On Jun 26, 2:01 am, Adriano Varoli Piazza <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Twisted wrote: > > With the latest stuff like Ubuntu, you're pretty much right ... until > > something goes wrong. Windows has . > [...] > > Linux has ... the > > command line, or worse a GRUB or fsck prompt at startup. No access to > > accessible, easy to browse help right when you need it most. > > I suppose you never used Ubuntu's disc for anything but installing or > reformatting either, but that doesn't mean it's the only thing that > can be done with it. You can boot with it, have a working net > connection (or create it) and solve many problems in the comfort of > the full GUI, and with all the help available from the web.
Ah, if you have a live CD this might indeed be possible. If you can get it to mount your usual hdd partitions to go sniffing around the configuration files that might be gummed up, and if doing this isn't insanely complicated anyway. A Windows restore CD or recovery partition doesn't do anything of the sort, although a genuine install CD has a repair function, which can among other things fix problems with the MBR and reinstall key Windoze components on the hdd. If you can boot to safe mode you can fix most things with System Restore, which simply lets you roll back the configuration to before that ill-advised install, uninstall, driver update, or whatever it was that hosed things. I've had to resort to it exactly twice; once when firewall software b0rked the system on install and put it in infinite-reboot mode (safe mode halted the loop) and once when nVidia released some driver update that hosed the 3D accelerator and screwed up the available graphics modes. System Restore works by quietly backing up key files (DLLs, config files, and suchlike) and registry trees when an installer is run and under some other circumstances, including a manual instruction to create a save point, which you can use before you try anything dodgy so you can roll back to right before the attempt if it goes wrong. Ordinary document files and the like aren't backed up or anything by this, however. If they get hosed, they get hosed, although System Restore won't damage them any more than it will back them up. I've managed to fix driver and networking problems a few times, and sometimes on someone else's computer, with and without system restore. Most of the times if I've seen any flavor of unix misbehaving, it's been find a bigger geek or resort to beads and rattles; it's been far from obvious what the problem was from the error messages, let alone what the fix was, and often the problem precluded access to any useful tools or documentation simultaneously. A live CD might make that less of an issue, though it would still be a pain if you had to keep using it as a workaround for days while waiting for a mailing list or usenet response explaining what the f*#! "bad zixflob in fuzzwangle.rc, aborting" meant and how to fix it, especially as a system-wide search didn't turn up any files named "fuzzwangle.rc" -- or whatever the problem was. :) [Insulting insinuation snipped] Oh, sod off. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
