kernels so I can mount other-OS drives in my lab station. -- Heather

   I have toggled between DEVFS support (initially I said no, but enabling does
   not seem to make a difference anyway). 

     By the time devfs really causes pain you're in userland already - you
     didn't get that far. Didn't I hear a rumor they're deprecating it? --
     Heather

   I verified my settings in /etc/lilo.conf were correct. I even tried passing
   the root=/dev/hda2 parameter to the kernel at boot. 

   Nothing has worked. 

   I have tried to see if there are any error messages during the boot but
   where I would suspect there being an error message, it scrolls by way too
   fast. Nothing gets logged at this point either. 

   As I said, I have been running 2.4.24 for a bit now having patched that from
   2.4.9 along the way. My distro is slackware-current which reports to have
   support for the 2.6.x series kernels. 

   Any further suggestions would be much obliged. 

   Thanks for your time. 

     [dann] I fell pray to the post to TAG curse again, which usually has me
     finding the answer within a few hours of emailing TAG.

     I had replaced a failing drive about 6 months back with a used drive I
     picked up along the way. This drive had EZ-Bios installed in the boot
     sector. Initially I was concerned with this but when I had no problems
     with running linux after I transferred over my partitions, I put it out of
     mind a bit too far.

     I compiled a 2.6.2 kernel enabling everything possible under the IDE
     device drivers into the kernel. This slowed down the boot process enough
     for me to see this line:

     /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0 p1[EZD]

     Sure enough, I knew EZBios was going to come back and bite me one day. I
     guess EZBios was somehow preventing the kernel from seeing the drive
     properly.

     After removing EZBios the 2.6.2 kernel booted without a complaint.

     Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate your time and effort.

     [Ben] Surely that would be "The TAG blessing" rather than "curse", Dann?
     :) All you do is write to TAG and shortly thereafter get your answer. What
     could be better?

   That is true. Perhaps I should take advantage of that blessing more often
   and post sooner. Maybe the luck will work the other way. Instead of three
   days of trial and error, post on day one and the answer will appear. 

     [Ben] (Yes, we managed to enlist the Universe and The Gods of Fate and
     Time in helping us. We thought the negotiations would be tough, but, you
     know, Gods are intelligent beings and therefore use Linux. It was a
     shoe-in.)

   Well heap some more offerings on the pyre. I'm going in for another round of
   video capture and editing soon! 
            ____________________________________________________

Live Linux CDs

   Wed, 18 Feb 2004 19:45:58 +0000 (GMT)
   Thomas Adam, Raj Shekhar, Ben Okopnik ([55]The LG Answer Gang)

   Hi all,

   Someone on my LUG found a really useful site[1] that has a list of all the
   Live Linux CDs that are available. Not just Knoppix you know!

   -- Thomas Adam

   [1] [56]http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

     [Raj] A lot of effort is going to create the regional language flavor of
     Linux. Linux + Live CDs has provided a fertile ground for internalization
     of software and demoing the capabilities of Linux to the people.

     For example, one of my friends demoed a Bengali version of Knoppix (Ankur
     Bangla Linux) in the LinuxAsia 2004 held in Delhi, India. It was a great
     hit. People watched open mouthed as he typed away happily on gedit to
     produce a small Bengali poem.

     [Ben]  Oh,  excellent! This is sorta the "dark area" of computers -
     generally solved by "simply" learning English. Not that I mind the world
     moving toward a common language, but the exclusion field and the entry
     requirements are keeping the computer culture very small compared to what
     it could be.

     I'm really looking forward to the day when someone invents an input method
     that  is multilingual, portable, and at least as fast as a keyboard
     (they'll  be  billionaires  overnight.) I've heard of various "fist
     keyboards" like the Twiddler and OrbiTouch, but... we're not quite there
     yet.