digby

iphitus, you wouldn't happen to have a bigger vesion of that would you? (let's just say 1280x960) Genius, sir. Pure genius.

Just for sake of expiriment: When you boot off the Mandrake install CD and get to the menu where it asks for you to press enter or F1, press F1 and type: "linux noapic nolapic". That was the only way I could get it to install on my nForce2 machine, though I'm not using any sort of RAID. One other thing... is your BIOS updated to the latest version? I have heard that doing that has helped several people with nForce chipsets.

I didn't know about mc or vitutor. I will give those a try.

urpmi told me that that kernel was already installed (as I expected it would since it showed up in Grub... sorry I forgot to mention that). I didn't know how to remove it once it was installed, but I tried to boot it just for reference, and got the same error. Everything goes fine until it tries to replay the journal transactions. Of course I am now getting error messages about my filesystems not being cleanly unmounted, but that was expected given the activity during lockup.

Just a note: if you're used to the DOS editor, you probably don't want to use vi as your editor of choice yet. I've heard people rave about it, but when first started it, I couldn't even figure out how to exit. You should probably use joe or nano for small stuff at this point. I think that even emacs is a little more intuitive than vi, but maybe I just missed something obvious.

So after many tries, I finally got 10 official installed. All it took was a BIOS update, re-downloading 2 of the CDs (I'll never forget to md5 sum my downloads again), and booting the kernel from the cd with "linux noapic nolapic" (thank you nForce2). And even then I would have random lockups after the license agreement, during package installation, etc. But it finally worked. And then I tried to boot it. Everything was going quite well for the first bit. But then it read that it was replaying journal entries. I don't know how it is journal entires to replay... it's never booted before. But it always freezes there. (I think I gave it two minutes of no HD activity just in case.) I tried this with the default kernel and with the 2.6.3 option that the installer put into Grub. Same results. Standard info: XP 2500+ on Abit NF7-S v2 nForce2 chipset with latest bios update 1024MB PC3200 RAM GF4 Ti4600 w/ 128 MB 8x AGP 120 GB Seagate 7200 SATA HD hde5 mounted at / and formatted with ReiserFS hde7 mounted at /home and formatted with Reiser FS

The other CDs have additional packages (software) on them. I don't remember exactly what is on which cd, but the kernel is on CD1, and I think that Open Office is on CD3. I had a kernel problem with my install too, and it turned out that I forgot to md5 sum my downloads. I ended up with errors on the first and third CDs.

makes sense. so is the command just menu-update (as root, I assume)? and thanks!

Well, I don't quite know what I did this time... I was using RPMdrake to browse through some games looking for a chess game and some scorched earth clone I head heard about. I seleted a couple of other itmes that looked interesting as well. After telling the gui to install everything, I got an error that my contrib source (raven.cslab.vt.edu)'s list was out of date. And now over half the programs in the Gnome menu have disappeared and all of the icons that were once colorful have changed to gray-green folders. Any thoughts? -EDIT- Ok... after all this, I was installing XMMS ( # urpmi xmms) All the programs came back. Everything is just like it should be except the top level menu. Everything that should be there is, but it's ugly. Did the other stuff come back because urpmi added something new? -Re-re-edit- Restarted the X Server and everything is fine now... but that didn't fix it before. After all this started happening, I turned the computer off (thunderstorms kill my uptime) and nothing changed. It wasn't until I installed XMMS... everything works fine now, but I'd love for someone to explain what happend and how I fixed it.

If nothing else, as root you should be able to run: # service dm start and that will bring up the graphical login screen that will let you pick your desktop enviornment. This is the only way I can get KDE to work for my main account. It's useful for switching back and forth. As to why you had trouble? I have no idea.

That's a nice resource... bookmarked. Thanks!

ahh... that makes sense... (I haven't given away the fact that I'm a complete newb, have I?) I'll try it realy quick and let you know what happens -edit- ok that works... I was actually wondering how to bring up that graphical login screen... I hadn't seen it since shortly after the install. I did get one error while kde was coming up, though: Sound server informational message: Error while initializing the sound driver: device /dev/dsp can't be opened (Permission denied) The sound server will continue, using the null output device.

root has always been able to use kde. I should have mentioned that before. When I run startx as root, kde has always run. I've only had 1 occasion to run a GUI as root, so I hadn't played with it that way. I haven't upgraded X. I only have the faintest idea how I might go about it even. Haven't moved the .kde dir either.

Ok, it gets better. Now when I run startkde, it gives me what I believe is the same error as before, but now it quits nicely to a bash prompt. Here is the text: $ startkde xset: unable to open display "" xsetroot: unable to open display ' ' xmodmap: unable to open display ' ' xmodmap: unable to open display ' ' startkde: Starting up... ksplash: cannot connect to X server kdeinit: Aborting. $DISPLAY is not set. Warning: connect () failed: : No such file or directory ksmserver: cannot connect to X server startkde: Shutting down... Warning: connect() failed: : No such file or directory Error: Can't contace kdeinit! startkde: Running shutdown scripts... startkde: Done. $ I also how have an icon on my desktop that launched konqueror's file manager to my home dir

well, I don't see anything in any of those files that looks like a real error... granted, I can't make heads or tails of what most of it is saying... I'm going to logout and I'll try to catch the messages that go by. I was thinking, I didn't give it any particular command to tell the system to go back to gnome after I ran startkdm. I did try startgdm and gdm, but neither seemed to be valid commands. Is there anoyher one I need to try? -edit- After logging out and back in as my main user, startx worked perfectly. It was also much faster than normal. Do I need to run something like init3 to kill X? Am I completely off my rocker?