[Nottingham] Mandrake 10, xp dual boot, designing an installation....

[David Aldred]

Hello again!

It seems quite a while since I was asking questions regularly here, but
there may be a few more coming!

Right, we now have the laptop running under Mandrake 10 linux, and
Peter's machine likewise with XP dual booted, but now little-used.  They
both talk happily and wirelessly to this machine, which is still XP
based.  Interestingly, XP simply cedes domain management to whichever
Linux machine it finds first, whatever settings we try - it knows when
it's beat!

I was planning to make a major change this evening, and install Mdk 10
on this machine, the main one which handles the internet dial-up, but
for two reasons I've deferred it.

First, the defrag which ran last night hasn't done the job properly, so
I couldn't re-partition the drive anyway.  I'm running a further defrag
tonight with a different tool.

Second, there are a lot of reports of problems dual-booting Mdk 10 and
XP.  Peter's machine didn't have a problem - but that's not necessarily
conclusive!  I can't work out from the various discussions on the topic
on the net whether or not this is sorted with Mdk 10 official.

Has anyone any more information?

This is rather important - one of the things I don't yet know is whether
the modem in this machine will work properly under Linux.  It's an hcf
conexant chip, for which there are linux drivers: I don't want to spend
on upgrading the modem since broadband is a short-term likelihood, so I
can't risk linux *not* talking to the modem, then being unable to
re-boot in XP, thus losing net access entirely and with it all access to
the resources which might sort things out!

Apart from that, I think I'm very close to (but just not quite at) the
stage where, if the modem is happy and XP won't boot, then XP can go
anyway: one of the four machines in the house would retain it, Crossover
/ Wine could handle most stuff anyway if needed, and that would be all!

The other questions which are in my mind (and on which I might as well
ask for input at the same time) are these:

-  do I need to do any serious planning about how I want the network to
look after the upgrade to linux?  The present one sort of congealed
rather than being planned!   I'm thinking here about directory sharing
etc.

-  Two things which I haven't solved so far
        - is there any way of automounting a remote directory if and
only if the network is running?  I'd like to be able to navigate to
(say) ~/mnt/mainpc/documents to get to the documents on the main pc from
the laptop without having to run smb4k or linneighborhood first each
time....
        - and on a similar (to some extent) question, is there something
which tells me whether there is a live internet connection on a machine
which is dialling up?  I'd like to automate news collection using cron
and fetchnews, running fetchnews every (say) fifteen minutes *if* there
is a live connection, but not otherwise.

Thanks of any input - sorry I can't join you tonight but my wife's been
ill today and I can't leave her unaided with all the kids!

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|\avid Aldred   / David at familyaldred.org.uk  \   Nottingham, England
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