[ale] 1997 BIOS too old?

[James P. Kinney III]

All of those warning are related to power management. A 10 year old
system didn't have APCI. It's easy enogh to turn it off at boot time.
Add the following to the boot string "apci=off" and it's off.

In short, it's not an issue to worry about as far as the power
management.

There shouldn't be an issue with the PS2 mouse as it is still well
supported. Serial mice are no longer supported by Fedora 5. 

The sound card issue is due to some module changes that are not good for
your older card. I have issues with some older sound stuff as well. The
move is on to a newer, better designed and more stable sound system
(alsa). But older cards are just not going to get the support they need.
ISA stuff in particular is barely supported any more.

The secret is not use the 2.6 series kernels and stick with the 2.4
series.

On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 18:12 -0400, mute wonder wrote:
> Since the first time I tried Linux last year, through 5+ distros I've
> managed to install on my computer, I've gotten complaints during the
> boot about my old BIOS:  Power management would be disabled because of
> it.  And with some recent distros, I'm getting  trouble with my
> Plug-n-Play (ISA?) soundcard, and even the PS/2 mouse.
> 
> Maybe the recent hardware problems have to do with 2.6 kernel
> innovations or bugs, but what's wrong with having a BIOS barely a
> decade old?  Are there certain BIOS settings I should change?  Maybe
> IRQs I need to check to make sure nothing's interfering with anything
> else?
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part