I recently tried installing R4V5 on a dual PIII Tyan board. During the boot from KnoppMyth CD process I only get one penguin, and then the system locks with the keyboard lights (scroll lock, caps lock I think) blinking.

A long time ago I was able to install R4V2 on a similar system (and saw two penguins during boot). I have not been able to get either of these SMP machines to boot successfully from a KnoppMyth CD on any release after R4V2.

I've seen other posts about installing (via debs) and building SMP kernels, but I don't know how I could do this if I can't get the system booted.

These same boxes boot just fine from plain Knoppix CDs.

Is there something different about the kernels after R4V2 that might explain this?

Thanks!

PS: Any chance the MythNews debs for R4V5 have been rebuilt yet? I'm a little gun shy about following the steps to extract, modify, and install it by hand.

I think your blinky keyboard lights are probably unrelated to SMP. Do you have a USB mouse and keyboard, by chance? Another problem point could be the LAN card -- some models cause the kernel panic. Search around for blinky keyboard and you'll find several posts.

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you must have a PS2 keyboard plugged in to boot.. as mentioned by liv2cod.. otherwise blinky......blinky

I wish it were that simple. I have both a PS/2 keyboard and PS/2 mouse connected (and a VGA Monitor) during boot.

On one system, the LAN is intergrated into the mobo, on the other system I have an SMC 100mb PCI ethernet card. Note that both these systems boot happily with regular Knoppix.

I had the blinky keyboard lights during install problem with R4V5 too. By trawling the forum I found the following suggestions:

Turn off any power save options in the BIOS (ACPI? APIC?)
Use a PS2 keyboard and mouse
Press shift periodially during install
Unplug cable from NIC
Leave for 20 minutes after freeze and reboot and it works
use alt-f2 to get console and type setterm - blank 0 ; setterm -powersave off
do some strange low level disk formatting stuff
use the "knoppmyth vga=normal" option when booting.

I tried dozens of times using various combinations of these options and found that it would only complete the install about 1 in 6 times.

When I tried the vga=normal option, it worked first time, and subsequently worked the second time in a row (unheard of on my box with any of the other suggestions), so I would strongly recommend trying that.

I've got a dual PIII Tyan board too with the same problem. I removing everything that wasn't needed and disabling most things in the bios. No luck. Let me know if you find a solution Bhamail. I'm using my single processer board until I find a solution.

No complete solution, but more info....

Some specs:
Mobo model: Tyan S1834, two PIII 600mhz cpu's, 1 gig ram (2 x 512mb) in slot 1 and 2, Seagate 160gb ide drive.

I removed every card from my system, leaving only the SMC 100mb ethernet card and video card (a real cheapo ATI - AGP slot, only VGA out, no tv out - that I plan to replace with an NVidia asap). Then I was able to boot to the KnoppMyth install screens. The bad news is I always only get one penguin (it only sees one cpu). I remember when using the old R4V2 install on a single cpu system, I used to get a message during boot about only "one cpu found"....that is why I started this thread asking about changes to the R4* kernels, since I suspect old versions (like R4V2) where setup to use a dual cpu kernel, which would fall back to using a single cpu if only one was found. (I'm totally guessing, don't even know if that's possible). Anyway, now I can boot, but I never get both cpu's recognized by the KnoppMyth install. Is there any switch on the boot screen I could pass to make the KnoppMyth CD try to install with a SMP kernel?

After I was able to boot with the essentially empty box I started adding cards:
1. sound -> still boots, but only one penguin
2. PVR 250 -> still boots, but only one penguin
3. Adaptec AHA-2940UW scsi card -> no boot, shows loading 2940 module, then blinky keyboard
3. remove scsi card, add second PVR 250 card -> my bios never gets passed init process.

My next plan is to start playing with bios settings (disabling unneeded com, parallel, etc ports to free irqs) and see if I can get my mobo bios happy with two PVR 250's.

Of course my main goal is to make use of BOTH cpu's, so any adivce there would really help. As I said before, with the old R4V2, I was able to use two cpu's and I didn't have to manually swap the kernel (which I'm totally clueless about, and even so, really hoping it's not required).