[NTLUG:Discuss] Poison update in OpenSuSE 11.0??

[Robert Pearson]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Stephen Davidson
<gorky at freenet.carleton.ca> wrote:
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> Greetings.
>
> Installed, no problem.  Printers and everything were set up ok (KDE3.5).
>  Ran the updater to add the patches to all the packages (there were ALOT
> of security & kernel patches).  And now system will boot into Grub, and
> that's it.  Grub says it can't find the boot image.

You should be able to fix this by looking at what Grub reports at boot.
If you can not see the Grub file listed on the screen at boot you will
need to boot in emergency or repair mode
and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to comment out the "hiddenmenu" option.
If you have to do this you might as well look for the image files in
/boot and see if they are there.

The usual problems with Grub not finding the boot image are:
[most common] Grub has the wrong location in (hd?, ?) to look for the image
[less common] the images were not installed during install - did the
machine reboot after install?
[even less common] the images were installed somewhere other than /boot

Where did you tell the installer to put them? The default is /boot

I keep a Grub boot disk (floppy) around for these problems. It has
been a lifesaver.
There is a CD version but I could never get it to work.
On my system without a floppy I had so much trouble I can fix Grub
without the boot disk.
Sometimes by just re-installing it.

>
> ????
>
> Anyone know what's going on?  Or am I going to have to write off
> OpenSuse as well???  (Note: Fedora is also out -- clean install, and
> Mozilla keeps crashing on Fedora 8 -- my wife says "Not usuable due to
> its crashing").
>
> Btw, on some upgrades, my 10.3 has lost some webbrowsing ability, and
> its networking is not capable of talking to my home wireless (one of the
> few things that Fedora 8 is doing).  As a result, I am getting a little
> desperate to find some Linux that I can use that actually works, or that
> I can configure to keep working.  Suggestions welcome.
>
> Help?

I experienced problems with both the openSuSE installer
missing/skipping/ignoring files on the install media and
updates doing weird things to existing packages. I got the package
updates under control by careful repository management. Add one at a
time, run updates and reboot. If all is stable try the next
repository. Not all of them worked for me. The main ones I needed did.
The installer is just buggy. Especially if you have done any
customization to your system or have a lot of one-off hardware and
add-on software.
I now run Ubuntu for stable use and one Kubuntu (KDE 3.?) for leading
edge information. It ain't perfect either.
There are a lot of people running openSuSE 10.3 - 11.? very happily. I
was happy with 10.3 but not the package management.

>
> Steve
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