Wow! My heartfelt thanks to all who replied. This will give me fodder for some fun experiments this evening. :-)
By the way, more for intellectual interest than anything else, I thought I would reply to the comment that the resolution of the problem shouldn't depend on which distro I use: The main reason I was experimenting with different distros is that I also had another pressing problem with Fedora Core 5, the distro I had originally intended to install: No mouse pointer! The mouse would "work," in the sense that blocks would highlight when the mouse was moved to the proper places, clicking in the proper places would do the right thing, and so on. But the mouse cursor was invisible. [So going to the "proper place" was quite a challenge. :-) ] A check of the Web revealed that this problem was common with nVIDIA video cards. The solution was to download better drivers, etc. But I was curious to see if other distros had the same problem--and they didn't. I knew already that Knoppix didn't have the problem, for the simple reason that I had used Knoppix (containing QtParted) to do my disk partioning, and the mouse had worked fine then. I then tried Mandriva because I had a DVD for it lying around the house anyway, and the mouse worked fine there too. So I hoped that my network problem might also disappear under one of the other distros. It didn't. Now here is the really weird thing: While trying to fix my network and mouse problems, I tried various solutions. For instance, I tried using a USB mouse instead of PS/2. (I didn't want to try downloading a better video driver until I fixed the network problem, with my having to download on another machine then transfer, etc.) Also, I tried running the Powerline install under Windows for the new machine, on the theory that it might be needed to initialize the wall unit. Well, in the midst of all that, my mouse suddenly started working! Yep, in one of the many times I booted up Linux last night, in one of them the mouse was working perfectly--but then in subsequent boots the pointer became invisible again. I have no idea what I did "right" at one point. Norm _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
