I finally got the Cooker installed via FTP off of a remote mirror
(sunsite.uio.no), since resynchronizing my mirror and using my other machine
were both inconvenient. Thursday night actually might have been a good time
to synchronize and do an HD installation or an FTP off a local machine.
I would not recommend doing an installation off of a remote mirror, even at
highspeeds. Problems I've found and solved with this approach were almost
entirely due to missed files, some of which I knew about, some of which
surprised me. I knew KDE choked and I went for a second pass, doing an
upgrade to the new installation, and it left me with 15 or so files. almost
all KDE, that I had to go get by hand. What sort of surprised me were some
of the system packages it missed, and didn't tell me about. Telnet-server,
net-tools, open (required by Aurora) were among some of the files. (None of
these were in the process of being updated, so I'm without an explanation on
this. Maybe I should have used a mirror located on a continent near me.)
I also found a weird USB problem which I have "fixed" in a probably improper
way. Usbd still won't load because /proc/bus/usb/devices doesn't exist. I
poked around with modprobe and brought my mouse online, so I looked
around in the rc.* files and found that the one that calls modprobe looks in
/etc/modules. Not having an /etc/modules but having an /etc/modules.conf, I
made a modules file and changed my startup to not load usbd automatically.
That's on my ToDo list to fix properly.
KDE has dome something which looks weird to me in KDM. It seems that I
only have the option to restart the X-server, not to halt or reboot. Is this
just something weird on my box, or is this for real?
The new Aurora should not be confused as a troubleshooting tool. I would
probably enable it on a production server or on an end user desktop, but I
would disable the vga parameter in lilo that calls it on any box that I was
testing. Then again, I didn't have Aurora enabled on 7.2 either.
I'll bet Claudio is right, and that a HD installation would work about one
out of every ten times. With the constant KDE and kernel revisions, I'm not
surprised. I'd also bet that had a MS Windows mirror tool I was trying
worked, or that I did one more reinstall of 7.2 purely to resynchronize my
mirror, I would have at least gotten away with a better FTP installation from
my local mirror, if not a straight HD installation.
Now that I have a Linux installation back up, I'll resynchronize my mirror
and do an in place upgrade to see if there's anything else I missed.
I'd much rather fix a clean installation of the Cooker than try to upgrade
7.2 which was what I was going to do if I had to keep chasing down the
mirror, for an installable copy. It would be nice to see a beta release, but
I can also understand the backflips Mandrake would have to go through to
presently find stable code.
Comments welcome.
--
Van Holland; MCSE+I, Master CNE
Public Key: 0xDDB2572D
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
