Here's a puzzling qestion. (not to Ray, as the description of what happened comes from a 3-years newbie still lacking the required 30-years-Unix-culture-acquaintancy and thus is absolutely inable and inapt to use [a] correct terminology [b] in an exactly rules compatible logical arrangement of said words which [c] would make it indeed totally redundant to ask as, in that case heing, the stupid newbie anyway would know everything already.)
Case is/was a (after all, rather well working) installation of Mandrake 8.1 inluding the use of KDE 2.0 on a not-so-new Toshiba laptop with built-in CD-Rom drive. In an onset of total madness I threw out the installed packages for Nut$crape 4.78 and the installed, but yet unused, package of Mozilla 0.9(-.one or .23 something, earlier in any case) - the idea was to install the RPM-package for Mozilly 0.98 which runs perfectly well on another install of Mdk 8.2 (on a desktop box) and does indeed excellently all the brwoser tasks I need/use there. Using Mdk's "Package Manager" to try to install that Mozilla 0.98 RPM from the Mdk-8.2 CDs, it could not find the CD drive any more. In fact, the whole Mdk-8.1-install all of a sudden could not access the CD-ROM derive any more. HOWEVER, the laptop would well boot up from any of the two sets of installation CDs - though would not do _anything_ more at all, complaining about a "missing (CD-ROM) device". MANY hours and trials later, and using the - still - well working old Mdk-8.1 install, I found by more or less haphazard use of one of the diagnostic tools (none of the others had told me that before) that the built-in CD-Rom now is identified as "/dev/hd_g_"; instead of the "/dev/hd_c_" as which it had been seen and mounted all the time before. (REM for Ray: emphasis has been added by the writer of these lines and had not been displayed by the various utilities employed/abused.) To note well is in addition that all those tools "detected" the "Toshiba CD-ROM-XM_1602BV" with "Bus Type: Atapi/IDE". Changing the mount line in "/etc/fstab" for the CD-ROM in the old install appropriately, did make indeed the laptop boot up and use the CD-ROM drive normally and ordinary as before - it then even did the "upgrade" run with the (very relatively) newer install-CDs (although the Mozilla from there would _not_ install, depending on a long number of dependency conflicts with KDE-specific things installed suddenly appearing; but that seems to be again a completely different development and new story.) To repeat: _nothing_ else was changed, neither in the BIOS (this Toshiba shows three possible address/irq combinations for CD drives) nor in the whole setup of the Mdk-Linux install. Intermittant reboots into Win$ and DOS (both of them are installed there too, and I made the DR-DOS boot/partition recognise the CD-ROM as well) regularly aggreed to access the CD-ROM drive duely and just as before. So what happened ? Is there any explanation ? Would there be any means that could have avoided ca. six hours of perfectly useless (and needless) frustration ? And I'm facing another round of that latter. After all, I have to re-install a pseudo-"graphical" browser on that box again, because this is one of the key uses/functions for certain tasks it's needed for. The only alternative would be that M$-I-Exploder indeed. // Heimo Claasen //<revobild at revobild dot net>// Brussels 2003-06-21 The WebPlace of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.revobild.net - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
