Proper Partitioning

I think you just need grub to hand off booting to Linspire with a chainload stanza like so.

title sda5 - Linspire 5.1.427
rootnoverify (hd0,4)
chainloader +1

Give this a try and see what happens & let its grub handle the details.

jim

I have the same card and it works perfectly.

First of all what version of Mepis are you using? If 6.0 check your settings in MEPIS utilities to make sure they match your wireless router, and that the card is started, If one of the 6.04 betas the utility to use is MEPIS Network Assistant.

Rich

Well, I edited menu.lst as suggested, rebooted, and received the following onscreen msg:
____________________________
rootnoverify (hd0,4)
chainloader +1

Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format

Press any key to continue...
_____________________________
Concerning the wiFi card, I'm using a full install of MEPIS 6.0. Right now I'm connected using the onboard CAT5 nic. There is a Broadcom AirForce One 54G wireless card embedded on this laptop, turned on in BIOS, that works in Linspire, but not in MEPIS. I can boot into XP and verify this Linksys card is okay and works fine; it's just here with MEPIS. I checked the settings in MUtilities, but don't really see anything that stands out as being wrong.

MENU.LST: When installing Linspire I selected that Grub be installed to root rather than MBR knowing it was easier for me to edit menu.lst via MEPIS. Linspire is there; it's a fresh install taking up 3.84Gb right now. Maybe I have to reinstall? ack!
And as far as I can tell the keyboard on this laptop doesn't have an AnyKey so I wasn't able to continue. Would a fullsized kb have one, ya think?

I appreciate your help and suggestions. While not new to computers as a whole, this linux stuff is certainly humbling after all those Windows years. Ha. So, does that error message give any indication as to the problem?

JT

You might find the info on the Mepis wiki useful..

http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php/GRUB_from_command_line

http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php/Special:Search?search=grub&go=Go

Great. Thanks for those links. I may just have to install Linspire to MBR, copy the menu.lst (menu-custom.lst in Linspire's case) entries to a USB drive, then reinstall MEPIS to MBR and make final edits to include what Linspire likes to see. It'd be nice not to have to go through all that though. Probably just a matter of tweaking the Grub menu in the right way.

Try marking that partition as bootable with cfdisk and use the chainloader example again.

Cfdisk is a command line fdisk tool i use regularly. Ctrl>alt>f1 to cli log in as root with pswrd & issue command >cfdisk then highlight linspire partition >highlight mark as bootable & press enter use arrow keys to highlight quit & enter again to exit cfdsk then, issue command > reboot -n to test it.

Who knows till tried some need to be bootable.

jim

Tried it. Marked as bootable I still recieved the same errors. Oh well. Anyways, today I contacted and have already received refunds on both the full Linspire Five-O and PowerDVD products that I purchased from them. Aside from working on booting to it here, I've been going round and round with my assigned rep. on their Tech Support team on getting my wifi card working. While most will immediately want to reply with something about wifi cards being finicky or some unsupported, this was moreso about Linspire's bait-n-switch tactic, and a business deal I was happy to have an 'out' on at the moment. Simply put, everyone downloading a Linspire LiveCD today to test on their system could very well make a purchase decision based on their experiences using that LiveCD, like I did. While I found Linspire to be a great linux package for the most part, what I enjoyed in the way of easy plug-n-play connectivity using the Linksys WPC 54G card was nothing when compared to the amount of personal time I lost while running through the various steps Tech Support had me doing to get it running themselves. No connectivity, not since Jan 19th. Yeah, riiight. Not worth it.

That Linspire installation is still there and I'd still like to get to it, but I've gone ahead and installed openSuSE for testing on the next neighboring partition, sda6. I figured maybe there was something missing since partitions 5,6, and 7 are on the extended partition whereas MEPIS was on a primary partition. Surprisingly, SUSE not only recognized the presence of XP, but also accounted for bootup selection into MEPIS from the GRUB menu as well. Sweet. I figured I'd post openSuSE menu.lst contects here hoping we can pull something from it.

XP on sda2
MEPIS on sda3
sda4 is the extended partition containing the following...
Linspire on sda5
openSuSE 10.2 on sda6
linux-swap on sda7

=======
openSuSE 10.2 menu.lst contents; fresh install, edited slightly only to change order of sda's at menu time.

# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Thu Feb 1 03:37:23 UTC 2007
default 1
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd0,5)/boot/message

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows###
title sda2 - WinBorg XP v5.0
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,1)+1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: sda3 - MEPIS, kernel 2.6.15-26-386 (/dev/sda3)###
title sda3 - MEPIS, kernel 2.6.15-26-386 (/dev/sda3)
kernel (hd0,2)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.15-26-386 root=/dev/sda3 vga=791 nomce quiet

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title sda6 - openSUSE 10.2
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18.2-34-default root=/dev/sda6 vga=0x314 resume=/dev/sda7 splash=silent showopts
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18.2-34-default

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: hidden (/dev/sda5)###
title hidden (/dev/sda5)

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe -- openSUSE 10.2
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18.2-34-default root=/dev/sda6 vga=normal showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 edd=off 3
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18.2-34-default