Hello, everyone...
First of all, I would like to say that through my use of lmce 0710, I found the software quite impressive and useful...there were glitches here and there, but in the broad sense, very cool stuff
and so I decided to try 0810 beta 2 (DVD/internet installation)
HOW I SOLVED THIS PROBLEM (step 12 is final solution):
(after going crazy with xorg.conf files, nvidia drivers, DVD installations, updates, internet installations, etc, etc for 4 days...)
well, apparently the 0710 installed fine with 1 nic, you just had to change some stuff once it was installed to work right with 1 instead of 2
but in 0810, it is a different story:
1. I installed Kubuntu 8.10 from the linuxmce DVD - install ran fine
2. sudo apt-get update - cool
3. sudo apt-get upgrade - awesome
4. Instead of running the linux mce installer script on the desktop, I used the instructions at
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/LinuxMCE-0810_beta#Internet_Installation and ran the newest install scripts from there - all three ran fine...after a while
5. after the third script, restarted...it came up with the A/V wizard just fine (if it doesnt come up, this is a DIFFERENT problem, and can usually be solved by either hooking a monitor to the VGA port, using a DVI>VGA adaptor and hooking to that, or using the A/V wizard hot keys to activate the output you desire) - no problem so far
6. because of all the problems I was having, I selected the basic UI (no gl or alpha-blending) and told it to use the VGA at 640 x 480 - obnoxious, but functional
7. after completing the AVWizard, big text started appearing telling me about every package being installed and then said "Orbiter Regeneration" and began processing that - patience time
8. after getting to about the end of stage 2, I would end up with the infamous black screen with a white mouse cursor...that moved - obnoxious... but, considering this was at least my 8th attempt, expected
9. from another computer, I attempted to access the web admin page to see if it was functional - neither
http://192.168.0.xxx or
http://192.168.80.xxx worked
10. I pressed alt+F2 and logged into tty2 and typed "ifconfig"...nothing..."ifconfig -a" brought up eth0, pan0, and lo but none had IPs
11. "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart" produced an interfaces error
***12. "sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces" showed that it was attempting to assign the static IP of 192.168.0.100 with no mask or gateway to eth0
---considering my router's DNS server starts at 0.100, that was already taken, so I modified the file to say another address that would not be in use, gave the mask of 255.255.255.0 and the gateway of 192.168.0.1...left the 192.168.80.1 stuff alone...and saved that***
13. another "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart" and "ifconfig" revealed a now functional ethernet connection
14. "sudo reboot"
15. upon reboot, the big text returned, it went through the packages to "orbiter regeneration" once again, but after the orbiter finished regenerating...it KEPT GOING!
16. it started my devices, brought up the installation wizard with the videos, went through that, brought up UI1 and I finally felt some success
17. well UI1 at 640x480 is a terrible media center...so I rebooted and held shift to restart the AVwizard...then selected the mode that I actually wanted (with alpha blending)
18. after regenerating that orbiter, it works! I have a functional installation of MCE 0810!
I really hope this solves some problems out there, because a lot of other people seem to be going insane over the exact same problem, everybody was blaming the nvidia drivers, but if thats not it, check other devices and see if things are starting up right
thank you linux community for all the assistance and knowledge that led to yet another solution