Hi!
After a lot of 'thinking about it' I have finally taken the plunge and have installed Linux Mint as I'd read this was a good start point for any one wanting to take the plunge with linux.
When I boot into Mint I get a message stating:
'MP-Bios bug error 8254 -timer not connected to IO-APIC'
Can anyone advise as how I should proceed as everything (up to now) seems to be working well.
I'm running Mint on a Siemens/Fujitsu machine with a Pentium 4 and 2G of Ram.
Thanks in advance
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Hey Fixer,
Linux Mint is a very good choice indeed. Anyway, Here are a few suggestions. The problem you are having seems to be something to do with the new hardware interrupt system (APIC). You can disable that at startup, so that's an option but it's not the best choice as Linux should work fine with APIC on all PC's these days, so the first thing I would recommend is to see if there are any BIOS upgrades for your particular model of Fujitsu Siemens PC's. If you purchased it in the UK a couple of years ago, I know for a fact that certain models of them had a few bugs in their BIOS. Head over to the Fujitsu Siemens website and see if you can find a downloads section (probably in their support section). See if there are any BIOS updates for your machine and apply them first.
If that doesn't fix the problem, then try using NOAPIC. To do this, when you see the Linux Mint boot screen pop up, I think it has a timedown thing (eg, Linux Mint will boot in 3 seconds, hit ESC to see boot menu). So, when you see that, hit ESC. You'll be presented with the GRUB bootloader screen. There should be a line starting with linux, with a whole bunch of other items beside it. Use the down key to get to that line, and hit e to edit that line. At the end of the line, add the word noapic, you should also remove the word splash and quiet if you see them. Once you are happy with that, hit return and boot the system (either enter again or b to boot). If it boots now, you know that the system is having a problem talking to your APIC controller. You can make the change to the boot-up sequence permanent by editing a file called menu.lst which is in /etc/grub/. You need to do this as root, so it's actually easier to do it from the Terminal, as follows:
Applications>Accessories>Terminal
cd /etc/grub
nano menu.lst
cp menu.lst menu.lst.bak
change the line in the file like you did in the GRUB menu above
save the file and restart your computer.
Hopefully the same thing should happen each time you start up now, so you don't have to enter NOAPIC each time you boot up. The line cp menu.lst menu.lst.bak has made a backup copy of the menu.lst file for you just in case.
Hope this helps,
Ali