Comment 7 for bug 213747

The reaction of the knowing one was to try pulling the 128 MB out.
And this is what happened by running the 512 MB alone.
- 2.6.24-16-generic booted !!!
- could have been just luck, but there was no crash in about 10 min.
- testing reboot and my dinner is disturbed by resets making booting loop
- but in fact, the reason is that fsck is silently rebooting the machine
- the naive user I could have been needed to boot in recovery mode, to guess that fsck /etc/sda6 is what I had to type in a self-started (by fsck) maintenance shell and to reply yes to a series of question that even the less naive me didn't understand completely.
- after that, *** boot and run are now quite normal *** , yeah, wow, 'rrrray.

So, the bottom lines are :

- what on earth makes Linux fail with a properly configured RAM (PC tech + my correction) in which both Linux memory test and Windows XP are happy?
- a memory mapping issue I should say, but what?
- Does one want to investigate? Practically speaking, I'd prefer to move on to other urgent problems like making a linmodem work, and I would buy a second 512 MB to increase memory and speed (interleaving speeds up). But I will help those who help.

- Am I a fool to strive to setup a 100 EUR Ubuntu laptop to offer to a little Belorussian girl to communicate with us by e-mail, play and learn? Will she be able to do what I did above to get rid of the fsck problem? I can manage some Russian by e-mail but it's impossible to describe/solve such problems on the phone let alone SMS. Won't she dump Linux and use Windows instead?

Thanks so far for the dialog that led me to what had to be thought.