Spinbase or CoreCDX for Vanilla KDE & Dual Boot [Solved]

[Butch Cassidy]

Possibly but if that's the case I can see why most people just use a desktop environment specific disk and remove what they don't want. lol.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Have you installed nm-applet and added NetworkManager to the default runlevel yet? You could have done it by now to check if it gets you network access.

[Butch Cassidy]

I'm just about to head over there. It's a friends laptop and he wants to try a different distro / approach, so I'm printing all the relevant stuff off. I'll try the chroot route first and then if time runs out I'll just put the KDE disk on for him and he can sit go thru it at leisure.

[Fitzcarraldo]

I've had to do it (install a missing GUI front-end for NetworkManager) myself a few times in the past. Like everything else, it's not difficult when you know how.

If the lack of connectivity turns out to be something else (there are many possibilities, unfortunately), make sure to post as much information as possible here to enable readers to help. See, for example, the thread Howto Gather Log Files Easily - Help Us to Help You.

As the bare minimum, to make it easier to diagnose, you'd need to post:

1. Name of the manufacturer & the model of laptop.

2. The output of the following commands (issued as root user in a Konsole/Terminal window):

Code: Select all

uname -a
lspci
lsusb
lsmod
ifconfig
rc-status
equo search network
equo search nm-applet
cat /var/log/messages | grep -E -i --text 'error|network'

3. If wired networking is working and you are trying to get wireless networking working, also the output of the following commands (issued as root user in a Konsole/Terminal window):

Code: Select all

iwconfig
dmesg | grep -E -i 'error|wireless|firmware'
equo install rfkill
rfkill list
iwlist wlan0 scanning # Replace wlan0 with your interface, if different

If you don't have either wired or wireless access from the laptop, you can redirect the output of the above-mentioned commands to a text file and copy them to a pen drive. E.g. lspci > lspci.txt

[Butch Cassidy]

Right. I got nm-applet via chroot and still no joy. But whilst I was checking his partition information over I noticed something a bit odd, so booted with a gparted disk to double check and sure enough there's a partition there that shouldn't be there.

So I asked about malware from Windows and it turns out he had an infection that he considered cleaned and gone. He told me about it in detail and sure enough he'd actually had a rootkit, and one that hadn't been cleaned properly at all.

Anyway at this point I ran Combofix / TDSSKiller, etc, etc and ended up wiping the drive with gparted and starting from scratch. So he now has a Windows, Sabayon KDE dual boot using the KDE disk (fully updated entropy / rigo and updates, all of which went smoothly) because of the amount of time wasted cleaning up and installing. I'll probably be back asking further questions on my friends behalf regarding his printer and such like, or something.

It's been a very useful and informative exercise for me personally as I wanted to try SL out anyway. I would definitely go down the CoreCDX install route for me. I hope the next round of CDX ISOs get amended, but if not, I'm reasonably clued up now.