Knoppix and 'Knoppix Hacks' rescue me from borked GRUB on the $0 Laptop

So I figure I'll try OpenSUSE 10.3 today. Before that I tried out the Fedora 8 live CD. Not super impressive, although I'm not saying I won't take a look at Fedora 9 when it comes out.

Anyhow, I install OpenSUSE on one of my free partitions. For some reason, I can't get the network configured. My static IP information just won't stick.

This after a weekend during which every time I booted into PC-BSD 1.5 it looked worse. First my ACPI fan management went away, then my KDE "bouncing icon" cursor thingy returned to its pre-1.5 blurriness when a new app is launched..

So I had SUSE on the box. Even though the live CD booted in 1024x768, after the install (during which you'd think the system would ASK me whether or not I wanted a static IP ... but I digress) I had only 800x600 resolution. It was easy enough to choose 1024x768, 24-bit, reboot and get the right resolution, but do they have to make networking so hard?

I should probably give Fedora 8 a run at the hard drive ... or maybe I should just wait for Ubuntu 8.04, which is only a few days away at this point.

Before I did anything, since things were already screwed up, I did a NetBSD 4.0 install to the SUSE partition. It wasn't the prettiest looking thing -- the installer, that is -- and I tried NOT to install a new Master Boot Record. But I did end up with one, and I booted straight into NetBSD. It looks exactly like FreeBSD when you start X. Twm is the window manager. And no, I still couldn't exit X from the Twm menu. I had to use ctrl-alt-backspace. So either Twm, or NetBSD and FreeBSD, do not like the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450).

I was left without the GRUB bootloader. In order to restore GRUB, I started with the Lenny business-card CD in the "rescue" mode. All I wantws to do is reinstall GRUB, and I'm being asked all kinds of questions about my drives, how I want them formatted, waiting for the base system to install ... I got out of there quick. I didn't want to screw up my current Lenny install, which I'm actually relying on heavily at the moment.

Here's how the laptop is set up. The drive is 30 GB. I have Linux swap on hda1. My "experimental" partition, which went from PC-BSD to SUSE to NetBSD in about an hour, is 10 GB on hda2. Debian Lenny is on hda3, also 10 GB. I have an extended partition (hda5) which is formatted to ext3, on which I back up files from the other installs.

To fix GRUB, I booted into Knoppix 5.1.1, opened up a terminal, did su to root and then the following (thanks to Kyle Rankin's excellent "Knoppix Hacks"; and yes, we all need a copy of this very valuable book):

My Lenny filesystem (which had a "good" /boot/grub/menu.lst) was automatically mounted by Knoppix, so I remounted it with the dev option and write permission:

# mount -o remount,dev,rw /mnt/hda3

Then I restored GRUB:

# chroot /mnt/hda3

# grub-install /dev/hda

Again, thanks to Kyle Rankin's "Knoppix Hacks" for the tip.