I am recycling an old laptop (Chembook 9780) for a variety of "quietly sit in the corner and compute" tasks. Unfortunately I am running into a few problems.
For what it's worth, I've used Red Hat for a long time and switched to Debian because it would boot on this laptop. Much to my delight, I'm finding Debian to be wonderful most of the time especially when it comes to adding new packages. Problem No. 1: I'm using a 3Com 575 PCMCIA 10/100 ethernet adapter. depending on load, eventually the ethernet interface "goes away". The link light is still up but I cannot pass any traffic. when I force the error, I noticed that the interface has multiple overrun and frame errors. The error rates seem to be in the single digit range usually but the interface locks up all the same. If I eject and then reinsert the card, it works for a while and then stops. I have tried multiple network drops and network cables with no luck. I had this problem happened to me before with a much earlier version of Red Hat and I didn't have time to do a diagnosis them except swapping for a known good 575 card which didn't make a difference. problem 2: this laptop has cooling fans. They go on when the machine gets hot as they should. Unfortunately, they never shut off once they go on. I want them to go off at the right time. problem 3: this is probably more of an "Eric is new to Debian" problem. I don't need a GUI most of the time so all I want the screen to do is come up standard console mode and blank video when it's not being used. do I need to muck with inittab or is there a utility for doing this? many thanks in advance for any answers. ---eric -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
