[OKDXA] Did Someone Say Five Tube Superhet?

[AC5UP]

> That's odd.  When I installed it on my laptop (Edgy Eft, I believe),
> it set up GRUB to include XP.
>
>   
Earlier this year I was playing on a 'scratch' machine with XP and 7.04 
(Feisty Fawn) and discovered that if you do the full install of XP, 
meaning all the service packs and upgrades, then install Ubuntu on the 
unpartitioned space... GRUB would hose the boot sector and neither would 
boot. Had better luck doing a 'straight' XP install, loading Ubuntu, 
then applying the service packs. Maybe I'm hallucinating, maybe one of 
the later XP security patches locks the MBR in a way that GRUB can't 
cope with. All I know is that I had better luck loading the XP patches 
as the last step of the process.

In case you're wondering, my XP is on a genuine Dell restore CD that 
passes MS validation without a hitch. No sneaky code involved.

In the latest example with Gutsy Gibbon (beta) the machine was 
dual-booting OK with XP and SuSE. Used the disk manager in XP to remove 
the two Linux extended partitions (swap and EXT3) then asked Kubuntu to 
load itself in the unpartitioned space. I've done this before without a 
hitch and it keeps SuSE from setting up two swap partitions. Install 
went OK, machine booted cleanly into Kubuntu with no pause to choose XP. 
Poke around the GRUB menu and there's no entry for XP. Run Konqueror and 
the two NTFS partitions are there (I always set separate boot / data 
partitions except on small drives when I need to work tight).

Also... Discovered last night that it's now a no-brainer to create a 
desktop device icon to an NTFS partition and set the mount point. Was 
then amazed to find I could read and write (!) to the NTFS partition 
through Kubuntu without any extra perspiration. Works like a hose.

> Another oddity, especially given the ubiquity of HPLJiii printers!  I
> can't imagine that the CUPS stuff didn't just work.
>
>   
I'm still in the head scratching stage on this one... Win XP prints fine 
on the exact same hardware. Both SuSE and Kubuntu can send 'Hello World' 
as a straight text string to LPT1 and have it come out on paper. Shoot a 
test page to the port and the printer buffer loads up then does nothing. 
Force a form feed and I get one line of garbage. Reset, reset, reset the 
printer and still no go. Click on advanced properties and tell CUPS to 
talk to 378h and it makes no difference. One thing I haven't tried yet 
is running through the BIOS options, as in AT, PS/2, EPP and ECP for 
LPT1. I know there is no way both SuSE and Ubuntu missed a buglet like 
that so it has to be my problem.

BTW: If and when you make the jump to 7.10 you'll find that toward the 
end of the alternate install CD (text install, runs faster than the GUI 
version) the machine will appear to be locked up. No progress 
indication, perfect impression of a doorstop. Don't reach for 
ctl-alt-del like I did the first time... Check the blinky lights on your 
modem / router and you'll see that it's downloading. Best guesstimate is 
that install now requires about 150 megs of transfer and this will take 
a while. Friday night my DSL was doing a start / stop thing into EU and 
the total install took the better part of an hour.

Note To Gentle Readers In The Lilly Pad: Edgy Eft... Feisty Fawn... 
Gutsy Gibbon. EE-FF-GG. Simple, ehhh? SuSE properly uses the lower case 
'u' as it's derived from System und Software Engineering.

Visualize computer geeks in lederhosen und drindl's... (!)