I have been struggling recently with Ubuntu 9.10, using GRUB 2, trying to do something which was more or less trivial with previous releases.  What I would like to do is set up a multi-boot system for a friend with Ubuntu and Windows, and have it boot Windows by default.  Simple, right?  Not so far, at least for me.

I know what needs to be done, the "default" value needs to be changed from "0" to whatever the appropriate entry number is in /boot/grub/grub.cfg.  But I also know that one shouldn't edit grub.cfg (if I read that one more time, in one more different place, I'm going to scream), so it has to be changed in /etc/grub.d/00_header.  But the problem is that the content of grub.cfg sometimes change in such a way as to change the number of boot entries!

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I am in the process of installing openSuSE 11.2 RC1 on all of my systems.  One of the first things I have found is that it still has a problem with non-U.S. keyboards.  No matter what keymap I select during installation, the installed image ends up with the U.S. definition.

You can manually change the definition by editing /etc/sysconfig/keyboard and changing the KEYTABLE value.  Look in /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/i386 to find the known maps - and don't overlook the fact that there are separate directories for qwerty and qwertz keyboard maps.  Reboot after changing.

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I've been installing the new Mandriva 2010.0 RC2 distribution on various of my notebooks, netbooks and nettop  this morning.  Well, trying to, anyway.  It has turned out to be a bit more difficult than I had expected.  I can only speak about the Mandriva One KDE LiveCD, as that is the only one I have tried, but I would assume that this is true at least for all of the One LiveCD versions.

The first problem is that the LiveCD failed to boot on my Fujitsu Lifebook S6510, which is really a pretty standard Intel Core2 Duo system with an Intel 965 graphic controller, and on my HP Pavillion dv2-1010ez, which is a not-so-standard AMD Athlon Neo CPU and ATI Mobility Radeon 3410 graphic controller.  What I finally found was that Mandriva is still trying to auto-generate their own xorg.conf  file, on those two systems they got it sufficiently wrong that the X display server couldn't even start.  However, they are using the latest X.org server (1.6.4), which is plenty smart enough to figure out everything it needs to know on its own, so it doesn't need an xorg.conf file.  So the solution was to just login as root on the text console, delete the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and then run startx to get the X display server going so that you can then use the LiveCD graphic installer as usual.

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Two of my favorite things converged over the weekend - Linux Mint, which I think is an excellent distribution for average users, and the Xfce desktop, which I find myself using and liking more than either Gnome or KDE, especially on netbooks.  So the Linux Mint 7 'Gloria' Xfce Community Edition was a welcome addition for me.  The following are a few notes that I have made about installing and configuring it on various of my notebook and netbook computers.

- The Mint Xfce Community Edition is built from the Xubuntu distribution, in much the same way that the standard Linux Mint distribution is built from the standard Ubuntu distribution.  It looks like it includes all the 'mint' utilities, such as install/update/backup/disk/nanny, and the same artwork and themes as the standard Linux Mint distribution.

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I have mentioned this topic in passing before, when talking about Ubuntu Karmic GRUB, but I have since discovered that that issue is serious enough, or at least the consequences can be serious enough, that I think it deserves a separate and more detailed explanation.

During the installation of Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 5, there are no questions about installing GRUB.  It does not ask if you want to install GRUB or not, or even where you want to install it, it quietly installs GRUB 2, and it installs it to the MBR (Master Boot Record) of your primary disk.  There are at least two specific things you need to be careful about related to this:

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When I read the release announcement and release notes for Slackware Linux 13.0, I thought it might be interesting to try to add it to MMS, my Dual Atom Multi-Boot Mini-Server.  I knew that it wouldn't be trivial, for two main reasons:

- I multi-boot openSolaris and several Linux distributions, and that only works using the GRUB from openSolaris, so I have to be careful not to replace that when I make a new installation.

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