"Steven C. Darnold" wrote: > And the crash was caused by...? Not Linux, I'll wager. > More likely a flakey application or silly newbie mistake. Netscape. I hardly do anything else with Linux. > > > or whatever, and when cold booted again would not boot > > the os. > > Naturally, if a headstrong newbie accidently wipes something > important, the problem will be permanent. That's one reason > why BasicLinux runs on a ramdisk. The newbie can bugger up > the ramdisk filesystem as much as he wants. There is no > lasting damage. I spoze so. BasicLinux does sound nice, but I obviously have not read enough of the Linux documentation according to Bob to be able to make use of it. Maybe if I was smarter and not so lazy it would help. However, I do have a life I havta cope with away from this computer, so I cannot dedicate enough of the attention Linux so richly deserves.
> > I remember one that told me to run xfsck or some such > > This is not a kernel message. It's probably being generated > by one of your startup scripts. It would appear your kernel > booted just fine. Yeah, there was a script. Now that I think back on it, it said that the drive was 'ro', read only, and could not be utilized, and told me to use xfsck on it. > > For most Newbies, with a single drive on a single system, > Who says most newbies have only a single drive on a single > system? The postings from trouble on the Linux lists by Newbies. Most of them seem to be windoz users, justifiably fed up with Micro$loth who want to try it on a partition. > > > this is the end of the line. They cannot get online to get > > help, > Of course they can. The turn on their Windows computer and > run Internet Explorer. Not if the whole system is trashed. > > > To say you should have used a 'rescue' disk isnt always > > useful either. > > Not guilty. I didn't say you should use a rescue disk. That > was someone else. that was a standard recommendation of the four distros which I have tried. I've also ordered suse and slack and another I never heard of, 'storm' or some such to try. > > Personally, I think a rescue disk is a loaded gun. Give one > to a newbie and anything could happen. Well, I have been able to use one to get a distro running, but saw no way to repair the drive so it would boot from the hard drive again. But I can wait to see what slack and suse suggest. Meanwhile, I can try the desqview I just d/led http://www.chsoft.com/dv.html and see if that runs Opera. I aint all that fond of Netscape either. And to save space Bob, I did get the official Redhat 5.2, or I wouldnt have had the manual. I also got their Powertools package. but since it would not logon, I just went ahead, after reading the flames about it, and the praises in favor of Mandrake 7, that I ordered that, and tried to install it. As the postings suggested, it was duck soup for a Newbie to install, and so I never bothered with Redhat again until recently when I ran into the problem trying to get it to install on a Tekram driven scsi. At this point, I ordered a newer copy of RH, 7.2, but it wouldnt run the scsi driver I downloaded from Tekram, which admittedly was for RH 7.0 They didnt have one for 7.2, and the Taiwan geek they referred to me said his would work, but it didnt. But since both Mandrake 7.0 and Redhat 7.2 could not run a 'Crystalview' monitor I had, I tried Corel, which ran it right out of the box, no xf86config questions asked. With BSD and Deb 2.2 there were similar problems. Maybe I am just lucky, or maybe there are significant differences in the responses distros have with different hardware. My experience with dos, as with modems or EPP printers, is that it would either work at once, or not at all, and I didnt waste time screwing around with it hoping I could get all the magic spells correct. DRDOS has DOSBOOK.EXE which is hyperlinked and gonzo easier to use than man or info. But of course, the database it hasta work with is vastly smaller because DRDOS itself is so limited. But then, I dont havta spend much time to see whether what I have in mind to do is impossible, whereas I see here that there are so many more options to consider in Linux. To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
