Dr.Backtick`

I've decieded i'm going to switch over to Gentoo Linux. Some of the things I need to find out are: 1. using ext2 filesystem and want journaling now (tune2fs -j /dev/hdb1) Would that command just add Journaling and erase data or just add Journaling. According to the man pages it doesnt mention data loss. Thats about all the questions I have right now. I think i'm going to start the install if I dont get any reply to this. thanks --George

Hi again, New Situation: There are some minor things that are wrong now. Well at least I think they are minor. I was curious to see if KDE3.3.1 would boot up. I installed KDE3.3.1 in Super User mode so it installed to my home directory /root. Anyway I wanted to have it available in regular user mode so started the X and copied /root/kde3.3.1 to /home/kc2keo. So after that I changed the permissions so I could access the kde folder with no problems. I started X in user mode and it started up kde3.2.3. Later I set the environment variables to go for kde3.3.1 and it works. I'm in kde3.3.1 right now. Problems: 1. GLX module not loading. When the command 'glxgears' issued the gears go really slow 2. ALSA drivers not working. 3. when I start a shell it starts up with a white background with black text (annoying!). The saved shell that started up saved from .kde had the normal black background. I tried looking at the Konsole options and I dont see any problems. 4. Konqueror when started up doesnt load certain pictures. For example if I start it up and go to google.com their Google logo doesnt show. 5. The background on my desktop wont show up if I configure it. 6. Some screensavers wont work such as the picture slide show that you use your own pictures. It says no picures found when I specify a folder that has the pictures in it. I tried to delete .kde and .qt and it started up and asked me to configure kde3.3.1 and I did so... same problems. The paths are set to the newer KDE. Am I missing the xscreensaver? Hmm, I wonder if i'm missing some other KDE packages. I have to modprobe nvidia in superuser mode before I could start the X. Thats it for now i'll post updated stuff if any progress Thank you, George

yay, i'm back up and running. I didnt think this would work but I tried again anyway. 1. deleted /usr/X11R6 -- I force installed xorg RPM packages and their dependencies from my OS CD and force installed kde packages all individually and it worked. I am now posting this thread from KDE over the Xorg X server. I noticed that all of my previously opened windows and shortcuts are still there. Except that I need to fix konqueror(minor) and reinstall mozilla(minor also). I shall see how this turns out and reply with any issues i'm having but first search for the awnsers on a search engine. bye, George

I was in init3. I never did it in init 5 so that isnt the problem. i'm going to try what you said with deleting .kde and .qt then reply with the results. I dotn know if you read what I said before but I also installed konstruct and installed KDE from source. so now its in /root/kde3.3.1 I could do it in user mode also bye, George

why would that help? .kde is a directory and so is qt. I dont see how that will help then just make it worse. I feel the real choice I should make is to do a fresh install. I guess I might do what I said in the last post I posted. I'm just nervous and want to take this slow and consider as many options I could do to prevent any data loss by backing stuff up. df seems to be a good command. Thanks for posting that. bye and thanks for your input, George

OK, I have logged into my computer via ssh in putty from my school and issued the 'df' command in both user and superuser to see if there was a difference: [kc2keo@localhost win_c2]$ df Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hdb5 31G 17G 12G 59% / /dev/hda1 12G 8.4G 3.0G 75% /mnt/win_c /dev/hdb1 87G 71G 16G 83% /mnt/win_c2 /dev/hda5 14G 664K 14G 1% /mnt/win_d /dev/hda6 4.5G 532M 4.0G 12% /mnt/win_e /dev/hda7 3.9G 190K 3.9G 1% /mnt/win_f /dev/hda8 3.9G 593M 3.4G 15% /mnt/win_g /dev/hdb10 21G 17G 2.8G 86% /storage1 [kc2keo@localhost win_c2]$ I see a problem. It seems storage is part of /. I did 'df /storage' and / returned with /dev/hdb5. This isnt good. I am planning to see if I could copy all of storage over to /mnt/win_d. I know its bigger than that partition but I wonder if the system stuff is a couple of gigs itself so storage might not be so bad. Should I worry about anything like moving stuff over to fat32 drive from a ext2 drive like sym links and hidden files? I know the hidden files start with a '.' so that could pose a problem for me in windows. So does this mean I shouldnt verify that the files are on that partition by booting to windows because it could complain about the hidden files and sym links. Heck they might not even copy over and complain. If this is the case I suppose I could copy them over to /storage1 individually. /storage is where I have my sources and notes on. Well thats unfortunate for me that 'storage' seems to be in /dev/hdb5. Thats whats going to be formated. And what i'll do for /var and the others I explained above. I probably wont copy EVERYTHING over to backup but as much as I could and the important stuff. By looking at the results of 'df' what would you do im my situation. Just interested to see what you'd do. Also by the way my 160gb WD is a RAID IDE drive(think thats right). It has a 8mb cache and the rest doesnt matter for that drive. My other drive is a 40gb seagate drive that came with the computer. Thanks, George

before I installed Mandrake Linux 10.1: Before all of this crap I backed up fstab, inittab and some more which arent that important now to me. For /storage and /storage1 should I refer to fstab? I'm not sure which they would be without fstab. Would diskdrake work for me? /var /etc /usr /home If I have room for these directories on my windows fat32 drive I will back these up...I suppose if I find my configuration files I want i'll be good as golden to install the OS. And so your saying any specifically mounted drives like /storage/ and storage1 arent part of / and the others(listed above) are. /bin doesnt matter... So my goals would be to: 1. copy over /var, /etc, /usr, and /home to windows drive. I might want /root 2. go and install "Just make sure you know *what* partition it is and tell the install routine to mount it and *not* format it" - how would I know what partition it is? the fstab file? a detecting method? I've done this before but forgot. I guess diskdrake. How would I tell the install routine to mount it? I suppose it would just skip /storage and /storage1 and i'd have to mount it with diskdrake. Ok now that I understand better of what I should do i'm almost ready to do this :o i'm nervous about this. I always am with these types of events. bye, George

Ok so adding a user and attempting to start KDE doesnt work(as I figured it wouldnt). So now I feel I should do a install of Mandrake Linux 10.1 since I havent done it for a really long time and it probably is cluttered with stuff like old configuration files and garbage. I think it is affecting performance anyway. BUT: I know i'm going to have issues somewhere along the install or noticing something dreadfully wrong and freak. I dont want that. Or it might go totally fine and i'll be relieved. The questions I asked before remain. I am looking for the awnsers without much knowledge of which keywords would be most successful. bye George

Ok, So I already figured I should of installed by this point, I guess I should of done the easy stuff first . So, I dont have any critical data in /home anyway so I dont care if I lose that. I figure I will lose settings and packages I installed but oh well. But before I do anything hasty I will make a new user and try to start the X with KDE. Question before install: 1. should I back up /var/www/html which has my html files along with folders I do not wish to lose? 2. /storage wont be lost would it? storage along with storage one is a mounted drive and I dont think that will be written to. 3. When i'm doing an install and erasing / what exactly am I erasing. 4. I also have webmin, ssh, http, ftp installed. Would I lose those? so... I did check some other folders with configuration files that were updated and I noticed that they had these strange new configuration files with a .rpmnew extension on them and the older ones had it without .rpmnew. I found this in Shorewall, Xorg and a couple of others I saw get updated. I am saying this because what I found wierd is that when I had just booted into Mandrake Linux 10.1 for the first time all of my ports were blocked that I had opened before. I looked at the shorewall configuration files and they seemed fine. However when I looked at another config file with the same name EXCEPT with .rpmnew at the end it was different. I am assuming this is caused from the upgrade. I also asked people on IRC who updated about what happened and they had no problems whatsoever. I suppose its because of the forein X server I downloaded previously after the install of Mandrake Linux 10.0. I also changed the home directory for a user and started X and noticed that it did the same hang up job. I admit I should of attempted some other stuff such as #modprobe nvidia #init 5 and try what you said above. Anyway that was a good learning experience. I printed out the documentation for X and KDE and learned some new things like Qt. :D I am also very nervous about issuing an install because I DONT WANT TO LOSE MY DATA I worked hard on. Anyway i'm sure I wont lose anything much with /. /storage and /storage1 should be safe since they are mounted. I'll just be VERY happy once this is water under the bridge. Thank you, George

First of all: This computer is a Dell 4300 with a 1.7GHZ and an intel archecture 32-bit. The kernel is 2.6.8.1-10mdk along with its kernel source and have Mandrake Linux 10.1. My graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForceFX 5200 So... Before I decided to upgrade I have done some research on the official Mandrake site along with asking others who have installed it or upgraded. I finally decided to upgrade and everything seemed to go ok installing packages and upgrade them. However I knew i'd have problems since I installed newer packages on my System. After the upgrade I noticed that after issuing the command startx(tied in with kde in the .xinitrc file) KDE started up and hung at a screen. It made the startup noises however it stayed at a screen with the mouse usable. I figured it would be KDE being the problem so I decided to go to KDEs site and get the latest version. I decided to get the source version with Konstruct. After doing so I logged in as root(not neccessary since it installs to home directory) and installed it. so it installed and I had similar problems. I also decided to get the latest NVIDIA driver from their site. I checked up on their revised readme. I saw some describing about Xorg. After the driver installation I tried to start the X again and nothing. So I compiled and installed the KDE packages (After installing Qt) through Konstruct and it installed to /root/kde3.3.1. I went to the bin directory there and issued ./kdm and that started up half way and died. I figured this could be with my X server because I think I had installed XFree86 server and Xorg installed over /usr/X11R6. The last X server I had installed I installed was not the default from the OS packages. So in response to this I figured why not delete /usr/X11R6. So I did and I didnt want to back up that directory. I got the latest X(6.8.1) from www.x.org and tried to install it. I ended up installing quite successfully and now when I try to start X the NVIDIA driver starts up and shows the NVIDIA screen and crashes with messages complaining about the keyboard module not existing and glx not working and this other one I cant remember now. I've installed DRM packages along with DRI on purpose to make sure they work. I've read on another thread on this forum by Artee that DRM packages are neccessary along with DRI. I am not going to load DRI with NVIDIA since it says specifically to NOT load them. So I figure... Should I try running xorg? Should I try deleting /usr/X11R6 and try installing it from RPM on CD? I prefer to fix this and not delete it and install by RPM. bye(anthing i'm leaving out?) George