Re: Getting a working base system

Hi,

> I got it installed and found out how to get a lot of things working,
> with help of course (thanks Bero :-) ) , anyway I tried to get some
> updates over Kynaptic at first I wound up with an extra kernel that
> wouldn't boot with full hardware support,

That's weird. Any idea what kernel that was? They all work here...

> the second time I wound up 
> with all my non-windows grub entries disappearing

That would happen only if all kernel rpms were removed for some reason (in 
which case the whole system is unusable), but you can't do that without 
either using rpm directly and specifying --nodeps, or using apt and 
confirming that you're doing something stupid by typing in "Yes, do as I 
say!".

> so I'm effectively 
> locked out. Does anyone know how I can get back in and restore the Grub
> entries for Ark?

Assuming something really deleted your kernels, there's not much you can do, 
aside from booting from some live system, chroot-ing to your installation and 
reinstalling the kernel package.

If something messed up your grub.conf without actually deleting the kernels, 
you can press "e" in the grub menu, and just enter a working config manually 
- a good start may be

root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-3ark ro root=/dev/hda2
initrd /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-3ark

> Btw. I know I complain about this a lot (in the regular Ark Linux list)
> but the packaging system seems a little messed up, last time I
> successfully booted into Ark I was unable to install any of the
> development packages because of a lot of dependencies which were off by
> a simple release number and not anything significant like a version
> number.

Please explain exactly what you did. The version numbers of -devel packages 
can never be off because they're generated from the same source package as 
the main package.
Maybe you forgot refreshing the package list?

> Should I assume that upon installing Ark I should avoid updating 
> until some sort of announcement is made indicating that its safe?

No, it's always (more or less) safe unless we make an announcement saying it 
isn't.

> It seems unlikely to me that others are contributing to Ark while
> experiencing the same problems I'm having so there must be something
> everyone here knows that I don't.

This is simply not happening for anyone else we've heard of - we need to know 
exactly what you did.

> I was unable to get my DVD-RW and CD-RW drives working in Ark, I don't
> think they are properly detected since I manually edited the /etc/fstab
> file and was still unable to get them to work.

There seems to be something really weird with your hardware - that's another 
thing we never heard of (and I've installed 5 boxes today, all of which have 
DVD-RW drives and just work).

> I am fairly familiar with 
> how to do this from Slackware and a couple of other distributions but
> Ark didn't even know the drives were present when I tried to eject
> /dev/hdb (DVD-RW) or /dev/hdd (CD-RW).

Try /dev/scd0 or /dev/scd1 -- RW devices are configured to use the SCSI 
emulation layer normally.

LLaP
bero