jjcohen

I worked as a contractor at IBM from 2001 through 2004, supporting the last, large scale OS/2 application IBM wrote. It was a hospital information system called CIS, written for Kaiser Permanente Colorado. It was finally retired just last year. It was an interesting system, and way ahead of its time. It was writtn back in the mid nineties, when Windows was still way too immature to handle the client side of such a mission-critical application.

Could be a memory problem - Try removing, swapping the ram.

To install, type rpm -i (name of .rpm file)

As far as I can see, it can be installed either as a regular rpm or a .tar file. So you'll have to download it on another machine, then copy it over to run the install. In the meantime, do you have a regular ethernet connection you can use?

So first you need to get your wireless adapter wirking, right? That might be tough. Not all wireless chipsets are supported. Try linuxant (www.linuxant.com) for drivers.

The key thing isn't **what** you are installing, but **where** you are installing it to. Limewire can be installed anywhere - it doesn't require any files to be written to /usr, or to any other directories requiring root access. The install is really just an unjar, so root privileges aren't necessary.

There's always the brute force method. Re-install the X packages.

I think it could be your hard drive performance. Look into hdparm. Make sure you have 32 bit and dma on. Run: hdparm /dev/dvX -tT .

Look into the mono project

You need to boot into single user mode to get to a command line.

You need to set up ALSA: www.alsa-project.org. Here's a mini-howto: www.alsa-project.org/~valentyn/Alsa-sound-mini-HOWTO.html There is a step in the process where all the necessary entries in /dev are defined.

Try the ALSA drivers: http://www.alsa-project.org/

You shouldn't have to do anything special to make the first disk bootable. Just burn the iso images using easy cd creator or something like it. You can use isobuster to extract the files from the iso images, but installing that way will be very painful - I really wouldn't recommend it unless you absolutely have to do it that way - like if your CD-ROM drive doesn't work. Your motherboard shouldn't be any problem for a modern distro. You shouldn't even need a boot floppy.

To create a swap disk, run mkswap: mkswap [ -c ] device [size-in-blocks] See the man page for more detail. You should be able to run without a swap space anyway. Some folks prefer it that way, especially if you have enough ram. For now, just comment the lines out where swap areas are defined. I don't know how you can restore the old partition table, but that shouldn't be necessary. For what it's worth, I think you're pretty close to solving your woes. As long as you can still boot at all, there's hope. Try this: from a command prompt, run fdisk /dev/hdX, where X is the drive. Type p to print out the partition table. Then see how that matches up with your fstab. That should help you sort things out. Since you have 2 linux installations, be careful to keep things straight. Don't worry about /dev/shm. It's a virtual drive, but don't try using it as a regular partition.

Edit your inittab so you boot to a command prompt. That'll make things easier. Later, you'll be able to your desktop by typing startx, or just change inittab back to a graphical logon. I think maybe you hosed up your swap space. See where it was mouted in fstab, and just comment it out for now.