Aaron,
I think you are having issues with legacy Grub and Grub2. I originally
upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic while keeping legacy Grub and a few months
down the road I started experiencing issues with certain kernals not
loading. I have my HD partitioned so I can try other Linux
distributions. I loaded Linux Mint 8 with Grub2 and ext4 and it fixed my
Grub issues with Karmic ..... for a while. One day I could not boot to
Karmic at all. I ended up converting my Karmic partition to Grub2, and
though I still get the Linux Mint flash screen it has all the Karmic
kernals to load and I have not had any issues since. It was pretty
frustrating for a while. You will have to boot from a Live CD to fix
convert your Karmic partition to Grub2. I think this is the help that I
used.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1195275
I have experimented with Fedora 12 and it seems like a fine
distribution. The rub I had with it wasn't Fedora, but IBM's dismal
maintenance of the iSeries Access for Linux package. Anytime a group of
updates came through, I had to find the Motif and ODBC upgrades and
dis-allow them. Sorting through a hundred updates was a pain. I never
have that issue with Ubuntu or Linux Mint.
I have tried a number of Linux distributions, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuse,
Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS and a couple others and I keep coming back to
Ubuntu. I am going to try Debian shortly, as I had to get a Debian sound
patch for KdenLive to work on Ubuntu. If you have a certain hardware
issue with one distribution, I have found that because it runs at the
kernal level, all the distributions have the issue. On my Thinkpad R61,
the internal mic doesn't work, except for a patch from a user. It
doesn't work with any of the distributions. One of Linux's week points.
If you haven't tried Clonezilla, I would recommend it. You can save your
Karmic partition to an image on another partition, or a SATA or a NAS,
and if you have issues you can restore the image fairly quickly.
HTH,
Jay
-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-to: Discuss & plan a Linux based desktop environment for IBM i
<linuxdesktop4i@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Discuss & plan a Linux based desktop environment for IBM i
<linuxdesktop4i@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [LinuxDesktop4i] Ubuntu alternative for RPG programmer
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:10:12 -0600
Hi all,
Upgrading Ubuntu from 9.04 to 9.10 has proven to be a hair-pulling
experience for me. After trouble shooting for 6hrs I am still not able
to boot into the latest kernel version from GRUB and instead am booting
into a previous 9.10 kernel version which seems to also cause my sound
and printer to not work (among other things) which means I have no Skype
(something I use for business). This is my first "I can't seem to fix
this" for Linux - took 1.5 years to get to it. Here is the issue for
anybody wanting to know:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KarmicUpgrades#Unable%20to%20Load%
20Linux%20Drive
Anyways, I am wondering what others are using for Linux desktops that
don't screw you over if you choose to upgrade after a new version has
had ample time to fix any issues. After doing some reading it seems
Ubuntu likes to be more on the bleeding edge and I would rather NOT be
bleeding or on the edge for my business desktop.
Bruce Hoffman mentioned Fedora as a solid choice on iWeekly last week.
What do others recommend?
My application needs:
- VirtualBox
- JungleDisk
- Firefox (Flash needs to work well, no hacks)
- OpenOffice
- Pidgin
- SOAPUI
- tn5250j
- RPGNextGen
- Skype
- Filezilla
BTW, I am doing my best to resist getting a MacBookPro. I am in need of
a new laptop, and now a reformat of my desktop, so I am highly tempted
to migrate based on the many hours of consulting I lost.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/
midrange.com
