help: lilo v. grub, mouse driver spastic, what happened?

[Greg Rundlett]

> You can use the script grub-install to put the grub loader into the MBR
> of the first IDE drive by:
>
>     grub-install /dev/hda
>

Thanks for your help Bill.  I did this, and grub didn't complain, so that is
good.

Whether or not grub-install fixed anything, I think I uncovered the 'root'
of all my problems...I recall that while I was attempting to tweak my
network settings, and httpd.conf, I also changed /etc/hosts.  (I wanted to
give my computer a cheesy name like 'brie' instead of
'localhost.localdomain'.)  I guess I did it wrong, because the host was not
resolving, and that is what led X to fail, since it could not resolve the
host of the Xserver.  I added localhost.localdomain back to the /etc/hosts
file, and presto everything is working again.

It's hard to understand how this one issue could manifest itself in so many
ways (from desktop to mouse and bootloader).  I definitely have to read up
on the hostname setting, and how that impacts the system.

- Greg