Nils's questions

I have Ubuntu 10.10 installed on one (physical) hd and on the other one Windows. On both drives grub is installed to boot both operating systems. When I wanted to install SP1 for Win 7 I had to add a bootable flag to the partition from which Windows boots, otherwise the installation of SP1 does not work. I did so by booting into Ubuntu and using gparted to add this flag. After doing so the update for SP1 worked without any problems.

When trying to boot back into Ubuntu grub complained that it couldn't find the kernel anymore! I tried to boot into a Ubuntu minimal cd and to restore grub using chroot, update-grub and grub-install which didn't work. I still had the problem that it was Unable to boot Ubuntu putting me in some minimal system called initramfs. It seems however that the uuid of the partitions changed. I guess this happened when I added the bootflag to the windows disk.

Next thing I tried was to tell grub not to use the uuid for loading the kernel by uncommenting something in /etc/default/grub. Then I got the kernel booting but it suddenly stops (I guess when it is trying to mount the root file system) saying that the concerning uuid does not exist putting me into initramfs again. The strange thing is that there I coulnd't even manage to mount the root partition using /dev/sdb1 (on which it is in my case).

I would be glad if there is a way to restore the system again without having to reinstall it.

Update

In case anyone cares I solved this. For some reason I also reseted the BIOS and it set the SATA protocol back to IDE. It seems that there is no driver for this in initrd. So I just set it back now it works again.

Possible Duplicate:
How can I “reboot into” the non-default operating system in a dual-boot configuration?

I'm using a wireless keyboard via bluetooth and therefore cannot use it in grub, so I have to plug in an USB keyboard everytime I want to boot into Windows. AFAK Apple solved this problem by adding adding functions such as "Boot to MacOSX" in the Boot Camp control panel (iMacs come with Bluetooth mice and keyboard) so I was wondering weather it's possible to tell grub to boot Windows next time (and maybe even tell it from Windows to boot Linux next time)

I don't like icons on my desktop. On Windows I simply click right on the desktop and uncheck "Show Desktop Icons" or so. Couldn't find any similar option in Ubuntu 10.10.

Having used gnome-terminal I noticed that it does not remember its state, once closed. I would like a terminal which remembers its state, this includes the title of the tabs and the current directory in which I was. IIRC the konsole of KDE3 did this. So I installed konsole (the current version which comes with Ubuntu 10.10) however it does not seem to remember its state either. :(

I just downloaded the developer driver from Nvidia's CUDA Zone. Executed it and typed in restart gdm and the it worked. However after rebooting X didn't come up (xorg log), to fix it I can simply rerun the installer and the restart gdm again.

What I don't understand is where it breaks and why X11 doesn't find the module?! I removed all (I think..) of the Nvidia packages which can with Ubuntu 10.10. I've also googled a bit and found some HOWTOs about manually installing the Nvidia driver. However all of them were for an earlier version of Ubuntu.

Please do not respond telling me I should use the proprietary Nvidia driver supplied by Ubuntu, because I need the development drivers.

So I have installed gcc-4.4 and gcc-4.3 (same for g++). Now as far as I remember there is a tool in Ubuntu which sets the symlinks for you if you just tell it which version you want. However it does not seem to work in the newest version, which I find disappointing.

root@nexus:~# update-alternatives --config gcc
update-alternatives: error: no alternatives for gcc.
root@nexus:~# update-alternatives --config cc
There is only one alternative in link group cc: /usr/bin/gcc
Nothing to configure.


root@nexus:~# dpkg -l | grep gcc | awk '{print $2}'
gcc
gcc-4.3
gcc-4.3-base
gcc-4.3-multilib
gcc-4.4
gcc-4.4-base
gcc-4.4-multilib
gcc-4.5-base
gcc-multilib
lib32gcc1
libgcc1

Any ideas?