> I run windows xp and have had some experience with linux > in the past. My question is this: which distribution would be best > (ie, programs come with the installation) for hardware diagnostics? I > wish to run comprehensive tests on most components of my machine, disk > drives in particular. Can anyone recommend a dist or a list of > programs designed for the afformentioned tasks? Thanks in advance!
Random observations WRT normal Linux operations vs. normal MS-Windows operations in the case of 'marginal' hardware situations:
Case 1: Gateways' shiped with the 'dreaded' Quantum SCSI disk drives:
We (UMass / CVRL) bought a couple of Gateway workstations that Gateway shipped with Quantum 9gig W/F SCSI disk drives (avoid these like the plague). With one machine, we tossed the pre-installed MS-Windows (95?) and installed RedHat Linux (5.2 or maybe 6.1). The other machine got MS-Windows NT 4.0 installed. After about 1 month, the machine with Linux installed reported disk I/O errors (and crashes). The machine would recover (fsck after hard reset in a couple of cases) — the disk had not totally farmed, just started to lose it. We got a replacement disk (IBM) from Gateway and did a disk-to-disk transfer (dump | restore, partition by partition) and used a boot floppy to re-boot and install lilo. This was some years ago. The machine is still running with the replacement disk. The 'NT box reported no problems until after about 6-7 months of use. Then crashed and refused to reboot. Disk was close to complete death. We suspect that the disk in the 'NT box was probably starting to go at the same time as the disk in the Linux box, but MS-Windows NT failed to notice *minor* disk I/O errors.
Case 2: Token MS-Windows box goes off line and gets converted to a take-home Linux machine:
We had a Gateway G6-200 (PPro 200mhz) machine that was the lab's 'token' MS-Windows box (NT 4.0). For various reasons (including lack of serious use), we took it off line. Later we needed a take-home box for a prof. to learn MatLab under a Linux environment for a course he was to teach, so we *tried* to install Linux on it. The install kept crashing. No apparent reason way. Finally, we swapped out the RAM SIMMs, and presto, Linux installed properly. I guess the RAM had developed some bad bits, and MS-Windows NT failed to notice…
*Maybe* 'NT is notorious about not noticing hardware failures. Maybe Linux is really very sensitive to "minor" hardware problems (slowly developing failures).
Robert Heller deepsoft.com
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Date: 21 Mar 2003 22:17:36 GMT
> I thought most Linux releases these days are quite plug and play?
They are. "modprobe 3c59x" will take care of any 3Com 59* card as well as most 3Com 90* cards. If this is an old ISA 3Com509, 3Com515, or (shudder) the ancient, broken 3Com501, well, ISA Plug-n-Pray never really worked right at all. Post the model number of your 3Com card, also include the output of "lspci -vv | grep -A6 Ether" if this is a PCI card.
Matt G
Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2002 11:07:19 -0700 Newsgroups: alt.os.linux.suse, comp.os.linux.misc
> I have two computers running SuSE Linux 7.3 Pro, with KDE 3.x as the desktop > environment. Anybody seen a good system performance benchmark utility/app > that does a good job testing the various aspects of a system's hardware > (CPU, memory, hard disk, etc.) I want to compare the two system's relative > performance.
I don't know of anything for testing the CPU, offhand. You could look at the "bogomips" field in /proc/cpuinfo, but that tends to vary greatly between different processor families. In particular, AMD Athlons are rated at about twice their clock speed, while Intel Pentiums' ratings are roughly equal to their clock speed. That difference may be genuine for tight timing loops, but not for typical programs.
To test the memory, I suggest running memtest86. This program must be run standalone (instead of the Linux kernel), so you can only run it by rebooting and selecting it from your boot menu. I know SuSE 8.0 has it installed by default, and I think 7.3 does too, but if not then you can fetch it from http://www.memtest86.com/.
For disks, use "hdparm -t /dev/hda". This will test the disk hardware, but not the filesystem. I can't suggest anything for testing the filesystem speed… which is a shame, really, since it would be cool to see the difference between ext2 and reiser.
For 2D graphics, use "x11perf" with the options of your choice. There are dozens of tests that it can run, and some of those tests take a while. If you want to do them all, then wait until the end of the day and then run "x11perf -all >times".
For 3D graphics, just run a game with "frames per second" displayed. You might also find something useful in /usr/share/glutdemo, but I didn't.
Steve Kirkendall @dsl-only.net
