Sounds to me like you may have CD burner problems or possibly many bad downloads. If I were you, I'd check MD5 sums on your .iso image downloads. Also, if you are talking about hardware issues with your laptop, then you may need to use some boot options, like noapic, noapm or nolapic. Since you didn't say what your issues were, who can tell.
I've actually heard of some people finally having success with the OPL3Sax sound chips with some of the LiveCDs. Which is good news, but about 2 years and one Diet Coke too late for me. Anyone recall the Coke I spilled all over the perfectly fine, older, free laptop I had.
For Apt-pin issues, I was referring to stuff pinned by Mepis. It would either keep me from installing or uninstalling software. Many times, just an upgrade would be impossible, due to some specific version being required. With the switch to Ubuntu repositories, and other internal fixes, some/most of this should go away. Does anyone have apt-get update/upgrade called in a cron job to stay up to date?
-----Original Message----- From: On Behalf Of Jack Sent: Sunday, April 09, 2006 7:58 PM
snip
On the Ubuntu front. Every version I've installed has had hardware issues, preventing a clean install. I've totally failed to build a Kubuntu CD that would install clean (whereas sometimes Ubuntu would install clean). It's been a long time since I've had a distro that would flake out on me on some hardware. I've run Mepis for many years and never had much issues with it. It's still a nice distro.
As far as apt-get issues, I have a few apt-pin problems, but if someone has apt-pin problems it is <<< always >>> the fault of the person who is maintaining the system and has no relation to the flavor of Debian or Debian itself. Basically, you should never apt-pin, and if you do you should be prepared to pay the price. The price being eventual apt-pin problems.
--- "Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO" wrote:
Sounds to me like you may have CD burner problems or possibly many bad downloads. If I were you, I'd check MD5 sums on your .iso image downloads. Also, if you are talking about hardware issues with your laptop...
That was my first thought, but it only happens with Ubuntu family of distros. Whereas, the odd thing is, that I have my best success with the *buntu distros on laptops.
For Apt-pin issues, I was referring to stuff pinned by Mepis. It would either keep me from installing or uninstalling software. Many times, just an upgrade would be impossible ...
Hmm, that's odd. I've never run into that issue with Mepis.
Does anyone have apt-get update/upgrade called in a cron job to stay up to date?
I've considered it, but have decided I like to see what is going to upgrade before doing it (especially since, I have OpenOffice apt-pinned so that I can use Mozilla addresses as a data source). Although, the update part is a good idea.
This problem booting tips me off to one problem I've run into on older PCs with newer distros. I was a frequent user of DSL on a laptop until a new version came out and it wouldn't boot. I skipped a version or two and then came back. It turns out that a lot of people had a problem. I don't recall the exact reason, but now they release two .iso files and the one that works has syslinux in the title and it has something to do with how the kernel is bootstrapped. Can someone else explain?
On 4/10/06, Jack <quiet_celt> wrote:
--- "Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO" wrote:
Sounds to me like you may have CD burner problems or possibly many bad downloads. If I were you, I'd check MD5 sums on your .iso image downloads. Also, if you are talking about hardware issues with your laptop...
That was my first thought, but it only happens with Ubuntu family of distros. Whereas, the odd thing is, that I have my best success with the *buntu distros on laptops.
Does anyone have apt-get update/upgrade called in a cron job to stay up
to
date?
I've considered it, but have decided I like to see what is going to upgrade before doing it (especially since, I have OpenOffice apt-pinned so that I can use Mozilla addresses as a data source). Although, the update part is a good idea.
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Brian Kelsay wrote:
This problem booting tips me off to one problem I've run into on older PCs with newer distros. I was a frequent user of DSL on a laptop until a new version came out and it wouldn't boot. I skipped a version or two and then came back. It turns out that a lot of people had a problem. I don't recall the exact reason, but now they release two .iso files and the one that works has syslinux in the title and it has something to do with how the kernel is bootstrapped. Can someone else explain?
Kind of grasping at straws, but there are several ways to boot off of a CD. Syslinux is generally a floppy-based (or at least FAT-12/16) boot loader, which would typically be used on a CD-Rom in floppy emulation mode. In this boot method, a chunk of data on the CD gets read into memory and used by the BIOS to emulate a floppy disk.
Other methods of making bootable CDs include using a hard-disk image for emulation (instead of a floppy), or not using an emulated disk at all.
I suspect the newer images used isolinux or something that does a no emulation (or hard-disk emulation) boot that older BIOSes didn't generally support very well, while using syslinux on an emulated floppy image should generally work anywhere, even on older machines with wacky BIOSes (you're just limited to a maximum 2880K floppy image).
See the mkisofs man page for details on the -b, -hard-disk-boot, - -no-emul-boot, -boot-load*, and -c switches (and probably others).
- -- Charles Steinkuehler charles@steinkuehler.net
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Brian Kelsay -
Charles Steinkuehler -
Jack -
Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO