Phatmass Technical Support Corner

[Groo the Wanderer]

where's the 'any' key? danged program keeps telling me to hit any key but i cannot find it

[Innocent]

It's right next to those [url="http://www.workflowfaq.com/wheres-the-any-key"]other[/url] keys.

[arfink]

[quote name='Innocent' timestamp='1329700307' post='2389724']
Yes, but from my experience with GNU/Linux it seems to me that if I manage to get Win 7 to dual boot with Win XP then GRUB or LILO shouldn't have a problem adding both of them to its boot menu.



Yes, I do realise that wiping the drive clean and then installing XP first and Win 7 after that would probably be the most painless way to go about it, but there are a lot of software I use for academic purposes that I've installed in Windows 7 over a long period of time, and so if I can avoid the hassle of having to hunt up my backup discs once again and install all that software once again from scratch, that's the way I'd be keen to go. That's why I'm trying to see if I can get away with installing XP alongside an existing Win 7.



Well, first, it's out of curiosity to find out if it can be done in this order. There are tutorials on the net that say it can, and I want to try them out, and probably learn something about the Windows boot process along the way.

Also, some software I use for academic purposes run best on XP. While it might be possible to run XP on virtualisation, I would prefer a real installation if possible.

But if this does not workout, I suppose I'll have to cave in and be satisfied with a virtual system installation, after all.
[/quote]

If you want to see what virtualization can really do, and you're feeling adventurous, give a dedicated XEN install a try. I have messed around with virtualization a bit, and while I will agree that things like VMWare or VirtualBox are are really not "the thing," XEN is the real deal.

I'd save the XEN experiments for when you have time to do a little learning though. Once you get past the learning curve it's actually really really nice. Oh, and you'll also want a multi-core processor, plenty of RAM, and possibly a second GPU. If you want to do gaming in the VM. >

[Innocent]

This happened today morning:

The yum on my installation of Fedora 16 kept stalling at "Running Transaction Test." (I think this is just at the juncture where yum hands over control to rpm, but I'm not too sure.)
So I [url="http://www.unix.com/linux/161711-yum-hangs-running-transaction-test.html"]searched[/url] [url="http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/rhel-centos-fedora-redhat-yum-running-transaction-test-error/"]the net[/url] and attempted a lot of stuff including cleaning out the yum cache, updating yum, rebuilding and reinitialising the rpm database.


$ sudo rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
$ sudo rpm -vv --rebuilddb
$ sudo rpm --initdb

$ cd /var/cache/yum
$ sudo /bin/rm -rf *
$ sudo yum clean all

$ sudo yum upgrade yum
$ sudo yum upgrade

But I'm still getting the same error.

/var/log/yum.log didn't show anything out of the ordinary. Just listed Updated & Installed packages.

Some people on some forums [url="http://fedora.12.n6.nabble.com/yum-freezes-on-an-NFS-mount-td2398995.html"]were saying[/url] that a mounted NFS share could be locking yum. So I unmounted all [url="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/unmounting-all-nfs-filesystems-without-unmounting-local-ones-709400/"]nfs[/url] shares:

$ sudo umount -a -t nfs

Restarted system and still no change.

But a few minutes later, I restarted it (without having done any more changes) because the response was sluggish, and NOW IT SUDDENLY WORKS! Yum updates and installs [url="http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f16.html"]everything I tried[/url] perfectly.








The only thing that's more frustrating than an error that doesn't respond to debugging is an error that suddenly disappears without leaving you any wiser about what exactly it was among the things you tried that solved the problem.












By the way, seeing that we already have a patron saint of the Internet in St. Isidore, we should get a patron saint for debugging computer problems.

[MIKolbe]

this is so elementary school.

@@

[arfink]

Mikol, go back to your sammich.

[MIKolbe]

arf, go back to your crayons.,