[Bio-Linux] odd and confounding behavior with BioLinux distros 5 and 6

[Tony Travis]

On 16/04/11 22:57, John Bradsher wrote:
> Hello Tony:
> Well, thanks for the confirmation on that. I had suspected this, even if
> some of the specs for the Pentium 4 suggest that it has the 64-bit
> architecture.

Hi, John.

Sorry, I should have said that *most* Pentium 4's are 32-bit, and I 
suspect that your's is a 32-bit one. Intel did ship versions of the 
Pentium 4 with 64-bit extensions and, the 'Core' chipsets are derived 
from Pentium processors anyway. You are quite right that some of the 
'high-end' Pentium 4's were in fact 64-bit, but not the ones used in 
'commodity' PC's. They were used in high-end workstations or servers.

> However, the real problem comes from being unable to boot from the disk
> with the BL5 iso image. As I stated before, I can only imagine that this
> results from having the more recent ubuntu 10.10 kernel running on the
> Pentium 4 machine. Is there any reason this should happen? Is there any
> workaround for the problem?

I'm a bit confused, because if you boot off the Bio-Linux 5 'live' DVD, 
you will be running a 32-bit Ubuntu 8.04 kernel even if you have a 10.10 
kernel installed on your hard disk. The DVD does not read files off the 
hard disk. All it does is use the swap file if one is present.

HTH,

   Tony.
-- 
Dr. A.J.Travis, University of Aberdeen, Rowett Institute of Nutrition
and Health, Greenburn Road, Bucksburn, Aberdeen AB21 9SB, Scotland, UK
tel +44(0)1224 712751, fax +44(0)1224 716687, http://www.rowett.ac.uk
mailto:a.travis at abdn.ac.uk, http://bioinformatics.rri.sari.ac.uk