Chainloading GRUB 2 from GRUB

I installed PCLinuxOS on my laptop (more on that some other time - I was impressed). Among the other OSes on there is Debian Squeeze. The problem is that Debian Squeeze uses Grub 2, while PCLinuxOS uses Grub.

After some fruitless searches and guesses as to what to do (Grub knowledge doesn't help much with Grub 2) I decided to check the Arch Wiki. As usual, the answer was there. Add the following entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst in PCLinuxOS:

title Debian
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/grub/core.img

where root (hd0,4) tells Grub that Debian is installed on /dev/sda5.

Restarting sound on Debian Squeeze

Finally found something that works. Many thanks to the author of this post.

sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils stop
sudo alsa force-reload
sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils start

Installing a Network Printer on Scientific Linux 6.1

Took me a while to figure this out. Can't use the http://localhost:631 configuration window. Have to go to > System > Administration > Printing. Click on New. Click on Find Network Printer. Enter the IP address in the text box next to "Host...". Click on Find. The rest should be straightforward.

I had to find the IP address by printing the network configuration page from my HP wireless printer.

64-bit Firefox builds for Linux

Now that I'm running 64-bit Linux, the one problem I was bumping against was getting updates for Firefox. They've got their new schedule of releasing frequently. Some distros aren't keeping up - and probably for good reason, if they care about stability.

It was easy to find the nightly builds. That's actually pretty slick, with a new update coming through each day automatically. Well, it's slick unless you use your machine for work, in which case you don't want things to break. Oh, also, many of your extensions won't work. Not really what I'm after.

For some reason, Mozilla only provides 32-bit Linux builds on their download page. It will show a 32-bit download link even if your OS is 64-bit. After much searching, I found the 64-bit downloads:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

{This is probably something that everyone else already knows. I didn't. This way I can find it in the future.}