hard disk free to install

[teacher]

(....but my command of the more colorful side of the english language has really improved..even created a few new words ..but I'm  still not where I want to be in my knowledge of Linux

We will take your word on it for this one!

[striker]

that's where the forums come in, to help each other where one can. You know Barry, imho one can only learn the ins and outs when he switches for once and for all to the penguin.That way you' ll have to learn those things whether you'd like it or not.Way back then we had to do it in windows,and after all those years we managed to get the habit of it.(That does not imply of course we all know it! I believe we never end up to learn .)

[Ozidave]

Isn't it funny that Linux users seem to have a LOT more to give and a lot more patience when it comes to helping those who ask for it.Or is this my imagination..?

[BarryB]

Dave I think that is true of this forum in particular but spreading...But I think that is true of Scots forums regardless of OS....(at least that is what I have seen)...Julia...Colorful..not profane(or unusually intelligent for that matter)..my kids love it when Daddy talks to his computer's...LOL(at least THEY realize won't answer, I have yet to hit that peek...I keep trying)Stryder...Hey I learn that way too..the forums..helping guiding.... prodding..., and if it's to easy it doesn't stick..I have to have that hands on..having to seek answers (if I like it or not) to learn..(maybe it's a character issue )

[striker]

Well I think it all comes down to character.Not just that easy giving up but searching a way to get ones problem solved, even if that means asking for help.Well, why shouldn't we ask for help if the needs arises?I for sure dunno all and I'm very glad I dunno all!Otherwise I wouldn't have any question left to be asked Barry, I see you're making a little mistake in answering the posts : me I'm striker, Stryder is another respectfull highlander ...

[BarryB]

I knew that...really ..Sorry mental process over took visual input

[Ozidave]

But I think that is true of Scots forums regardless of OS....(at least that is what I have seen)...

I wouldn't dispute that for one minute, and it's a credit to all involved. It's just the atmosphere of those involved here with Linux that makes it seem a little bit different.I suppose it's because you don't see anyone criticising or ranting about the OS, even though it's a bit quirky. I don't know.. maybe I'm just getting older too.. But I do know one thing.. It's 1.00am and I'm OFF to the sack!

[striker]

I knew that...really  ..Sorry mental process over took visual input

no problem at all

[striker]

The new hard disk drive has arrived ! So next week I have a lot of work to do

[Ozidave]

I knew that...really ..Sorry mental process over took visual input

Hi Barry,My brain has trouble Multi-Tasking at times also, so you're NOT an orphan.

[Ozidave]

The new hard disk drive has arrived !  So next week I have a lot of work to do

Hi Striker,Don't forget to keep us informed with the good bits and not just the bad bits.

[teacher]

Here's to a brilliant install time. One that runs as smooth as possible without any hiccups. Let us know when the install party will be held.

[striker]

I'll keep you posted when the fun begins ...

[striker]

I'm removing Yoper from my initial install plans for the coming weeks, and replace it with MandrakeLinux 10 Official .How's that move ?Why ? Well, it showed up in the last week that Yoper did not do some basic fundamental things right out of the box which I see as normal or standard.Maybe these abnormalities are bugs,but I don't dare to call them that way,let's just settle on abnormalities for now, for reason that this is a *** of a box to get a linux distro installed on.As it stands now, these are planned to be ready for take off :SimplyMepis 2004.01Redhat 9Mandrake 9.1 PersonalMandrakeLinux 10 OfficialSuSE 9.1 Pro (FTP)All were tested OK on this box except the MandrakeLinux 10 Official, at which I'm in the middle of downloading right now. So I've got a few days left to test that one on this rig too. If it shows to be a no-go (which I don't hope ! ) I shall replace it with another one.

[Bruno]

Looks like a good list to me Striker . . . . ( and for the Drake 10 Official: there will be a 10.1 official in 4 weeks from now, the community 10.1 is just released ) Bruno

[striker]

Bruno,Nice to see you around again, did you have a good week?Regarding the MandrakeLinux 10 Official : I'll see what is does on the machine in the coming days, if it goes like planned I'll stick to it for now.If not,then maybe the 10.1 is another candidate, or maybe as a supplement... nr.6 in row ?

[Bruno]

did you have a good week?

excellent . . thank you ! . . . ;) Bruno

[striker]

I tested MandrakeLinux 10 Official : it was a disaster.Kind of reminded me of the 9.0 version.The install program refused to install lilo on the floppy,tried it with 3 different floppies from which one was a brand new one out of the box.It just always gave an error about destroying some base file system...? :hmm:I couldn't get a basically normal graphical display,it was a (estimated) 640x480 one at 75 Hz, normally I have at least a 1024x768 at 85 Hz, it simply refused to accept the values I gave the installer and reverted to its own values.The screen looked like I was staring at a square with rounded planes, almost ellipse.Never saw that before in any distro.I tried to do a xvidtune,It started alright, but then after doing some "right" commands, the mouse cursor vanished.I tried what I could (3 times) to no avail,had to do a ALT-CTRL-Backspace to get back to text mode.Fixed the MBR to get rid of the lilo entry, end of a short story. BTW : 9.0 wouldn't work either, 9.1 works flawlessly.

[teacher]

Were you following the tip for the larger file on a floppy? Most boot disks require the 1.7 format rather than the 1.4.

[striker]

No, there was no advice during the install or something like that.If that was necessary the installer should have told me so or given me an option to do so,but there was nothing at all.Further more, I was perusing Bruno's thread about Mandrake 10 and I saw a few remarks in there about a bug in the installer, but also a remark to add some packages during install.About the bug I did know that,but adding the packages during install I had simply forgotten. So when I have time I'm going to retry once more and beforehand I'll format a 1.72 MB floppy.I have printed out Bruno's thread and some other tips which I will use during my second attempt. Furthermore the installer didn't show me some screens which I saw in Bruno's thread, which would have given me a few more options...and secondly, I thought my monitor was almost killed when I saw the screen after install ,never saw this before during any install in the last 1.5 years of any linux distro.This is no good. I'll be back on this when I have more to report.Anyway, thanks for the floppy-tip Julia !

[Bruno]

Keep us posted Striker . . . . I am curious how this evolves . . Bruno

[Ozidave]

Hi Striker,I pinched this quote of Bruno's from another thread, by the time I installed the URL to it, it would have taken up the same amount of space... I wonder if you are suffering something of the same type of problem... It was my experience with Yoper that it 'wanted' 3 partitions... Home / Swap / Root while Mandrake only wanted two? I think SuSE would have run with two also... but I told it to make Home 10G / Swap 1G / Root 25G. Anyway... Bruno's Quote and food for thought!

- When installing SUSE, did you have partitions prepared ( by Drake ) and did you install it on the last partition ? ( SUSE is picky about this, because sometimes it forces you to delete the partition and recreate it . . this causes the numbering ( hda1, hda2, hda3 ) of the partitions to change and results in a corrupt multiboot of the other distros you have on that HD )

[striker]

Hi Dave,thanks for the heads up. I knew that from SuSE, it sort of likes to have its own manors, so to speak.But there are ways to let it behave.

It was my experience with Yoper that it 'wanted' 3 partitions... Home / Swap / Root while Mandrake only wanted two?  I think SuSE would have run with two also... but I told it to make Home 10G / Swap 1G / Root 25G. Anyway... Bruno's Quote and food for thought!

Well, I partitioned in front of the install process, so all I can say is that I directed Yoper to the right partitions. Reason why I'm dumping it right now is because there were a few "abnormalities" in there which there shouldn't have been, things which were eating at its basic functionality.Some people can live with that, but I'm not one of them.MandrakeLinux o.t.o.h wanted 3 partitions, /boot, /root and /home : please keep in mind that it actually wants 4, but in my case I already had a common swap partition which I believe it detected ok and therefore not mentioned any further during install (at least I haven't seen it).SuSE just needs 2 partitions in its default install, but that will leave you with a huuuuge /root partition, in which there also happens to be the opt directory, and that could be to turn out a problem later on, if you install a lot of other applications, which will install themselves into just this opt directory.So i believe it would be better to create a separated /opt partition. Maybe Bruno or someone else van confirm/correct this ?

[striker]

Success at last !After the tips in the former post I decided to give MandrakeLinux 10 Official one more try, and I succeeded.First I followed to the letter, the tips Bruno gave in his excellent thread about installing it,and I installed the extra packages via Individual Package Selection, except xterm which was nowhere to be found : later on the installer asked for cd4 which I never saw on the download site (nluug) nor on Mandrakes, so I canceled that one. (imho this installer sucks in a way that a new kid who never did any linux before probably is able to hose his system without knowing, or he ends up with a completely useless system.That's no good as Mandrake is aimed at new kids too.How's a new kid to overcome these problems ? ) And there were some more glitches, but read on.With the tips above and with Julia's tip about the 1,722 MB floppy, I was now able to direct the bootloader (lilo) to a floppy disc, which I formatted before the install in Mandrake 9.1 at 1,772MB.Problem still persists the installer didn't show any option screen during install whether to install or nor or to hda or floppy;I managed to correct it to install it to the floppy disc at the summary screen at the end of install phase.But that's the wrong place to do so...It even left my MBR untouched this time ...Then came the reboot : I opted for a runlevel 3 of course, to be able to correct things later on if something went wrong.After logging in I did a startx and there it was : kde, or at least something like that.It was a black square on the screen (yes, this time it was square, not sort of ellipse as in my previous post) and in there was a colored kde screen at about 640 x 480, even while I opted for 1024 x 768 during install. I opened up a konsole and then did xvidtune,adjusted the settings but then again the mouse cursor vanished.Duh ! Well, there are more ways to knock off a chickens head, so I logged out and back in as root,fired up my beloved kedit (well, it's my personal favorite,ymmv of course, I like to keep things simple when possible.) and opened up Xf86conf-4. From previous Mandrake and Redhat experiences I knew I had to put in a modeline there and to do some tweaking.So I did that and resaved the file. The monitor section now looks like this :Section "Monitor" Identifier "monitor1" HorizSync 31.5-69.0 VertRefresh 51-90 # Sony Vaio C1(X,XS,VE,VN)? # 1024x480 @ 85.6 Hz, 48 kHz hsync ModeLine "1024x480" 65.00 1024 1032 1176 1344 480 488 494 563 -hsync -vsync # TV fullscreen mode or DVD fullscreen output. # 768x576 @ 79 Hz, 50 kHz hsync ModeLine "768x576" 50.00 768 832 846 1000 576 590 595 630 # 768x576 @ 100 Hz, 61.6 kHz hsync ModeLine "768x576" 63.07 768 800 960 1024 576 578 590 616 # 1024x768 @ 85.6 Hz, 69 kHz hsync ModeLine "1024x768" 94.50 1024 1088 1184 1376 768 769 772 808 +hsync +vsyncEndSectionThe #1024x768 and what follows and the HorizSync and VertRefresh did the trick, the installer would just not let me put in these values or it would not stick, but be warned that you should do that only and only if you know exactly all the parameters that go in there and that they are all absolutely correct.Now I'm looking at a fairly normal screen as used to be like in other distros.Beats me why MandrakeLinux 10 Official still sucks at this point, it did so in 9.0 allready. 9.1 was OK ...go figure. (Maybe because they stripped the nVidia options,normally the installer would detect my chip on the grapics card as a nvXX, this time only as nv but it was not selected by default.It defaulted to a Geforce 2 DDR which is correct, but a nvXX would even be more correct.In the previous install I tried that to correct, but it would end up with an error screen.)While rebooting I saw something else : lilo showed up after booting from floppy disc with a linux option, a few more options and... a 263-7 option. The linux option would give me a misconfigured screen later on so I cancelled that one out to use at boot,therefore I always have to choose the third option which is this 263-7 : what is this, 263 sheeps and 7 herders or what is it?Ah, an indication of the kernel used,ah now I see... but shouldn't that be 2.6.3-7mdk, like a uname -r in a konsole showed me? Why did I have to guess what this meaned?Well, it works, after some tweaking this and that. Speaking of tweaking, let's go to linuxconf and kde,to so some tweaking...the mouse cursor.Hmm, a bit tiny for my eyesight, oops ...there are some cursor schemes, that's nice.But what does all these schemes result in, only 3 or 4 out of a total of say 10 or 11 show a preview of that particular scheme? Well, guess work does have to do the trick again, so read what the scheme has to offer, if that does explain something of how it will look like, and choose that one. Off course you'll have to restartx to be able to see what you choosed as mouse cursor, and if you don't like it you'll have to go through that circus again and select another mouse cursor scheme.BTW : The mouse was misdetected, I had to change that to Explorer/PS ,it's a Log**** MX300 wheel mouse.From now on, no more vanishing mouse cursor.(It detected the mouse as IMPS2, which may be correct in some distros, but obviously not this time.I remembered another distro where I had to change it to Explorer/PS, don't know at the moment which distro it was.)Well, here we are then, a working MandrakeLinux 10 Official at this rig. Can't say I'm under the impression, but ok, at least I got it working and usable. That leaves the option of reinstalling it again and then choosing the 2.4 kernel option, but I doubt it will be much better, or am I wrong here? I know there will be some more things wrong entering the surface while using MandrakeLinux 10 Official, only time will tell if I give it that time. I did a few updates to see if the connection would be established, and lo and behold it connected to nluug and updated without any errors.I then opted to log out and switch off the computer, that way I could glean at some nice error messages/warnings about a wrong keyboard or something alike.Nice, indeed very nice...never saw that before in all the distros I laid my hands on.Then a few hours later I thought let's copy the XF86config file to a floppy disc as backup, guess what?Even while root I was not allowed to do so, I checked the permissions,they were ok, but it simply refused to obey.Guess what...copying to the C:\ drive on that other distro (while that's far more dangerous if you ask me) worked like a charme.And yes, the floppy disc was mounted.I even umounted it and again mounted it to no avail.Well, at the end of this little install review, you will know without doubt that I'm not under the impression of this distro.As a matter of fact, I never was of any of the distros from these guys at France.Maybe you've got a better suited computer, but let me tell you this, before anyone starts critisizing :way back then I built a new computer with the better components available, then a three months later came Mandrake 9.0 PowerPack Edition, which was a complete disaster on this rig.Now we are a few years later, and all I see is still a buggy installer and misdetecting this and that and some misconfigurations here and there. I'm very sorry with the fans over here, but you'll never get me turned over to be a fan of this brand.They had enough time to iron out all of the bugs and abnormalities, but there are still some bugs in here which shouldn't be here anymore.And don't tell me "why didn't you buy the PowerPack", I did that once...Here stops my critics about this brand for now and forever, so let's go on and take another distro.

[Bruno]

Well, Striker . . . at least you did get it installed this time . . . Bravo ! ( And I guess you will be running back to SUSE . . . ) Bruno

[striker]

Well Bruno,SuSE continues to be my main distro, and of course Mandrake 9.1 will be part of the install coming week also. Strange how one single distro just works flawlessly, while the previous one and the one that comes after that single distro don't, even while they're the same brand and the machine is the same.Meanwhile I'll do some more playing with 10 and intend to have a look at D*** Small Linux.

[Ozidave]

(imho this installer sucks in a way that a new kid who never did any linux before probably is able to hose his system without knowing, or he ends up with a completely useless system. That's no good as Mandrake is aimed at new kids too. How's a new kid to overcome these problems? ) And there were some more glitches.

Hi Striker,I agree. But -Any- Linux is a real turn-off for anyone wanting to just install a 'different' or free OS.. For the amount of work and frustration that has to be put into it, MOST will opt NOT to bother and either purchase Windows or Pirate it. I've taken it off myself... some of it was fun... most of it wasn't.. I had SuSE running like a Swiss-Watch and enjoyed up-dating, configuring, and generally playing with it. But! I can do that with Win too. In my opinion "there are too many Linux Distro's to choose from", and none of them are finished, and one would have to want to install Linux as a challenge, rather than an alternative OS.I would also suggest that Linux is not a good OS for anyone on 56k, as SuSE needed / wanted over a 100MB of upgrades, and most of them were security issues. There is so much downloading to be done.... So! for the moment I've said goodbye to Linux and will go back to having regular hours, regular meals, and normal BED-TIMES! :hmm: PS: By the time I'm 60, I may want to look at it again... For something to do.

[BarryB]

Dave,,,So when are ya gonna be 60 ...

[Ozidave]

Dave,,,So when are ya gonna be 60     ...

Not that far away from it now.... It's in my 'Profile'..

[striker]

mmm, I know what you mean Dave.There's a normal life too and of course the family. And then there was linux...if you don't separate those into workable proportions, you'll need 30 hours a day.That means today hitting the sack later and tomorrow getting up earlier, how do you get at those 30 hours else?And so it goes day in and day out,week in week out.Then one day the door smashes...WAM ! A little voice coming from behind the door screaming "You've got a wife too, ...." ; Yes, I know what you mean.SuSE, the Swiss Knife...yep,that may be thrue for you and me, but nor for someone other.But why don't you use a clean install and start over again?And do not bother with the other distros again,if you like SuSE then go for it and grab it .To me SuSE has it, and it just plain works like a Swiss Watch, ticking and ticking (no,not a timebomb !) and doing exactly that what it should do when I want it to do.For all fairness, it even could become my main distro and ditching W**** for once and for all.I'm studying on that but I've got some other hurdles to take like what they at work want me to be able to do on the machine.But as I said, I'm studying on it...

I would also suggest that Linux is not a good OS for anyone on 56k, as SuSE needed / wanted over a 100MB of upgrades, and most of them were security issues. There is so much downloading to be done....

Well Dave, that was only the first and maybe the second time doing upgrades, but that applies to that other OS too after you did a clean install. The last couple of weeks there were either no updates or just one or two little ones, but I have to agree I've still not forgotten the time I sat in front of the pc when I was updating this or that while I still had dial up...

In my opinion "there are too many Linux Distro's to choose from", and none of them are finished, and one would have to want to install Linux as a challenge, rather than an alternative OS.

I believe SuSE 9.1 Pro can do it, I mean as an alternative OS.The others : you might be right here Dave, but the challenge for me is not the challenge on its own,but more the persistance to install it on this rig, or better said to have a look if it gets installed and how.So I'm looking for an alternative OS which I feel comfortable with and SuSE happens to be one of those.What I see is that there are indeed some distros that seem not to be finished, but also distros for which you have to pay money (and sometimes a lot) which claim to be "........." (fill in your self) and then the particular distro in question just leaves you with say a not-so-comfortable feeling afterwards, so you did in fact throw your money to the bin.And that's a thing you may be able to do once or twice, but then it gets very frustrating and questionable.That's one of the problems with this alternative OS which should be ironed out asap.Furthermore I just settle on 4 or 5 of these alternatives on the machine.Let the others be what they are, I don't need them.To find the right ones, that's the challenge ! Because there are ones which are Mandrake based, or Debian based or Redhat based etc. This week we'll see what it brings, keep following these posts and you'll see. UpdateD*** Small linux looks very good to me, but not as a full featured OS, maybe as "filler" but it's very nice, looks very promising to me .(I'm speaking of the 0.80 version, not the next ones).I'm downloading Libranet 2.8.1 now from here http://download.libranet.co.uk/ , in the past I tested the 2.7 classic version which was nice but a little old.So maybe there will be another candidate but I can't know beforehand right now. And there's Aurox too, those two are the last I'm going to test drive.If it's no good to me,then I'll stick with what I have now. (and by then I've ran out of cdr's again ) This week we'll see.