On Thu, 2003-07-17 at 20:38, Ron Daniel wrote: > Great. Here I sit, stuck in the world of M$ writing this email cause I > just upgraded to 9.1 Somebody should have told me about the descent > (downgrade) on the other side. > > How in the world is this FOSS stuff going to make critical mass in the > desktop arena if, when at release 9.1 in 2003 I find myself in the > situation where :
How in the world will Windows keep market share if you can't boot it when you change the hard disk controller? > > I had 9.0 and a working dual boot system which seemed to go painlessly > and smoothly on my compaq evo N880v, albeit with display behaviour > problems > I believe I had three file systems in my Linux partition, although I > can't remember or find out what they were > I bought the 9.1 mandrake update > I clicked on upgrade > It wanted me to specify what my file systems were and the mount points As I recall, the optimist who suggested the move to 9.1 said something along the lines of the following: > I guess if you're sure that you're using the upgrade option and > it's giving you grief, then add the 3 mdk 9.1 CDs to urpmi's sources > list and do urpmi --auto-select Which conveniently sidesteps all manner of issues (which button you're clicking for example, or indeed, where the partitions are) > (it should have been able to easilty work this out) I told it about my / > File system It then FRUSTRATINGLY asked me all the qeustions I had > already told it about my machine in the install of 9.0, only this time > it said I dodn't have the room for the machine to be everything I wanted > it to be, with games, and mutlitmedia etc, all I had room for were one > window manager and office and internet client. Wow ! Talk about > progress. > So it merruily installed asking me for the second CD and then asking me > for the international CD ! If I didn;t have this CD it told me to click > cancel. It should have knwon that I dodn;t have the international CD, I must have missed the telepathy patch for the mandrake 9.1 installer. > after all I am doing an upgrade with the 3 CD's of Mandrake 9.1. The third CD is the international CD. If it isn't labelled as such, and you purchased it (ie didn't download and burn it yourself, checking md5 sums and so forth) then I would treat the CDs as suspect if you're seeing installer problems. > Other > upgrades you buy always have all of the right media with them. By now my > fingers are crossed hard hoping that it aint going to wipe out my > windows partition with all my stuff on it. > Re start time, after some worrying confusing questions about lilo and > where it was going to place it. Didn't get these questions when I > installed 9.0 . Myabe upgrading is trickier than installing from > scratch. Hell, I wouldn't know. > Ok so it boots ok in windows. Relax Ron. Can breathe now. Lets boot in > Linux. > > Oh joy of joys !! My deskop is empty of all the stuff I had before. The > glidepad mouse doesn;t work and I find that I can't get to my other file > systems because the keyboard won;t respond in the mandrake control > center !! I really like this upgrade stuff. Give me back my old Holden ! Let me give you a symptomatic diagnosis. At a guess I would say that you have somehow clicked install rather than upgrade, or, you're using one of the 9.1 prereleases that had a number of problems not unlike what you're seeing. I honestly don't know what you've done, since I was unable to watch you doing it. I know for a fact that if you're using mandrake 9.1 final and you click upgrade, then it will not behave in the manner which you are indicating. So some part of this equation is wrong. Now, I offered you advice about using urpmi in place of the installer if it didn't seem to be working correctly (which is an observation you seem to have made). I don't understand why you didn't follow this advice, but that decision is your own, along with its consequences. > > > I hope that my other file systems are intact, and all I have to do is : > 1) create two directories under / called shite1 and shite2 > 2) somehow mount the other two file systems at shite1 and shite2 > 3) find out which shite is really my old /home and my old /usr or > whatever they were > 4) rename everything and remount old file systems as shite1 and shite2 > or home and usr > 5) whatever > 6) whatever > > But how the .... am I going to do this without an effing glidepad to get > into the control centre. Well, I can think of a number of ways: * Pressing shift-numlock to use the keys on your numeric keypad as a mouse (which will probably require other odd key combinations if you're on a laptop). * Press ctrl-alt-f1 to get to a console and do what you need from the command line with the console version of mandrake control center * Press alt-f2 (that's a kde shortcut which I use on gnome. Can someone tell us what the gnome default equivalent is?) to start an xterm and do the same (maybe unsetting DISPLAY if you're still mouseless) * do what you need to do from a console or xterm with the standard unix commands. So I guess if you're interested in fixing your problems, you might be served well by sending an email that is slightly less flame-dense. > > Do I now need to go and hire a unix sysadmin to fix my stupid laptop, or > just my stupid linux. Stupid ! Stupid ! Stupid ! Should have stayed on > 9.0. And they say debian is harder than this ! I just want it to work so > I can tell others it does ! debian is great at what it does. Upgrading is one of the things it does well. > > Now I wait, hoping that there is a simple solution ! Me too. James. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
