Archive for November, 2003

Mandrake Powerpack – arrived (or rather picked up)

Tuesday, November 18th, 2003

Finally….My Mandrake Powerpack CDs arrived. Actually they arrived on Fri, I was at school and the UPS people wouldn’t leave it with anyone (except me!). So……I went and picked it up at the local UPS office.

Now that I have the CDs, I am wondering if re-installing the OS (just retaining my /home) would make things okay…

and what about the updates I have done? Obviously they will get wiped out. If I dont format the partitions, will they be still there or overwritten. Hmm…Overwritten is more like it…

I don’t even remember what updates I did, what commands I tried and got my stuff working….or configured the way I want it…

Looking through the history of the root and my user login to see if I can trace my actions.

Would it be possible to look through the System Logs and figure the same thing out?

Will ask around in the Club and see what they have to say…..

Am tired today…..school..work…the CDs arrived…my turn to cook today….

(Yawn…)

Changed the template to Tekka…. updated my Linu…

Tuesday, November 18th, 2003

Changed the template to Tekka….

updated my Linux Blog -Lin*x Ninja@Mandrake

Aus vs India – Eden Gardens – 112/2, 21.4 overs

Gnite..

Screwed up Mandrake pretty bad now…

Tuesday, November 18th, 2003

Well….since I moved over to Linux completely around nov 3rd, I have managed to get (almost!) everything working, most of the time. Its been like this….if A and B worked, C and D wouldnt. (I dint know this at the time). Then all of a sudden, C and D started to work. A also worked, but now B got pissed off by something. Probably by A’s desertion…and sulked.

Had a tough time with B. Coaxed and cajoled and it worked….

SO, for a few days, I had this thing going GREAT!! everything was working….

It was too good to be true, hence I decided that it was no fun.

I tried to update a few things -dont really remember what now -and B went bonkers…..I mean really nuts….no amount of cajoling/coaxing yielded any results…I even threatened to throw it out, but it didnt make any difference. If anything, it made things worse.

Key:

————————————————

A = Network Connections = Ethernet LAN

B = Sound System = Sound Drivers + codecs + Media Player(s) = ALSA, OSS, aRTs + DVD plugins + Xine, Totem

C = Network Connections = Wireless LAN, (never worked even during install and afterward)

D = Touchpad and Mouse playing hide-and-seek

[Coaxing/Cajoling = Trying to find out what configuration files are needed/modified and manually figure out the problem and the solution.

Throw it out = Un-install ]

——————————————

Bottomline:

A = Supposedly been configured for office network, will have to test it tomorrow…er..today (2am now..) and check

B = FUBAR…the only thing that works is XMMS – for audio files and erratic video, The others (Xine, Totem show great video, without any Audio). Both I guess are using the ALSA system and in KDE, aRTs is having control over the driver right now….

C =WLAN funnily working, even hotplugging works

D = removed the external mouse, restarted machine, it detected removal, said OK, rebooted, reinsert ext mouse, got detected, now both work. well 2 out 4 aint bad….so ….

So, this has been a long blog, even longer nights spent on understanding how things worked in the Linux world.

*Yawn* I’ll sign off now with this link – looks like a pretty good site…

Making the big switch – from Windows to Linux – http://www.jediknight.com/~smpoole/switchtolinux.html