[Klug-general] Upgrade woes

[Mike Rentell]

Good day all,
Gavin Coles in Birchington spent last week building a super flash AMD64 
desktop PCc for me and delivered it two days ago. Super stuff, works 
very well.

So I have installed Mandriva 2008-64 on it. That seems to have gone OK. 
Wow - eye candy!

However, the reason for the hi-spec was to put a virtual machine on it. 
I have used VirtualBox before but there is also VMWare stuff.

Hah! No chance. Both installs want access to the compiler, the kernel 
source and the header files. Would you believe that such items do not 
seem to be on the Mandriva-64 package.

How on earth can you have a Linux set without a compiler?

A search of the Mandriva site reveals a complaining email along similar 
lines. The response was to install 'kernel-desktop-devel-latest' - but 
that isn't available either. Have I missed something here? Or has 
Mandriva disabled the 64bit set in order to promote sales of an edition 
with everything included?

So I thought I would switch to Ubuntu-64 or Kubuntu-64. I duly 
downloaded them, built the install CD and neither of them want to see my 
CD/DVD drive. The CDs are happy to start from the drive and then when it 
comes time to install - they fall over.
That Ubuntu fails to see my DVD/CD drive is astounding.

I really need a VM to run essential accounting products under windoze.

Right now my trusty old desktop is spending 2 hours downloading a full 6 
CDs worth of Fedora Core 64. I hope that has all the requisites - 
although I would prefer a KDE setup, if FC works, then \i can live with 
Gnome.

Any suggestions couched in simple terms would be very welcome.

MikeR