[ale] First time trashing Linux

[Neal Wilkinson]

I'm a new Linux user and am running Mandrake 9.0. I've run it several months
without many problems. I upgraded my Mozilla to 1.3a and everything was fine
until I had a sudden urge to use online banking. I had originally installed
without having Personal Security Manager for some reason. It seems like the
first time the install wasn't run from a GUI so maybe that is why and I just
missed the switch. Anyhow that was several weeks ago and it has worked fine.
I downloaded the most recent "nightly build" and ran the install. It was GUI
and had PSM checked by default. The first time I tried to install it I got
about 7 error messages but they were really blank buttons, no real info
gleaned here except the install didn't work. The next time it went fine but
did ask me to uninstall the copy on the system. It did this for me
supposedly. After the install it wouldn't run so I rebooted under the
thought that doing something totally irrevelant might fix the problem. When
I boot I get a couple of error messages that I haven't had before both
related to files in /usr/bin which is where the install and removal were
taking place. I then go right to bash and never make it to KDE. Of course I
have no emergency boot disk. I created a boot floppy from another system but
it provides the same results. I have run fsck without it fixing anything but
it seems to run awfully fast. I'm not really sure where to go next and would
welcome a hint or two. Being still very Linux stupid I don't have the
mindset yet to troubleshoot effectively. The dir command won't work anymore
which I found odd but that may be something simple. ls works fine. Any idea
on where I should start? I'd be happy to provide more specific information
error messages etc. if it might help. It appears to me that the boot process
isn't finishing for some reason. Since I can't imagine how Mozilla could do
this I'm thinking that something must be corrupt. Thanks.

Neal

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