is somewhat falling off the edge of the window.

Rewind. Try again. Construct a Fedora .iso set, but that kernel panics in the idle thread before it can boot. Then the thread doesn’t die properly so it hangs on trying to kill it:

invalid operand: 0000 [#1]                                                     
Modules linked in:                                                             
CPU:    0                                                                      
EIP:    0060:[]    Not tainted VLI                                   
EFLAGS: 00000286   (2.6.9-1.667)                                               
EIP is at mwait_idle+0x23/0x40                                                 
eax: c03b0008   ebx: c03b0000   ecx: 00000000   edx: 00000000                  
esi: 00039100   edi: c03da120   ebp: 0044a007   esp: c03b0fe8                  
ds: 007b   es: 007b   ss: 0068                                                 
Process swapper (pid: 0, threadinfo=c03b0000 task=c0354bc0)                    
Stack: c03148d3 c010408a c03b16a6 c03df4a0 01020800 c010019f                   
Call Trace:                                                                    
 [] cpu_idle+0x1d/0x32                                               
 [] start_kernel+0x216/0x219                                         
Code: d7 e8 3b 57 20 00 eb eb 53 fb ba 00 f0 ff ff 21 e2 8b 42 08 a8 08 75 2e 0
 ba 6a 08 10 31 c9 bb 00 f0 ff ff 89 ca 21 e3 8d 43 08 <0f> 01 c8 8b 43 08 a8 0
 75 0c 89 c8 0f 01 c9 8b 43 08 a8 08 74                                        
 <0>Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill the idle task!               

Somewhere on this desk is a proper Fedora installation disk, so maybe I have to bite the bullet and actually tidy up :(

At least I found a more sensible window manager for cygwin – it comes with a preconfigured version of GNUStep, just type wmaker….


5 comments

  1. Fedora: is this an old PC or a Cyrix or something? That message looks a bit like it’s tried to run an instruction which is not in the CPU’s instruction set (although I’m not sure).

    Ubuntu: if you have Internet you should be able to “apt-get install gcc”

    Wmaker for cyrix: ooh, that’s useful, ta

    • its a VirtualPC, so that would make sense, but why would the idle thread be trying to use something unusual? Ubuntu has gone now, I gave up in disgust, if it can’t install a compiler by default I don’t know what the hell else is missing – I’m not a linux guru, I’m coming from a windows world but with a reasonable understanding of build systems, not the knowlege of the intricacies of arcane Unix histories needed to do this stuff. Thats part of what I’m trying to learn by doing it.

  2. MS. I’d be surprised if they’d deliberately nobbled it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Linuxheads had made sure they didn’t run properly under it – it seems 2.4 kernel is fine while 2.6 isn’t. But I might be doing it wrong, who can tell.

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