Computer weirdness today. I have two computers in the Studio and they seem to have opposite problems.
The first is the new version of the Studio PC. Win 7 installed on perfectly. Connects to the Internet and the Home Network. I installed Linux Mint KDE 17 on it as a dual boot, but it only boots straight to Win 7 (/dev/sdb2) unless I use the Supergrub 2 live disk to boot it to Mint. But then I find that Mint has no connection to either the Internet or the Home Network, and neither does the Mint KDE 17 live disk! This is odd, as I thought it had connected to both while in the RecRoom (on another LAN cable). Most peculiar, but it also means I can't install the Grub update for KDE either.
The other is the ex-University Laptop. I did a dual boot install of Mint KDE on that one as well, with Win Vista. The dual boot works perfect and both OSs boot fine. But Win Vista doesn't access either the Internet or the Home Network, whereas Mint accesses both. Not only that, it shows up as a computer on the Home Network and I can share locations on that as well!
I expect it's the same problem on each, in that on the Studio PC Mint doesn't have a driver for the network adapter, where on the Laptop (an older Dell model) it did, whereas when the IT department re-imaged the laptop that didn't include up-to-date drivers for the adapter! Luckilly I have all the original disks that came with the laptop, and the manuals, so I should be able to find the driver somewhere there and get that working. And for the Studio PC, which has a Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller, I should be able to download the linux drivers from the manufacturers site, and somehow install those (have not done too many manual installs under Linux).
But it's just bloody awkward on both. Of course I could just leave the Laptop as it is, and use the Win Boot to check suspicious disks and memory sticks, et cetera. Then if safe I could swap to Mint and copy the files to the network. Or not. This is the sort of task where I attempt to follow up in the most straight-forward manner, and find myself getting lost very quickly. D'Oh!
I had to fix one laptop again after a Win10 update. It turns out, MS does not understand the system display of a Touchsmart from HP. For some reason, it thinks the laptop display is a second monitor resulting in a black screen. The fix for the future is to press CTRL at the black screen to focus the cursor then type the PIN or password and press enter. This will log me in blindly but the screen will still be dark. Then press the windows + P to open the display selection, press arrow down 3 times then press enter. This tells the system to use the second display as primary. ROFL I guess I need to look and see if I can turn off the display driver updates so I can do that manually from time to time.
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