[ILUG] Mandrake - it works....but why?

[Barry Redmond]

I've had USB problems on my installation of Mandrake 10.1, and lots of 
googling around has led me to think that there's a fundamental USB 
interrupt handling problem in there somewhere.  

I haven't seen any good explanation or solution of the problem 
anywhere.  There are various reports of USB device communication 
problems, sometimes with "Control timeout on ep0out" (or ep0in) 
errors.  My particular incarnation was a USB printer problem.

One suggested fix (can't remember where) was to use noapic at boot.  
In my case this did indeed fix the USB problem, but then any attempt to 
logout or shutdown via the KDE dialogue caused the machine to 
lockup ... !!??  I removed the noapic switch, and sometime later I 
realised that the USB printer was working.  I still get occasional 
problems, but  usually fixed by power cycling the printer.

Not very reassuring behaviour.  If I'd wanted this kind of thing I would 
have stuck with Windows.

Regards,
Barry Redmond