Well, after leaving my system alone overnight (to teach it
to behave *heh*), I attempted once more to upgrade RH 5.2 to
6.0. Sadly, the upgrade kept aborting. I didn't keep a
record of the error messages.
I just decided to do a clean install of 6.0. Because of my
troubles with Xconfigurator under 6.0, I first copied my
working XF86Config file to a floppy, intending to copy it
back into /etc/X11 after installing 6.0.
Well, lo and behold, the durned thing decided to work this
time, on the first try, albeit it works at 1024x768 8-bit
rather than my preferred 800x600 16-bit. What the heck, I
can try to fix that later, and I'm not doing graphics work
on this machine anyway (that's what I have a Mac for).
The only things I did differently this time were: a) chose
NOT to configure LAN networking during the install;
b)accepted the default monitor resolution/bit-depth in
Xconfigurator.
Once I had X working, I used netcfg to set up networking. I
changed my hostname from the default localhost.localdomain
to my own hostname...forgetting to add the new hostname to
the hosts.conf file. After saving and quitting netcfg, I
found that though X/Gnome was still running, I couldn't
launch any programs. When I tried to relaunch netcfg from
the command line, for example, I was greeted with a long
string of error messages. I noticed that the error messages
were suspiciously similar to the errors I was getting when I
couldn't get X to work (...could not connect...).
I was also unable to launch any programs using Gnomes menus,
so I thought I'd try logging out and back in. When Gnome was
starting back up it told me "Unable to locate
myhost.mydomain. Gnome may not function properly..." It also
told me to add my hostname to hosts.conf...
I think I now have a glimmer of insight. Could X be tied to
the networking functionality in some way? Or at the very
least, to the hostname? During previous upgrade attempts
(the ones that didn't abort) I had first performed a clean
install of RH 5.2, complete with networking configured - and
I may have neglected the step of adding the hostname to
hosts.conf. So my theory is that after upgrading to 6.0,
when I ran Xconfigurator, this missing hostname was
buggering everything up somehow. Am I on the right track
here?
Many thanks to everyone who provided suggestions and
solutions - your help has been invaluable!
PS - I realize I need to start RTFM more closely. Coming
from a Mac background I've just never gotten into the habit
- I'll work on that. (BTW - I'm having less trouble with
Linux than I did with Windows98 - at least Linux hasn't
given me continual "unable to access the CD-ROM - maybe you
should clean it" messages *G*)
--
Rik Osborne
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<http://www.phase42.net>
Sent from my RedHat Linux machine
