Probably, this may works with other distributions, kernel versions and other systems, but I’m not going to do any further test.

Recently, a friend of mine asked me to install a new hard drive on his Sony Vaio laptop, because he ran out of free space on the original drive.

So after buying and installing a new 160GB drive, I began with the setup of Windows XP SP3. Anyway I left some free space for Linux.

Setting up Windows was quite easy, but setting up Linux, was a real nightmare.

I tried 4 differents x86 Ubuntu’s CDs (8.04 live, 8.10 live & alternate, 9.04 alternate). They all had the same problem: kernel hanged during startup. The strange thing about that was that by pressing a key (any key), kernel startup process moved forward of a single step, and, keypress after keypress, after 10 or more minutes, the OS was completely loaded!

I tried with OpenSuSE 11.1 live CD. There were less problems during startup, but the matter still remained the same: the OS required several keypresses to boot. After installing to disk, nothing changed.

Now, I’m not an expert, but thinking about that, I supposed there was a problem with interrupts or system clock or both, so after looking for solutions on Google, I found someone writing about the boot parameter “clocksource”.

To know clocksources available on my system, I wrote:

cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/available_clocksource

on a terminal, and got:

tsc acpi_pm jiffies

Firstly I tried adding “clocksource=acpi_pm” in /boot/grub/menu.lst but, at the following boot, nothing changed.

Then I tried with “clocksource=jiffies“: that actually works!

The system boot up quite rapidly and without the need of any keypress.

Hope this article could help someone who is hitting a wall with his head trying to install Linux on this laptop.

Bye

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Categories: computers ,howtos


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