During booting of Antix (13.2), I have a problem that seems linked to my BIOS (message = i/o space for gpio uninitialized, more info here:
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The problem is not important, Antix boots fine.

However, the boot process becomes very long, it looks like there is a timeout of 120 seconds and it takes indees a long time (and many identical messages about aborting) before the boot continues.
Can I reduce this timeout somehow?

Thanks,
Roel

and attach here

Ok, I'll do that when I get home.
Just a small question: what's the diff between your command, and
thanks,

for this purpose, the commands are equivalent, although they function differently, the end result is the same.

Here is the message log, I could not find anything in there, but I'm not an expert at all...
I'm not really bothered by the cause of the slow startup. I hope there's a simple way to reduce the 120s timeout to eg. 5s.

Thanks,
Roel

The log delay occurs between ACPI: Smart Battery System [SBS0]: Battery Slot [BAT0] (battery present) and Adding 2128608k swap on /dev/sda2. Priority:1 extents:1 across:2128608k. There are also consistent segfaults (accessing unallowed memory) in the gmerlin programs and on October 5th it looks like the nfs file system crashed on an invalid op code. These other errors indicate something fishy is going on. The consistency of the gmerlin errors points toward a problem with the gmerlin software but the addition of the nfs error also raises the possibility of a hardware problem.

These TravelMate laptops are know to have problems with ACPI. For starters I suggest you add the boot parameters"noacpi" and"acpi=off". At least that is very easy to try. You will lose some ACPI features when you do this. If this works and you want the features back then you will need to install an updated DSDT for your machine such as the one available
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If this doesn't help solve your problem then it would be useful if you could capture the error messages that you say get printed to the screen. They might be in a log file under /var/log/. If you have access to a digital camera then maybe you could just take a picture of the screen with the messages on it and post it here. I'm hoping they will help us pinpoint the subsystem that is acting up.

Thanks for looking at all these details. I also have the feeling that something fishy happens on that laptop. Antix was about the only linux I could install on it, I tried about 6 different distros before, and all installations failed.

With acpi=off as boot option, Antix boots like a charm. I'm really happy with this simple and easy solution, and I don't have the impression there are any drawbacks. What could be these 'features' I don't have anymore?

Just to make it even better: is there a way to have this boot option by default? Right now, the default boot options are root=/dev/sda1 quiet
Thanks,
Roel

then on a line similar to this:

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-3.11.5-antix.1-486-smp root=/dev/sda1 quiet nouveau.modeset=0

just add the acpi=off , and save the file. it will be there after a reboot

Thanks, works great! I think we can close this thread completely now.