On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 10:08:52AM -0800, Ezequiel Reyes wrote:
> Hi all,
> Last week I tried to install netbsd in a laptop and had problems with the
> generic and laptop kernels, none of them loaded properly, I was reading the
> installation notes that come in the INSTALL.txt, I read something about some
> systems having problems with PCMCIA, they say there are two kinds of common
> problems, one with interrupts, the other with IO ports, the former is
> reconizable for locking the whole system, while the latter has other much
> "softer" effects. So I thought it could be causing the problem in my laptop
> and decided to follow the instructions to change the values of the kernel
> variables using gdb. I copied, unzip and renamed the generic kernel from the
> cd (previously installed the tiny kernel which did work), opened it
> with --write in gdb and did what the notes sugested. I then rebooted the
> system and this time the booting screen passes by the line it used to stop
> in, but it locks again some lines below, this time the lock is not as hard
> as it used to be. With the unmodified generic kernel, the lock didn't let me
> reset, not even with the button, so I had to remove the power to be able to
> get out of it. Now, after the gdb stuff, it can (at least) be reseted after
> freezing. I am puzzled by the fact that an OS kernel freezes during boot
> time when it has problems with a hardware device, more so knowing that
> NetBSD is a very mature OS. I thought at this time, the kernel could abort
> or ignore that hardware (not detect it at all) and continue, but it doesn't.

Well, the problem here is that it's not the kernel which freeze, but
more likely the hardware. The kernel can't do much is the processor
stop running.

> Any ideas?

Maybe try to restrict even more the PCMCIA IRQ and IO ranges.
If you have windows installed, it can give interesting values about
these in control panel.
Maybe also try to find some cardbus/PCMCIA-related options in BIOS.

> 
> My second question is concerning X. I would like to (once I get over the
> kernel problem) install X on my laptop. I have never configured X in a
> laptop. Mine has a NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go with 32 MB RAM, it would like to
> have it working, of course, but I guess there is no support for it yet. I
> tried the three NVIDIA cards from the xf86config database, but none worked.
> My screen fills with vertical lines and after I ctrl-alt-backspace, the text
> screen gets filled with funny characters in text mode. I tried telling
> xf86config to use 5 MB RAM, then 32MB, but it didn't work. Could someone
> tell me a working setup to have X running (and showing) in a laptop even
> without using NVIDIA factures? I mean, a basic working configuration for X
> in a laptop screen?

What kernel are you running when trying X ?

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 23 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--