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

[James Gibbon]

Hello David,

David Aldred <laptop at familyaldred.org.uk> wrote:

> 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?
> 

I've had problems dual-booting my laptop with XP ever since I installed
Fedora Core 2 on it, and they persist since installing Mandrake 10 I'm afraid.
I'm unable to warm-boot XP from M10, but a halt and cold boot will bring XP up
perfectly.


> 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!

I've used the HCF driver 'hcfpcimodem' with kernel 2.4, and it works great, but
I'm told it won't play nicely with 2.6.
 
> -  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....

Well, you certainly won't be able to mount it if the network's NOT running :D
I'm not sure what happens when the remote machine's off the air and you
try to NFS-mount a filesystem from it - I know the old SunOS automounter
used to hang, but I'm sure that recent versions of Linux will be much better
behaved.  However you could set it up to mount manually instead quite
easily.

>         - 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.

If I understand you correctly, something like

netstat -i | grep ppp > /dev/null

.. and check the error code.