[Discuss] Boot Problems and Firefox

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-01-16 19:45-0800 Murray Strome wrote:

> Any ideas or hints?

It might be hardware issues as Andrew said.  But one thing that bothers me
about your problem report tonight is I think you try way too many varieties
of Linux to try and achieve too narrow a goal.  My best advice is don't be
so goal-oriented ("I have to get firefox going tonight!"), and instead be
Linux education oriented ("I am going to learn something about my distro of
choice tonight").  Also, force yourself to stick to learning about _just
one_ distro for years at a time rather than chopping and changing.  Once you
settle down to learn just one distro the goals (such as getting firefox to
work just like you like) will paradoxically be achieved much faster than if
you are goal oriented!  I typically only change distros once every 5 years
or so and completely ignore all other distros (and windows of course) which
is why at any given time I am so comfortable and experienced with my distro
of choice and essentially never have software problems as a result (and I
use our computers hard including scientific publishing with Latex, docbook
documentation builds, fortran development, website development, and building
PLplot software in many different computer languages.).

In your case, you stuck with Mandrake for many years (which was good), but
the last I remember you decided to move to Ubuntu. However, once that
decision was made to switch distros, then my advice would be to stick with
it cold turkey and never go back unless you are obviously not making any
learning progress _at all_ with the new distro. In particular, if some
feature of your new distro is not working quite right, then get on the
distro forums to get some help rather than switching back to your old distro
or even a third distro.  (Underneath all distros, Linux is pretty much the
same so there is almost always a way to fix problems for any given distro.)

At this point, it sounds like it is too late for my advice to help you, and
it may be time for a clean install from scratch for your distro of choice.
But once that is done, apply my advice from then on and don't put anything
else on that machine (except the normal new version installs for your
distro) until you are ready in ~five years for your next distro switch.

My $0.02.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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