The saga of Atalanta continues. (That is the name of my new machine.) Debian Etch was duly downloaded and installed. (The installer froze once, while erasing data on one partition, but succeeded on the second try.)
Unfortunately, the intermittent kernel panics continued. This meant that the problem wasn't software; it was hardware. The freezing seemed to occur during times of heavy disk usage, so we thought the problem was with the disk or, more likely, the disk controller on the motherboard. Jeff plugged the drive into his machine, and it seemed to work fine; he also ran extensive fdisk tests. Fdisk found nothing wrong.
Atalanta got one more chance; we changed the hard drive transfer speed in case that made a difference. Yesterday evening, while I was watching a DVD on Atalanta, she froze again. That settled it.
Of course it had to be the motherboard! I could have gotten on without a graphics card or DVD drive, but it kind of doesn't work without a motherboard. Besides, it's the most inconvenient piece to remove; I had to pack up everything but the optical drive and the hard drive.
The motherboard is now boxed and ready to be mailed back tomorrow. Let's hope the replacement works out better.
Maggie says:
Interesting computer name choice. Can I ask why? :-)
Laurabelle says:
Fast but not necessarily smart. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atalanta
But that's more of an excuse. My naming scheme for my machines is mythological women, but of course this too is somewhat of a retroactive justification. Delilah got her name for an entirely different reason.