This will be a long post, so be warned. Reason? Because it feels so good to have something work the way it should, and I have to tell you about what happened. I sampled linux about a month ago. Bought a new hard drive w/8gig's and decided to dedicate the old one (3.9) to a trial of linux. Installed L-M 5.3 with little problem. Got the sound to work. Got the printer to work. Had a lot of trouble with getting on the internet with my ibm.net ISP, but finally worked my way on with control-panel, network configuration and interface ppp0 using activate/inactivate. Got Netscape 4.5 to work OK. I llke the linux system and the philosophy and am learning as I go. I agree we could sure use a little more help on the way the system works and how the file systems are set up, but we'll eventually learn all this. So, along comes L-M 6.0, and of course everyone has to have the latest version, right? Right, ... and when it came in the mail I took a long look at the configuration of my current system and decided it would be worth a try to upgrade from 5.3. First try. Made the boot floppy in linux from the CD. Added several programs to the default load on the CD and away we went. About an hour into the installation, the CD is thrashing around and nothing much is going on. The timer said another 8 hours. Time to dump the upgrade, so we got out. Next, we decide to abandon the current configuration and do a complete new install. Started the process and about 4 pages in, it quit and told me it was unable to continue. OK, one last try. Back to the upgrade path once more. Did the upgrade with NO changes to the default programs and the installation went tickety-boo. Saved all my old configuration files and even upgraded the kernel to 2.2.9-19 and netscape to 4.6. Needless to say, I am ecstatic. Everything works great and is very fast now that I told lilo.conf "append = mem=128" We are not totally problem free... the modem will not hang up out of the interface ppp0, but we will eventually get KPPP (or something else) to work and solve that problem. The sound still works, the printer still works and I can still get on the net, which is how you are learning more than you really care about this project. My apologies. It just feels good when something works right for a change. I think Linux-Mandrake has done a hell of a good job on the change to 6.0. I would hope everyone else has as good an experience. Thanks, Guys and Gals.
