Re: update (was 2009spring and kaddressbook)

On Monday 05 October 2009 04:27:49 mschild wrote:
> Hello,
> My ethernet card blew so I had to take the machine back to the shop.

Ouch! This makes me wonder whether your location may be prone to electrical 
power spikes, surges and sags. Sometimes other electrical uses close by in 
the neighborhood can be the cause of such irregularities; other times the 
power company itself may be the source of the problem. Along these same 
lines, I would be concerned about the steadiness and electrical cleanliness 
of the power that comes through your telephone circuit because sometimes that 
can be affected by environmental factors, too.

The bottom line here is that you should have as good a set of electrical 
filters as you can to smooth and to protect the power coming into your 
computer system's various parts. This should include having uninterrupted 
power supply (UPS) and surge protectors for your various computer gear.

There are meters that will allow testing of electrical spikes and sags, but 
they are quite expensive. Perhaps your local power company will loan one to 
you for a few days so you can get some indication of the power quality at 
your location.

> Since they have a fast connection I asked them to run all the updates for   
> me. Now I have Kaddressbook and all seems so far to run well.

This is excellent news. One problem solved, at least.

> At the shop they offered to download Kubuntu 9.04 for me for the price of   
> the disk because the card they replaced ( now a Netgear) will not run under 
> Mandi 2009spring! They would have had to recompile the kernel, etc. At the 
> moment I use 2009spring with the card on my motherboard ( long story to    
> explain why I have 2).
> Since my drive is large, I am thinking of installing Kubuntu on the same
> disk and shall keep 2008 on my 2nd drive. Any contraindication before I
> start? TIA

Both of these distributions should be able to live together on the same hard 
drive as long as each has its own partition. They can share a swap partition, 
and a home partition, however, so there will be room for both of them. I have 
not installed these two together, so I don't know the details of how they 
arrange their home folders, but perhaps you can create a subdirectory for 
each of them inside /home, then install your users under each distribution. 
(At least that's what I would try to do until I reach certainty that no 
conflicts exist between the /home folder structures.)

I know lots of people have dual-booted two linux distributions, and there are 
lots of postings and even videos about how to install Kubuntu and others in 
dual boot situations. You might wish to check out some of those before you 
begin just to have the benefit of their experiences, too. After everything is 
installed, you should be able to choose either distribution from a grub menu.


Ken
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