Thinking about changing distros

[coverup]

Hit ESC while seeing the bar, this will allow you to observe the boot process from the console. At what point does the boot hang? Did you try to boot from the rescue disk, and boot interactively?

[Artificial Intelligence]

A good friend of mine that got me into gentoo strongly recommended Ubuntu to me. Where is AI? :P

 

I'm here B)

 

If you go ubuntu grab the Dapper version though it's in beta 2 phase now.

Then you might considering which one it should be: Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Xubuntu, but as I recall it from somewhere you are a KDE user, right?

But you could take a look into Gnome.

 

You might run into problems installing Ubuntu/kubuntu of beta 2 with the grub as I did, but it's easely solve. When booting up go into Failsafe mode (choose i386 version when doing this).

then:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

 

While you are at it you can grab the right kernel, eg. for pentium 4

sudo apt-get install linux-686

 

and for installing nvidia card with 3d acc.

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

[ianw1974]

Definitely sounds like a lilo issue to me. Some hardware doesn't like lilo, so you might need to use grub instead. What you could do is boot from your mandriva cd in rescue mode. Then there might be a menu option to mount all your partitions, and then exit to the command prompt. I think it should mount under /mnt. Then do:

 

chroot /mnt /bin/bash
source /etc/profile

 

now you've chrooted it. I would then check in /boot to see if you have a grub directory, and if you have a menu.lst file within here. If not, try urpmi grub and get it to install into your environment. Once done, then check /boot/grub/menu.lst again, and make sure it has all your partition information in it. You should then be able to do:

 

grub --no-floppy
setup (hd0)

 

as long as you've not selected a separate mount point for /boot, otherwise you need to pass this to grub before you run the setup command, eg: root (hd0,1) if you put /boot on /dev/hda2 for example. Normally you'll get an error otherwise if it just returns to the prompt after running the setup command, you can then type quit to get out of grub. Then just reboot.

[Artificial Intelligence]

Ubuntu are using grub.

The problem is that they forgot to clean it so it starts up with an entry which doesn't exist (pointing to a kernel-686) which aren't installed by default.

But with a quick update should straighten things out if you don't want to edit it yourself.

Edited May 6, 2006 by Artificial Intelligence

[iphitus]

or just use arch which boots to a 686 kernel by default, as the whole distro is 686.

 

then just pacman -S nvidia ;)

[AussieJohn]

To those who repeatedly refer to Mandrake 9.2 and the LG cdrom disaster. Please get your facts right. LG was the cause of the problem because it failed to stick to the standards for drives on some of its particular models. Mandrake made a patch to get around the problem at the time but the final solution was LG abiding by the standards in its subsequent product manufacture. That is one of the reasons LG is a bit anti Linux. It was caught out by Mandrake.

 

John.

[mystified]

Well I finally got it to boot, switched to grub and now my wireless connection which was working perfectly fine is no longer working.

[Ixthusdan]

John has it correct. The so-called LG disaster was an LG problem, not linux, unless you want to blame linux for using standards while LG did not. That is what the windows press did, until they were corrected by real technicians. Also note that only one model out of all of thier models was defective, the only one produced using the wrong internal bios calls. Blaming Mandriva for this is windows fud. People should get their facts straight before spreading a story that was corrected 48 hours after it was announced. Of course, windows folks don't concern themselves too much with technical facts. If they did, they would use linux. B)

 

Mysti, while it should not have happened, reinstall the ndiswrapper connection. I would recommend copying the files I told you about previously to your /home directory.

[mystified]

Ix, I tried manually restarting and it wouldn't work so I rebooted and it's back up again. This is driving me nuts.

[Ixthusdan]

:lol:

OK. I had this problem, but forgot about it! I think I googled ndiswrapper and made an entry in a config file. Let me see if I can remember what I did. :woops:

I swear my laptop works flawlessly on wireless on different networks! Really!

 

Here is what I followed, but I used the Mandriva rpm rather than installing a new driver. I looked at the files and made corresponding edits where needed.

[ianw1974]

I too have had problems with ndiswrapper starting at boot, so I just added "ndiswrapper" to /etc/modprobe.preload and it sorted the problem out.