Hi all,

I'm enjoying Mandrake 10.1 community. It causes the least difficulties of any distro I've tried.

Little question: since I'm using it on a portable computer, I'm a bit sensitive to the boot up time. The machine get booted 3 or 4 times a day. Now, if the machine is connected to the LAN at home, it boots fine. If, on the other hand, I'm away from there, it takes a lot longer, while it reconciles itself with the sad fact that the LAN is not there, as expected.
It appears to almost grind to a halt in the process.
Is there any way to pass some boot option which would invite the machine to overlook the eth0 and eth1 that it is looking to configure, on those occasions when I'm not connected?

Thanks,

Declan

Are you using a DHCP ip address?

if you can swap to a static ip that would greatly improve the boot up time when you aren't plugged into your network.

Open the MCC. Go to Network & Internet -> Manage Connections. On the options tab, make sure your eth card is selected, then below that there should be a box labelled 'start on boot'. It should have a tick in it. Remove the tick and your network won't start up at boot.

Thanks for the responses.

Responding to pongmaster: I've tried that, and it does speed up the boot time.
But this is not really the solution I'm looking for, since - as I understand it - this would mean booting up, going to mcc, ticking the "enable during boot" box, then rebooting in order to connect to the LAN whenever I do want to do that.

Unless... of course there's a quick way to establish a connection when already booted up.

That would indeed be really useful. I've looked around in mcc, pressing various likely-looking buttons to do this, but they don't work for me.

The other thought I had was that if I set up two profiles, and could select the appropriate one in lilo (somehow), then one could be used for home use (with LAN) and another for wandering use. I tried this, a bit, but didn't work it out. Does anyone know if there's any future in such an idea?

Thanks again.

No, what he told you was correct.

All you need to do is to type in "ifup eth0" as root to bring the connection up.

You can even let something like gkrellm do this for you. I do so with my WiFi link.

Clicking on the Gkrellm status monitor for it will bring it up and down, after adding ifup and ifdown for that interface into the configuration.

Quote:

Unless... of course there's a quick way to establish a connection when already booted up. That would indeed be really useful. I've looked around in mcc, pressing various likely-looking buttons to do this, but they don't work for me. The other thought I had was that if I set up two profiles, and could select the appropriate one in lilo (somehow), then one could be used for home use (with LAN) and another for wandering use. I tried this, a bit, but didn't work it out. Does anyone know if there's any future in such an idea? Thanks again.

You can do the latter as well, however you might want to see if "hotplugging" works for you.

If so you can leave the interface to come up at boot.

It works!!!

Thanks, that's fantastic. I'll look into getting gkrellm to do it, but the command works a treat. Excellent.

Declan

Great!