Found the answer to my 2.6.8 kernel problems

Recently brought up a P3 for the linux box, and lo and behold, it always always froze using the Sarge 2.6.8 kernel at

ACPI: IRQ 9: SCI: Level Trigger

There is, however, an answer to this problem! Shut off the ACPI. From the grub boot menu, edit the 2.6.8 kernel thing, and in the line where it says kernel, put in

acpi=off

at the end. Tain't too bad :-) Alternately, you can use the 2.4.27 kernel, and where it asks for the mouse for X, make sure you're using /dev/psaux, not the /dev/mouse, I think that the kernel needs the HAL for that, and only the 2.6 series has the HAL. I'm hoping that the HAL stands for Hardware Abstraction Layer, oh well :-)

DVD-RAM and WinXP

I've installed a super-multi burner now twice, and I really like the native DVD-RAM support in Windows XP on up. Got a weird error message, though, when I tried it on Windows XP.

"Windows was unable to complete the format."

It was meant to be fixed in Service Pack 2, and yet it was still happening -- what could be the cause? Turns out it was the allow the burning from the windows drive thing. If you go into the properties of the drive, they have that enable drag-and-drop for burners thing that Microsoft ends to bandy about in place of a more serious cd-writing program. Disabling that did the trick. Could be because there was a cd-burner in it's place before, and, well, maybe not. We'll just have to hope :-)