G5 (SMU) loss of keyboard/mouse

[Ken Moffat]

  My latest toy is one of the last of the single processor G5s 
(PowerMac9,1).  It works well enough to install ubuntu or fedora, but 
once I boot the installed system I lose keyboard and mouse input in a 
couple of minutes.

  With a raphical desktop login I lose them as soon as the graphical 
login appears, probably because there is a sound associated with that 
(found that from a bug filed in ubuntu, but it seems to be generic, 
certainly the fedora install has the same problem if I try to test a 
sound).  I also lose it if I try tab-completion in bash.  I've 
occasionally seen ide error messages, as if the disk is no longer 
responding.

  Running a non-graphical installation helps a bit (I had over 10 minutes 
uptime on one occasion), as does upgrading to a cross-compiled 2.6.14.2 
(working network - thanks for that advice, Ben - and tab-completion 
doesn't always hang).

  I suspect this might be an unfortunate combination of options in 
.config, so I'll start by asking if anybody has one of these machines 
running reliably ?

Ken
-- 
  das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce