[plug] RH 7.3 and RH 9

[Bret Busby]

Hello, everyone. I have two problems with RH9, that I have installed on 
my computer.

1. Multiple booting
I have installed RH 9 in a multiple boot system which already had RH 7.3 
installed. I installed RH 9 as a clean instal in a partition that I 
found that I had, while retaining the RH7.3 installation, which I am 
using, and which is useful, for parallel implementation.

There is a conflict problem with a /lib/modules file, where the RH 9 
installation finds only the RH 7.3 version. At first, the RH 9 versiopn 
of lilo found only the Win98 OS to load, and not either RH 7.3 or Wn NT. 
When I managed to boot into RH 7.3 using the RH 7.3 boot disk, RH 7.3 
hasd the /lib/modules conflict. With all the problems, I overwrote the 
RH( lio.conf file, with the RH7.3 file, and modified it to include RH 9. 
However, the only way that I can get the computer to properly boot into 
RH 9, is to use the RH 9 boot disk.

Anne told me that she had given up on booting into RH on her computer 
for the same reason; she had has conflicts via lilo, with having two 
different versions of Linux (she has Debian  and RH), in a multiple boot 
situation.

I have RH 9 booting on my second physical hard drive, and RH 7.3 booting 
on my first physical hard drive.

In the lilo.conf file, we tried including a line "boot=xxx" in the 
paragraph of the RH9 component, but it did not make any difference.

Is it possible to have different versions of Linux, in a muliple boot 
system, using lilo, so that the intervention of booting from a floppy 
boot disk is not needed?

2. Updating RH9 and package management
Also, after having installed RH9, and then trying to update it, I found 
that I could not register a username. The error returned, was "Problem 
registering username". I tried several different usernames, in case 
what I was trying, was already allocated, and unusable by me. It 
occurred to me that that could be something to do with the expired 
certificates of RHN. So, I downloaded the two packages up2date and 
up2date-gnome (or whatever exactly they are named), and tried to instal 
them.

But, in RHN, I am unable to instal packages or update them. The gnorpm 
utility has gone, and instead, some application named "Application 
Manager" or something similar has replaced it, but I cannot find how to 
add or update packages with it. I tried marking the package (I could 
only find one of the two packages with it, in the packages that it 
listed (I can't find how to Find or Add or Instal packages that it 
doesn't list), and I selected that one, which unchecked the check box 
for the package (it appears to be the only way to "ungrey-out" the 
Update button, to update it), so I cannot use any GUI RPM utility in 
RH9.

I tried to use the command as specified on the RHN web page for the 
up2date pacakages replacement, something like "rpm -Fvh up2date-*", but 
the response was "Packages not found on your system" or something 
similar. I could not find where new packages should be stored for 
installation/updating, and I could not find how to configure the package 
management so that I could add a path for finding the downloaded 
packages (I saved them to my /home/bret directory)

It appears to me that RH 9 has become quite black-box-like, like MS 
Windows, or worse, so that the system is now difficult to administer, to 
update, or, to add applications.

Can anyone who has RH9 running, help with these problems?

Thanks in anticipation.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
  Chapter 28 of 
  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  A Trilogy In Four Parts",
  written by Douglas Adams, 
  published by Pan Books, 1992 
....................................................


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