New /boot/grub/menu.lst for Linux on usb-HDD

Because I had to delete ALL of my internal HDD because of an unrepairable problem in OS X, my precious menu.lst that handled, besides 4 Linux OSes on the internal drive, a further 6 installed on my usb drive.
Today I got three of them back, updated and generally tidied up to make them usable again. The three I got were Pclos, Fedora 9 and Mepis. Few if any problems were encountered other than the fact that the first two (Pclos and Fedora insist on calling the drive on the usb HDD /dev/sdax rather than the expected /dev/sdbx.

Pclos now working very well.

Got various replies to my post in the pclos forum. One of these said that you MUST update the system immediately after installing.
This did the trick very nicely and everything worked very well after this. No problems.
Actually, I feel a little silly that I didn't pick this up myself. The very first line of the pclos quick-start guide says the very same thing.
No excuses here -- bad slip-up.

Can't resolve issue with PCLOS and Compiz

I had mentioned a few days ago that, although PCLOS 2007 Final installed fine and seems to work OK, once I install 3D effects either from PCLOS Control Center or by installing fusion-icon from the repos (I had to activate the first 5 repos to make this available), PCLOS won't boot. The boot goes so far then just blacks out. The only way back is to hard reboot and re-install PCLOS.
I've even done this so that fusion-icon is installed but not included in ~/.kde/Autostart so it won't autostart on boot.
Nevertheless, it still manages to mess up the boot.
Note that 3D effects seem to work fine until the reboot.
I posted to the PCLOS forums on this. Will I get any replies?

Music on PCLos-2007-Gnome

Nothing very exciting today in my continuing setup of PCLos (installed to external usb HDD but running on MacBook C2D 2.16 GHz) but I did get Amarok working.
This was very easy and just involved installing (it's in the repos), pointing it to my music files (which are all on the OSX partition) and then playing. No codecs problems, everything seems to be pre-loaded which is nice.

Wireless now working on PCLOS

Finally got wireless working on PCLOS and despite my earlier desperation (thinking that madwifi drivers just don't work in pclos and almost ready to try ndiswrapper) it really wasn't that difficult.
The secret seems to be that Madwifi just won't tolerate any old unused drivers or driver parts left on the filesystem.
I got this idea after reading the ndiswrapper guide which says that every mention of ndiswrapper must be deleted before installing a new driver.
So, I had two madwifi folders on my Desktop. So, entered EACH one in turn and applied the madwifi script from here.
Uninstalled everything I could until only three archived madwifi rpms and one madwifi-unload module were left.
Then downloaded, compiled and installed the svn trunk madwifi from here
After this I ran "modprobe ath_pci" and then iwconfig showed ath0 as one of the network devices. The rest was easy.
However still can't get the wireless to connect at boot. Apparently I'm using NetApplet which seems to be PClos's version of nm-applet. However, it doesn't seem to connect the wireless automatically at boot as nm-applet does.
I tried installing knetworkmanager. This puts an applet in the tray but the tiptool says its not running and no active devices are registered to it.
I'll have to look into this a bit more.

Edit: (25-02-08)
I booted to pclos today but this time typing "modprobe ath_pci" gave me a "command not found" error. Also iwconfig and ifconfig gave the same errors. That sounds to me like the madwifi driver is not working.
So, I went about re-installing it from the same source as I described here. But the "make" was very short and showed some "nothing to do" statements. Don't understand this.
In addition I went to System>Administartion>Configure your computer>Networks&Internet>Reconfigure a Network Interface.
Here I found under the wireless tab, that no essid was present. So I entered "eircom1073 4700" and applied etc.
Then I rebooted and this time the wireless connected at boot.
I'm very surprised at this as it really doesn't seem like I did anything extraordinarily different. Nevertheless, it works fine and I shouldn't complain.

Yakuake now working in PCLOS

Well, if you keep at something long enough, eventually it might just work.
This is more or less what happened to me with Yakuake which wouldn't at all work for me in PCLOS 2007-Gnome yesterday.
The Yakuake version in the PCLOS repo is 2.8-2pclos2007 but as I reported yesterday, this just kept crashing without ever even giving the slightest sign that it was going to open.
So, I decided to try with an earlier version which I got from here.
I had actually tried a very slightly later version first (2.7.5-4.fc7.rpm) which also didn't work for me -- although I just can't remember exactly what the problem was -- it may have been exactly the same as before.
Then I tried the 2.7.5-2.fc4, and I installed by first deleting/purging the one that was already there using

# apt-get remove --purge yakuake

and nothing more than this. (Actually, I didn't know up to this that apt-get works fine in pclos-gnome).
Then I did this to get the older yakuake installed

# rpm -ivh yakuake-2.7.5-2.fc4.i386.rpm

and this installed very fast (its only a 80kB download).
Now I found that it almost works in that the "started" sign comes up when you start it and pressing F12 gives the drop-down terminal.
However, as I had found in both Zenwalk 4.8 and Fedora 8, the drop-down terminal shows up WITHOUT any prompt to allow command typing.
Then I remembered that you need some kde stuff for this to work outside of kde.
First I tried kdebase-devel but this didn't seem to help.
The I tried kdebase-konsole and now it worked!!!
(I should mention that I also have kdebase and kdebase-servicesmenu installed.
Well worth the wait as this is a great app.

Wireless in PCLOS on MacBook

I thought I was becoming very expert at installing wireless drivers for the Mac atheros card. That is, until today.
I did all the usual things like download the trunk madwifi source from here and then install the driver according to this guide.
Everything seemed to go well in that no error messages were received. But when it came to loading the ath0 module with

modprobe ath_pci

I get a "command not found" error. Similarly with "iwconfig".
I'm puzzled about this.
If I can't get this to work, I might just try a ndiswrapper driver as I'd at least like to have some experience with it.

Pclos is running fine on the MacBook

After much endeavour, I finally got PCLOS working well on the MacBook. The secret was that Pclos calls the External HDD not sda, as most other OSes do, but sdb.
So, I had to change the /boot/grub/menu.lst on the Ubuntu root partition to reflect this.
Also, I found that /etc/fstab on the Pclos root partition was equally all mixed up and I had to make many changes manually.
After this practically verything worked fine. Fusion-icon and AWN were available from the repositories and easy to install. Yakuake too was in the repos. However, I can't get it to run as it keeps crashing. Posted to the Pclos forums about this but no reply.
Haven't yet got wireless working here but can't imagine it should be too difficult.

PCLinuxOS - 2007 -Gnome

I had used PCLOS 2007 before (kde version) but this Gnome is apparently newer.
Previously I had no problem at all getting Pclos to boot from the usb drive without any alterations (which is actually the most common occurrence).
However, this time with the Gnome version, I couldn't get it to boot.
I actually tried my hand at increasing the sleep within mkinitrd from the default 8 seconds to 20 seconds. However, I have to admit that I don't think I did this very well as I'm much out of practice and I neither wrote anything down the last time nor can I find a suitable guide this time.
Cannot explain this. Right now, I'm trying again with the older version but, certainly, I'm going to have to brush up on all of the tricks I learnt 6-8 months ago on how to modify the initrd.img files.