[ale] Update BellSouth/ATT, Ubuntu, & Girlfriend

[tom]

I'm pleased as punch to report success in my efforts. All things appear to 
now happily work together, and much of the headache belongs to funble 
fingered me and not the incumbent phone company, although they get a bit 
of it.

Turns out there were two separate problems, the problem I caused covering 
up the ability to figure out the lost of dsl signal from the phone co. And 
I didn't mention something that I should have, which would have clued 
others in to my ignorance. PEBCAK or whatever it is.

The computer in question had been running Fedora Core 5, quite happily 
since it wasn't connected to anything. As everyone is aware, except me, 
Fedora starts the UID sequence at 500 for normal users, while Ubuntu 
startx the UID sequence at 1000 for normal users. Since I was hoping to 
not have to recover from the backup cds for her user directory, and I 
habitually put /home on its own partition, I didn't format the /home 
partition when installing Ubuntu. The process of creating the first user 
picked up the old directory tree, but didn't update the UID values for all 
of the files. Hence, when attempting to log in as the only defined user 
(Ubuntu doesn't use root), you get permission violations on a number of 
files and can not log in to fix things. My bad, and it took a reinstall 
and an hour of gnashing of teeth and pulling hair this afternoon to figure 
that bit of stupid out. A nice recursive invocation of chown as root fixed 
things quite nicely, _ONCE_ I tumbled to the error of my ways.

The dsl link decided to be nice and rock steady this afternoon while I 
worked on the other situation, so the connectivity problem I thought I had 
was actually a problem of not being able to hook up a decent trouble 
shooting platform. Something about not changing horses in the middle of 
the stream??

In any event, the notes from ALE helped immensely in guessing that there 
were two separate problems and not two problems causing each other. My bad 
that I didn't give quite enough of the right information to narrow the 
problems down properly.

My thanks to the list, both for the bandwidth, the support, and the ideas.