Power Management Problem - Almost Total Newbie

G

grocer

I've ended up here in a rather round about way...I have a Pentium II 300 that tried to put Ubuntu on (three different versions) and got basically nowhere...couldn't get the graphics configured and they all ran like dogs. I decided to try FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE and see what happens. I ended getting X Server configured, XFce4 up and running, ssh working, etc. Well, it works great when I'm using it but if I leave it (it seems to be about hour), it just locks up...and it doesn't matter what at - login, prompt, X, or XFce4. I can't login in via ssh, either.

Where should I look to start troubleshooting this?

System info: Pentium II 300, 256 MB RAM, Asus P2L97 motherboard (with 1.01 (I think...it's the one from 1999) bios update for large drives), 40 gig IBM hard drive (10 gig FreeBSD partition, 20 gig Ubuntu partition, 10 gig unallocated), IDE CD-ROM (Toshiba, bootable) and DVD-ROM/CD-RW, Diamond Sonic Impact (ESS Maestro 2), Gateway VX900 19" monitor, Nvidia TNT2 (32 meg)

I do more with windows than anything else, but I've dabbled with other OSes, I had an iBook for while as my main computer (which I why picked FreeBSD after giving up on Linux)...but I'm an expert by no means and don't even know how to get a useful error message out of this thing since it locks up...any insight would be much appreciated (either where to start or, "hey, dummy, this is incompatible!")

Thanks in advance...
 
It should work fine on a P2, I still have one as my firewall :e

You can start by looking at /var/log/messages, see if there's anything in there that might give a clue.

You can also try to boot without acpi, it may be the cause of the problems.
 
I had a 266 MHZ Celeron with FreeBSD on it. Once I dabbled in the BIOS in an attempt to choose more energy efficient options.

Those ended up on the computer having its HDD spindown after a few minutes and me loosing access to the computer from SSH.

My board did not support ACPI and I'm assuming your board falls into the same situation.

So do take a look at the BIOS settings, namely in the energy settings.

Also check /var/log/messages as SirDice suggested.
 
I have tried booting with and without acpi...it didn't seem to make a difference. Locked up when I went to check the next morning.

I will check the bios and messages when I get home tonight. Hopefully one of those will yield something...

AGP wouldn't make a difference, would it? (It is an AGP card)
 
Power management in bios is disabled...

I don't think messages is any help...

Code: 
Apr  7 20:00:00 freebsd newsyslog[803]: logfile turned over due to size>100K
Apr  7 20:51:52 freebsd login: ROOT LOGIN (root) ON ttyv0
Apr  8 08:00:30 freebsd syslogd: kernel boot file is /boot/kernel/kernel
Apr  8 08:00:30 freebsd kernel: Copyright (c) 1992-2009 The FreeBSD Project.

I logged in as root to install KDE from sysinstall and then came down to check it before I left for work, found it locked up, and rebooted...
 
If you're not running the last available BIOS for your motherboard, try updating to the last available. Believe me, this has solved some really weird and wonderful system lockups in the past (for some reason Windows seems immune to most, not all, of these mis-configured BIOSes).
 
Thanks for the bios idea, I've now loaded the latest bios (1010.004) for this motherboard (P2L97) and now ACPI works to shutdown and restart the system...but it didn't fix my original problem of locking up after sitting...so I'm trying it with ACPI and seeing if that fixes it now (with the new bios).

I will, however, note that Asus lists the 1010.004 (8/2000) as beta and has not released stable bios for this board since the 1009 bios (11/1999 release) that I was running...so ACPI sorta works with the beta bios but it still locks up. Testing without ACPI now...
 
Still locked up without ACPI. I did start going through the motherboard manual and found that anything over 128 meg DIMMs are unsupported (and it has to be SDRAM or EDO)...so I've now gone back to the 256 that was in it (two 64s and a 128) to see if maybe it wasn't power management but a clock cycle problem...I think this thread could be closed...not so much as problem solved as problem found...obviously there has to be a realistic cut off for working hardware and the fact there are beta bios and RAM issues probably means that while power management had something to do with things breaking, who knows if it was the actual cause. I'm still happy with system and with FreeBSD and certainly don't blame the OS for these hardware issues, I'm just happy to have something modern and usable running on 10 year old hardware.
 
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