I just bought one of those small XPC boxes, a Shuttle SK41G, in order to have a
Linux box.
But when I tried to install SUSE 9.0, the computer froze quite early during
kernel load. (The same happened when I tried to install the demo version that
came with Linux Format magazine.)
The second last line on the screen said the bus frequency was 0, and the last
line that also the CPU speed was 0. Then the computer behaved accordingly.
I reported the problem to the SUSE support web site at least a week ago, but
haven't yet received an answer.
Anybody with experience/knowledge of this Linux on this box or chip set?

The box (with the VIA KM266 chip set) has an Athlon XP2400 CPU and a card with
512 MB RAM. It freezes in same manner if I boot with a display card in the AGP
slot, or I use the on-board video circuit.

The computer worked fine with Mandrake 9.2, and when I went through the initial
steps of installing SuSE 7.0, things went normally.

One little puzzling thing: In the CMOS setup, the bus speed was reported as 100
MHz, and could be increased to 132. The RAM was supposed to run at 266 MHz, so
how can I get that extra doubling?
And: I wonder if it is possible to select kernel version 2.6 during install
instead of 2.4?


-- -- Olav Næss (Naess) olav.n@c2i.DROPTHISnet
-- -- Bergen, Norway

Olav Naess wrote:
>
>
> One little puzzling thing: In the CMOS setup, the bus speed was reported as 100
> MHz, and could be increased to 132. The RAM was supposed to run at 266 MHz, so
> how can I get that extra doubling?

It's DDR RAM (most likely). It runs at double the physical clock speed,
so setting the clock to 133 will cause them memory to run at 266.

> And: I wonder if it is possible to select kernel version 2.6 during install
> instead of 2.4?

Not likely. The 2.6 series kernels are still considered "development"
kernels, not stable ones. I highly doubt any distro currently offers a
development kernel as an install-time option.