installed a little kde, it switched to it on the reboot, and most stuff is missing, no access to a shell of any kind

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 14 December 2009, Goh Lip wrote:
>On 15/12/09 00:34, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> I have now learned enough about grub2 to be able to compose a menuentry
>> stanza and make it work.  And, right now I'm 'discussing' grub2 with
>>
>> Felix Zielcke<fzielcke at z-51.de>
>
>Yes, he has addressed some of the earlier bugs on grub2, like
>'no-floppy' and  UUID not updating. Good that he's in contact with you.

UUID's are now correct in the version Mint 8 uses, however _some_ of the 
"initrd (hdx,x) filename" statements are still wrong.  Fixable of course.

>> one of its maintainers, because the version with the mint8 install is the
>> only one that does it right, and even it has a few mistakes.  After the
>> first mandriva entry is correct, it then inserts a bogus (hd0,1) entry in
>> the path to the initrd file on the subsequent 'rescue' entries it
>> generates.  But that is getting a heck of a lot closer than either the
>> gnu.org tarball, or the fedora grub2 rpm can do.
>>
>> Politics and vendor lockin, ain't it great, NOT.
>>
>> In the meantime, I think I'll nuke the Mint version of the grub-mkconfig
>> when I get it running again to protect my hand edits.
>
>But you're still using the F10 grub set to sda, right?

Yes, but except for booting F10, I'm using that special entry that gives 
core.img as the kernel to make the grub2 switch, works fine.

>Shouldn't that be
>the one that get nuked? I've got a separate partition on grub2 set to
>sda. No OS can nuke this.
>
>I'll briefly mention how it could be done in case you may want to do the
>same.
>
>Create a partition (ext2 is okay) of 100 to 150 Mb. (I label this Bolt)
>At Karmic terminal
>sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/Bolt /dev/sda
>
>customize a grub.cfg file and move to /media/Bolt/boot/grub/
>
>done.
>
>Regards,
>Goh Lip
>
I just booted to Mint 8 and rescued the broken kde install from a single 
session, then rebooted again and ran synaptic to bring the rest of it up to 
date, then edited the grub.cfg it generated to fix the (hdx,x) boo boos and 
then copied it over to the F10/boot/grub2/grub.cfg.  So I should now be able 
to boot anything installed unless the core.img redhat/fedora  supplies is 
broken.  Frankly, that would _not_ surprise me.

But, now I have another problem.  I'm trying to install amanda, but no matter 
what I do to the user amanda using vim to fix /etc/sudoers and /etc/group, I 
cannot get into /home/amanda to actually do the installation, which for some 
portions of it requires a real root account.  Whats the best way to  fix that 
so I can actually do an 'su -'?

Likewise, and I haven't tried this yet, I want to do a "chown -R gene:gene" 
on a 2.6.32 kernel tree I've copied across, and then build and install it 
because there are sensor drivers for my hardware in it that are not in the 
default 2.6.31 kernels.  Its also already configured for all my hardware.  
Humm, that brings up ccache, is it available for the buntu's?  That will 
accelerate repeat builds by a factor of 20.

I am also looking to transfer my whole email setup across, which except for 
kmail itself here, it all runs as the user=me.  There are no doubt going to 
be roadblocks there that a sudo can't fix.  Once that is addressed, I can 
have my choices of mint8 or mandriva, and that is a good feeling.

I know, lots of eclectic subject questions here.  Bear with me please because 
I really do want to get off this &^%)&^ fedora train.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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