Linux problems!!!(processor related?)

[Sup3rkirby]

Ok, I believe I actually posted about this a while ago, and thought I found a solution, but this came back up, and it seems more complicated than I thought.

I have an Acer Extensa 5420 laptop. It is a decent laptop that has an AMD Turion 64 X2 processor, 2Gb RAM and and nice ATI Radeon x1250 graphics card.

Now, what I've been trying to do is run Linux in a virtual machine. I have tried some live CDs, as far as just on the laptop in general, but I do not plan to install linux on the laptop itself. Only in a virtual machine.


Now, let me explain what is wrong.


When I try to run a live CD or whatever of any linux distro, The virtual PC will start up, then goes full screen a few seconds afterwards. I can then see my cursor, but it is not very responsive(almost as if the computer goes into a major lag). Then after a while I get the BSOD(blue screen of death), but of course it is recoverable(windows fixed this in vista?!), and my laptop reboots. Then windows will alert me of the error when it starts up, and if i check of a solution it says it is related to my graphics card. Odd.... I know.

Now the kicker is, I get this error when running the x86 versions of linux. If i try to run a 64-x86 version, it will not boot, as it claims i do not have a 64bit processor(but i mentioned my processor). Finally one distro told me it was i1586. Strange though, why call it an AMD Turion 64 processor when it isn't 64 bit?

Well, I read and most things about this i1586 error only were about intel processors. Not helping me... So I looked more. One person had an AMD Sempron 64 processor with this issue. And I read that technically, Sempron wasn't exactly 64 bit, or something like that. Because of it being an earlier AMD processor. But I doubt this is the case with the Turion.

And then there is the fact that Kubuntu 64 bit has booted on my laptop. It is the virtual PCs that don't work.



So what is the issue here? The processor is a 64 bit processor, but when it is used for a virtual PC, it does not register. And I can't seem to boot the x86 versions, as they crash my laptop with some error reguarding my graphics driver(which is up to date).


I don't really think there might be an answer other than I just can't run linux in a virtual PC on my laptop.

 

[jchristensen]

I don't know what the problem with running the virtual machine is (I've had no luck trying to run virtual machines), but the reason that it's claiming you don't have a 64x cpu is because the virtual machine is emulating an i586, not a 64x.

 

[Smith6612]

I'd bet for the emulation settings on how the virtual machine is doing the job as well. Also, since you are running an AMD processor that is 64-bit, many distros like Ubuntu have a special ISO file made for SMD 64-bit CPUs. Did you check to make sure it is the correct ISO that you're trying to boot into virtual machine? Lastly, do the live CDs all work perfectly fine all the time, no matter if you use x64, x86, etc?

But one thing I would also watch is your CPU usage in Windows. If the CPU is spiking before the system goes into a BSOD, something else might be happening, but if Virtual Machine is working fine and you have the correct ISOs, I'd update your video driver if anything from the manufacturer's website, not Windows Update. Since you are running Vista, Vista is known for it's graphics driver problems especially with nVidia cards. I had to suffer these such problems until nVidia fixed their drivers after a little while from release of Vista. With the old, buggy drivers, my gaming computer at any random moment would BSOD, blank out and freeze up or blank out and come back, and the leave a driver crash log behind the game from Windows Error Reporting. This occured only in games however. Yay for fixed drivers!

 

[Twinkie]

The solution is to use Intel, other than that I have no idea.

I had a similar problem with Windows were I could not get to the logon screen without "BSOD" screen. I had to format my hard drive.

 

[Sup3rkirby]

Smith6612, the live CDs I'm using do boot just fine, as I can boot my PC or laptop with them in the live CD mode. I also only update my drivers from the manufacturer's sites. So my graphics card(ATI) has been updated from the official site. That is, unless Windows Update secretly slipped a grahphics update in there without me noticing(which is possible).

I think I will download the latest driver and confirm it is updated correctly, and also, I believe VirtualBox(the program I'm using right now), has a processor feature that allows the virtual computer to use the current processor(as in, eliminate the chance that a 'emulated' processor is causing the problem).

The thing that still gets me is, even if I change the processor setting and the 64bit version boots, the x86 version should still boot reguardless. I've had several PCs that all had various AMD 64 processors. And all of these were able to boot 64bit and x86 versions of linux. it is this darned laptop that is killing me.

 

[Smith6612]

Sounds odd to me then. See if there is a new video card driver around as everything sounds fine in my case. I'm just still wondering away from the video card driver being faulty why that would be happening. The only thing I can think of besides updating the driver would try a different piece of Virtual Desktop software to see if it'll boot.

 

[Sup3rkirby]

I tried MS VirtualPC a while back and it was just the same.

But it seems things have been 'fixed'. I went to ATI's site and updated my graphics card driver and now I can sort of run some virtual PCs. Things are still strange. I can't run any 64 bit distros(but my desktops can). So it looks like this laptop can only boot 64 bit versions of linux and not run them virtually.

Also, the CPU usage goes up to an average of 50% when running a virtual PC, and even after i closed it, the virtualbox process was still hogging up my CPU bandwidth. I tried backtrack 3, and it almost boots, but at the actual GUI stage(where you first get a cursor), the window will go full screen for about 2 seconds, then flicker down to about 80% of the screen, then go back full screen. So it never loads... But I was able to load Fedora 9. But like I said, the CPU usage shot up and I don't like having one app that uses around 40-50% of the CPU bandwidth.


I will look into some things about that and possibly getting all the compatible distros to actually run. But for the most part, a nice driver update seemed to 'fix' the problem.