[Discuss] Boot Problems and Firefox

[Murray Strome]

Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> On 2007-01-16 19:45-0800 Murray Strome wrote:
>
>> Any ideas or hints?
>
> It might be hardware issues as Andrew said. But one thing that bothers me
> about your problem report tonight is I think you try way too many 
> varieties
> of Linux to try and achieve too narrow a goal. 
--< snip >---
>
>
> In your case, you stuck with Mandrake for many years (which was good), 
> but
> the last I remember you decided to move to Ubuntu.
> At this point, it sounds like it is too late for my advice to help 
> you, and
> it may be time for a clean install from scratch for your distro of 
> choice.
> But once that is done, apply my advice from then on and don't put 
> anything
> else on that machine (except the normal new version installs for your
> distro) until you are ready in ~five years for your next distro switch.
>
> My $0.02.
>
> Alan
Thanks for the advice. I have largely stuck with Mandriva, mostly 
understand it, and like it for the most part. I have used Ubuntu in the 
past to get boot problems fixed when I could not figure out how to do it 
with Mandriva or other utilities. I also wanted to see why it was so 
popular.

In this particular case, I had just updated my Mandriva (which I have 
done pretty well every year, and did quite successfully on my wife's 
computer a few months ago -- the new version is a bit nicer that the 
previous one). I believe that I had some boot issues with it as well 
immediately following the installation, but was able to temporarily add 
Kubuntu and then boot into it with Smart Boot Disk, then fix the boot 
using the Mandriva boot administrative task. I then removed Kubuntu from it.

I have also used Debian on one old computer strictly for Koha (library 
software) which I could never get working with any other distribution -- 
and it was difficult enough with Debian. I haven't looked into Koha 
recently -- maybe someone has fixed it up so that it will install easily 
on some other platform.

Now why try Red Hat at all? Two reasons: I have some software that is 
only guaranteed to work with Red Hat or SUSE; lots of other software 
appears to only work with Red Hat (I have gotten MOST of it but not all 
working with Mandriva, but with some difficulty). I had also read 
somewhere that the Red Hat boot loading usually worked when nothing else 
would.

I know I should probably take the time to learn how to "hack" into the 
boot loader to try to figure out what is wrong with what Mandriva and 
Ubuntu did wrong, and/or to figure out how to modify the one Red Hat 
installed to enable me to boot to the Mandriva installation which is 
there on another partition. The problem with that kind of solution is 
that once done, it may be years before I have the problem again, and by 
then I will have forgotten how I did it this time. Just like some things 
I do with OpenOffice -- I learn how to do it when I need to, even record 
it somewhere and when I come to do it again a year or two later, I have 
forgotten where I put the instructions! Or, when I reinstall Firefox and 
Thunderbird to later versions, I sometimes (but not always) have to go 
through the rigmarole of figuring out how to make hyperlinks in 
Thunderbird open Firefox (or a new tab).

My intention is most likely to stick with Mandriva if I can get back 
into it OR make the effort to really switch to Kubuntu because my 
limited exposure to it has been positive, but keep Red Hat for the one 
major piece of software that is designed for it. Just as I use Windows 
pretty well strictly for non-linear video editing and income tax return 
preparation as I have yet to find comparable video editing or income tax 
preparation software for LINUX. I am sure it will come, but in the 
meantime ..

One problem I had with switching one machine to LINUX was that it was 
located in a place which was difficult to run an ethernet cable, so I 
used wireless. I could never figure out how to get the wireless card to 
work with LINUX.

Murray