payasam

UT Starcom ADSL Modem UT-300R2, supplied by the ISP. Four lights: POWER, WAN, PPPoE, LAN. I was required to have an Ethernet card, and the one installed is by D-Link. I was told that I could type in any URL, say Yahoo, and I would be taken to the ISP's log-in screen. I have simplified matters by having Opera (in Win and Lin both) take me directly to log-in when it is started. No router, no internal modem.

No luck, Arctic. Kept pressing "i", but the process continued as always, stopping at ppp0. All that happened was that each "i" appeared on the screen. Looks like you'll have to sneeze at me again.

All right about the interactive, Arctic. Will give it a go in a bit and tell you what happens. For your cold, here's a simple trick which involves no drugs. All you need to do is stand near a cup of water boiling in an open pan. The vapour will find its way into your respiratory tract. No real need to drape towel over head and get all hot and red-faced. Like damned dust (I speak as a photographer), steam gets everywhere.

I use LILO, Arctic. What does "after the grub/lilo selection" mean? I tried F1 after choosing Linux, and I tried it again when I saw the screen which offers me Linux and Windows and Failsafe. Everything went as usual. If by "the verbose bootscreen" you mean the one up which millions of words run, too fast for my old and tired eyes to catch, that is the only Mandrake or Mandriva screen I have ever known. I did press "i" on both occasions, but things went no differently from always. Could I have been too slow? Whatever it was, pressing CTL-C when the ppp0 line came up had no effect. Hung means hung. Past 2 a.m. here and time for Snore Therapy. I choose to imagine that you'd like a bit of the same. No matter if I'm wrong.

Right, Arctic. Excellent taste in clothes and complexion, I must say.

Moderator, please move this to the right place if it doesn't belong here. MDV 2006.0. All of a sudden my system refuses to boot. It stops at the line "Bringing up interface ppp0." Failsafe mode gives the same result. So far as I know, with a LAN connection I should have no ppp.

Six days later. If I hadn't become tied up with domestic matters, I would've said that soon after my last post I managed to get things functioning pretty much as they should function. Or so I think, anyway. Am in MDV now, struggling to get my desktop icons in some sort of order, and after a bit will go into PCLOS to see what's what there.

PCLOS installed, plus its LILO. It had put in win_c, which is where Windows boots from, and win_d, which has only data. Removed the second, Windows booting OK. It had not put in Mandriva, and I haven't so far managed to put it in manually. The entry /mnt/hda6/boot isn't accepted, not even with vmlinuz. The 2.6.15-oci3.lve is either common to both or else PCLOS is making unwarranted assumptions. It works all right, though: I'm in it right now, and my only grumble is that the type is too small for ageing eyes. Ah, yes, another grumble. The command ls /mnt/win_d brings up nothing at all. [EDIT] Hours later. Booting into Windows. Booting into MDV, although at the first attempt the thing hung while B: drive kept spinning. Booting into PCLOS. Went part of the way to setting up colours and things the way I like them. Downloaded some software with Synaptic. Unable to install printer (Samsung ML-1450), though, despite having updated CUPS. Its driver is on a CD, and PCLOS does not seem to have recognised the R/W drive. The command ls /mnt shows the two windows partitions but none of the files in them.

Pretty much what I'm thinking, Arctic. There's a "rescue" option on the first MDV CD, which I suspect is what you mean. Thanks.

Arctic, I was roughly equal parts low and pissed off: all because of an unseen smiley. Back when I was young, the sort of answer I gave would have been thought pretty rude. Yes, there seems to be general agreement that Grub is much to be preferred as a bootloader. I've come across some other freeware ones too, of which the most promising seem to be Ranish and Gag. I'm in Netscape now, and I can see smileys: but this is Windows, so my config for that prog in Linux must be different. Here's what I propose to do. I had resized Mandriva's /home with the PCLOS live CD and then put that OS on hard drive (and after removing it, resized again with the same live CD). I'll have a go at doing that again, except that this time I shall accept PCLOS' offer to set up a bootloader. If that seems dicey, I expect there will be a means of backing out.

My apologies, Arctic. The browser, Netscape, in which I read your last message did not show that you had ended with a smile. I am now in Opera.

Quite right, Tyme. At the beginning anyway, it's difficult to gauge how little or how much a person knows. One can end up teaching the alphabet all over again, or else saying things which assume the most arcane knowledge. Where am I at with my system? Far, far away. The Martians are able to see when I'm poking fun at myself, so they do not pounce on me to gouge out my eyes. That's to say, PCLOS is off my hard drive and /home of MDV is back to what it was. When I have the time and the inclination, I might have another go. By the by, sending you /etc/fstab might not have done, because one of the bigger problems was getting that very file in order. Thanks for the offer of help. There's no Mars bars on Mars. Wonder how the planet got its name.

Much rather get my system functioning, thanks: that would not be Inappropriate.

And I'll still be loading boots on a freighter...

That's one way of looking at it. Another is to accept that nothing has a fixed meaning any longer -- this today, something else tomorrow. It amazes me that people contradict themselves so rapidly, make statements devoid of reason, and appear not to be aware of what they do. All languages have evolved and will continue to do that: but if verbs are casually turned into nouns or adjectives, for example, we'll soon be swimming in polygons on dry land, so to speak. What will the fourth penguin make you? A brontosaurus? Which brings up another of my pet peeves: the importance we now attach to labels, ignoring the reality beneath.

Thanks, Neddie. While I might at times be a tolerable court jester, I'd be a disaster if I were to write of things of which I knew next to nothing. The lady is not my daughter. My contemporaries' kids are ten or more years older than she is. I have, though, been her devoted slave since she was four or five hours old. "Avatar", incidentally, is a Sanskrit word which has to do with the miraculous manifestations of supposed divinities. I do not know when it acquired this strange new meaning. My potted description of myself is in the text under the picture. It is a protest against being described as "Awesome", which I have always understood to have a quite different meaning. But if they can call a peace loving Swiss that...

Spent quite some while looking at whatever I could find on setting up LILO for my needs. It's clear that I must shoot *at* the target and not merely in its general direction. The trouble with much writing is that because those responsible for it are entirely clear about what they are saying, they imagine that their words will be clear also to those who read them. That is why editors -- I've been one for over three and a half decades -- exist. I've done chiefly academic books, but among the other stuff was the manual for a dot matrix printer many years ago; and by golly, was it gobbledygook.

The multiple boot example in the FAQ has the second Linux distro controlling LILO. Not what I want, and perhaps not possible either, since MDV came before PCLOS and I'm not likely to want to leave that. Here's what I did, in MDV. Created mount point /mnt/pclinuxos, edited /etc/fstab to add entry to mount second (not first, since that is MDV) distro's partition containing its /root, typed "mount -a". What I added was "/dev/hda10/mnt/pclinux ext 3". Didn't know whether to add "1 3" or "2 1". Here's where disaster struck. Went to /mnt/pclinuxos/etc as advised, opened the lilo.conf there. Found that it pointed not to itself (hda9 and hda10) but every which way it pleased. In terror born of incomprehension (technically, "duhness"), rolled back everything.

Arctic, the two guides to which you point me are the ones I found in the FAQs. Certainly I shall read them. Seems to me my problem was that I didn't put in the correct names of the initrd.img and vmlinuz files because I didn't know what they are. For decades I've left typos to more capable people. At this time, all I can say about the red error messages is that they zip by so fast that that there's no chance of my reading them. I expect the answer is to boot interactive. Haven't given up, but have taken to putting on a crash helmet when I slam my head against the wall.

I did re-run /sbin/lilo, Scarecrow: "Ran LILO and quit." As for having shared partitions, perhaps it is now too late. I'd much rather get LILO moving than switch to Grub, thank you. Become too old to learn many new things. Seems to me this PCLOS idea too was born of approaching senility. [EDIT] I'll print out the stuff on LILO configuration which sits in the FAQs. If I can make sense of it, perhaps all will be well.

Added these lines to /etc/lilo.conf in MDV. All the same as those for MDV other than those marked with asterisks. image=/boot/vmlinuz label="pclinuxos" ** "mandriva" root=/dev/hda10 ** hda6 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append=" resume=/dev/hda9" ** hda7 Ran LILO and quit. When I tried to boot into PCLOS, got many red warnings. Could not get to desktop. Quit, booted into MDV, copied back the original lilo.conf, which I'd saved elsewhere. Clearly I shall have to make other changes to that file. Straight imitation with variables changed won't do. So now I have PCLOS on hard drive but no way to get into it -- other than the CD, I expect.

I have PCLOS installed, folks. Booted from its live CD to see how much space it wanted, then thought I'd see if its partitioning stuff would do the job -- and it did it. I'm writing from it now (Konqueror). When the matter of install partitions came up, it offered to use the swap of Mandriva. I'd already made a separate swap for it, but now I wonder if I couldn't have saved some space by using /hda7 for both MDV and PCLOS. I did not ask it to install its bootloader anywhere, but there was no positive indication that it did not put it somewhere. I've configured Lilo in MDV before, but now I can't remember where the file hangs out or what the wretched thing is called. A quick look around here, or in Google, should show me the way. Thanks for your help, all.

Arctic, when I tried to log in as root, I typed not "root" but the e-mail address I'd given as the security administrator's identity. Now that that's sorted out, I should be able to move ahead with whichever option works. Tyme, if you look at the procedure which Arctic has set out pretty clearly, perhaps you won't call the business complicated. Increasingly as time passes, I find myself more comfortable at the command line than in graphical interfaces, many of which I need time to figure out. No version of Windows comes with a partition manager, so far as I know. You need tools from sources other than Microsoft: Partition Magic, Ranish, and so on. I have been most comfortable with BootIt NG the few times I have used it. Since Linux is a fundamentally more capable system, to a good degree because it is mostly open, one would expect it to have such tools -- and indeed it has them.

Arctic, I have /dev/hda6 and /dev/hda8/home, both ext 3, as well as swap, which is /dev/hda7. This is apart from 1 and 5, Windows C: and D: respectively. Tyme, Arctic said, in post 4, his first to me here, exactly what you say about logging in automatically. In the failsafe, init 3, startx procedure of which he spoke, I could not log in as root and had to do that as a user. No progress, Ian. This I think is because I do not understand the sequence of actions, and the alternatives, indicated in your post.

Arctic, I got the report I quoted after I had clicked on the "unmount" box at the left. Wondered where you were lurking, Ian. Now to try your medicine.