[Wolves] Today's Guessing Game

[chris procter]

> Hi All

> 
> Seeing as things seem a bit quiet here's a guessing game given that I'm
> too lazy to figure it out.
> 
> openSUSE 11.1
> 1. Switch the power on, at the post screen (Not Grub) "Could not find
> system press any key to continue" press any old thing and low and behold
> we get Grub. I should point out that this machine used to be dual boot
> so maybe MBR is up the creek?

Does this happen after a reboot or only after a boot from cold? I have this vague recollection of a problem with disks not spinning up fast enough so when the machine looks for an OS it gets no response from the disk because its not ready yet, but by time you've hit a key its up to speed and responding happily.  We may have solved this by changing the boot order in the bios so the disk it checked the disk last which gave it a few extra milliseconds to spin up. Or there might have been a "spinup delay" setting. Or I might be making this up entirely.

 
> 2. KDE4 Desk Top after Grub, now and again, when we should be presented
> with our lubberly desktop we sometimes get a white screen (almost like a
> jpeg or something) and Ekiga, which is the only Autostart app and
> nothing else. If I hit CTRL+Backspace I get a nice beep sound from the
> system board.
> 
> I can switch to another terminal and shutdown -h(r) now but here is
> another spooking thing if I press the power button just right for a
> thousandth of a millisecond the desktop will burst into life.

Sounds like kwin (kde window manager) not starting properly but it doesn't happen to my kde4, sorry!

chris