Giving up on Linux...

[Bill Gradwohl]

> How do you know that this is the correct number?

There is no "correct" number. It depends on what you want. 

On most mobo's with built in video, the video RAM size that it will steal
from your system RAM is set to 8Meg these days. That's not enough to support
higher resolution and better color depth. I simply set it to the max the
BIOS will allow up to 32 Meg. Even if the BIOS supports greater than 32Meg I
wouldn't use it since our use of these boxes is as servers, and we don't
play games on servers. 

32 Meg of RAM is satisfactory for excellent GNOME desktop images (we stopped
installing KDE). Taking 32Meg from my 1 or 2Gig of installed RAM is nothing
I'm ever going to feel in terms of performance. (We use CRUCIAL RAM with RAM
speed appropriate for the CPU chip we're running.)

BTW - We've been doing servers for our clients since 1982 (NetWare, 3COM
EtherSHare back then) and we've never seen one running at more than 4%
average CPU utilization in your typical small business set up. Folks that
are after maximum performance are typically going after things they can't
use in the real world except for a few seconds every month. We don't even
bother setting up the RAM for maximum performance via the BIOS because it's
a waste of time in our opinion. We take the conservative settings for
stability, knowing full well that 96% of the box's "power" is wasted anyway.

>I'd love to know where.  Out of the box, my motherboard has enhanced on for

>both PATA and SATA.  Are you saying that if I change it to your 
>configuration I would get proper booting behavior for Fedora?

Maybe!? 

Do you have the most recent BIOS installed? I always flash a mobo with the
latest BIOS before I do anything else. Why hit problems that have already
been detected and solved via a new BIOS flash. 

You didn't mention if you're using SATA. We don't. The hardware spec is
being revised so we'll wait till the next generation before we touch it.
Tried and true PATA works just fine for us.  Turn the enhanced IDE support
off and see what happens. We use Seagate drives almost exclusively because
they have never disappointed us. Maybe your drive type is a problem? We
noticed that installing with enhanced support on works just fine, but the
box won't boot afterwards. So we turned it off.

In general don't try to eek out maximum performance from the hardware. Try
being a bit more conservative and see what happens.

-- 
Bill Gradwohl
YCC
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