Installing Linux for the first time (& dual boot)

Yahoo!

I went into the BIOS and wondered what PCI Bus Master was, disabled an lo and behold Lilo came up fine! Even tried rebooting a few times to see if it was luck, but no it wasn't. Now I selected Linux, and after some text scrolling, I get a black screen saying:

localhost login:
password:

I didn't know what to put under login, so I left it blank, but under password my typing doesn't show up! Is that supposed to be a password protection thing? I.e I'll type, but the cursor will stay still.

So I tried failsafe, then it said something had to be corrected (sorry don't remember) and said do it or skip it, but how could I select those? The D's were highlighted, so I tried Alt, Shift and Ctrl+D but it didn't work. Any ideas?

Very happy now. :grinthumb

OK, figured out to put my user name and password in. Now I get <greg@localhost:> What now?

Tried startx as I suppose this is the command for the GUI, but I get 'execve failed for /etc/X11/X (errno2) Any ideas?

Did a reinstall, everything works! Any particular GUI you'd recommend? As well, my mouse doesn't scroll. Also, text looks pretty bad in Konqueror.

You are probably better off with KDE.

Well done for getting further with your problem.

You can get a mouse to scroll by changing its type - see the control centre thingie in KDE.

Is there a way to uninstall Linux? May seem odd, but I was just curious as to how it worked, but don't really want to keep it on my backup drive.

Basically, unless its on the active marked primary partition (which if you are dual booting with Windows its probably isn't, i.e. C: drive will be the partition containing all the boot code and programs like NTDETECT.COM and so forth), then just delete the partition, basically, and remove any references to it in any boot loader configurations. For you, this would be in deleting your linux partition with XP's disk manager, but only after you booted it one last time to uninstall lilo using the following command:-

/sbin/lilo -u

Then just reboot and format and / or delete the partition that contains linux and the swap partition. Its as simple as that. When you get more confidence, its possible to really manage the number of operating systems on your machine so that certain ones are changing more than others and adapting to your needs. The number of operating systems on your computer can be fluid and dynamic, and can vary according to your current needs and interests.

Well, I may keep it as a point of interest. Phantasm, is that in the rescue mode DOS like command prompt? I have it on my slave HDD, so I guess all I need to do is remove Lilo and delete the partitions within XP, correct?

Yeah, people give up too easily.

You will run the /sbin/lilo in the bash command prompt of the fully booted linux system - if you can boot, that is. If not, boot from the CD and chroot to the installed system, as I described in earlier in this thread.

OK, just wanting to make sure I get this right.

1. Under the rescue command prompt do the mkdir, mount and chroot functions.

2. Delete LILO.

3. Boot into XP and format the drive.

Just to confirm, after deleting LILO I will be able to boot into XP, right?

If there is a problem doing so, you should then boot from the XP CD and go into recovery console and regenerate your MBR and bootsector, etc, using the built in commands, which are

fixboot, and
fixmbr

When you uninstall LILO, it should attempt (as far as I remember - to restore from a backup your old bootsector.) But don't rely on this, so know how to go into the recovery console before you do anything, and look at the

help

command which will tell you all about the commands there. You will need to enter the administrator password of your XP installation to gain access.

Are you about to chicken out from trying Linux or are you just wanting to know??

Well, err, umm maybe I am chicken.

Don't be afraid. I was scared the first time too. LOL its kind of like loosing your virginity. Its really cool once you get over your first impression fueled fear of it. Relax - its not gonna bite you and it does some very interesting and cool things. You can build self-booting CDs containing a tiny OS and media player software to play Divx movies on a PC with no HDD - or you can use it to modify TiVos to take larger hard disks. Its just scarey because its more complex and a litte more unfinished.

Mmm, well I'll keep it I guess. Can I format the remaining space on that drive into FAT32 so at least I have a backup space? Ever since my HDD failure a few months ago I've been practically religiously backing up LOL. One other thing, I accidentally set the mouse to something I don't have, and now I don't have a mouse to work with in Linux. Anyway to correct that? I tried switching to USB to see if it would pick it up, on startup a little windows pops up asking me to change my mouse type. I can select it, but can't figure out how to press OK, any particular keystroke? Sounds weird I know.

You can probably navigate the change mouse bit with tab and return to select, I think.

Yeah, also do make a data drive from some fat32 space. You will be able to read it in linux and windows.

OK, I'll try that. If I can read it from both and have a backup, I'll be VERY happy.

Just formatted the rest of the drive into FAT32 for backup, how do I read that partition in Linux?

OK, any brain surgery that you do in Linux is done in the command prompt. so you must open the terminal window, which will be somewhere on your desktop or in the menus. It will open a command prompt a little like an MS-DOS window.

Now, first become root, like this

su

then entering root password. Now, we need to locate the partition you want to try and mount, so you need to know that

hda - is primary master IDE device
hdb - is primary slave IDE device
hdc - is secondary master IDE device
hdd - is secondary slave IDE device

Knowing that that is the case, now we just need to confirm the partition's name, which (if we take the example of the partition being on hdb) we can investigate with this command:-

more /proc/partitions | grep "hdb"

You will see something like this:-

3 64 80043264 hdb 2733 12376 18285 8810 333 751 2176 5600 -13 442020 37312332
3 65 32764536 hdb1 1952 9956 11912 1720 8 0 8 420 0 1630 2140
3 66 1 hdb2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3 69 32764536 hdb5 36 3 43 70 0 0 0 0 0 70 70
3 70 14506663 hdb6 741 2408 6298 6940 325 751 2168 5180 0 5360 12120

Try to locate your partition, remembering that hdb1 is the first partition, etc. Look at the third column of numbers to locate the size.

Now, suppose we now decide that its hdb6 that we want - that this is our FAT32 partition. OK, now we want to mount it. To mount a device (like a partition, or a cd-rom disk or something) we need to mount it into a mount point. A mount point is a normal directory (usually containing nothing before the mount event). We create one like this:-

mkdir /mnt/fat32

now try to mount it, with this command:-

mount /dev/hdb6 /mnt/fat32

essentially, mount THIS DEVICE, into THIS POINT. Its not really that complicated. If you get an error, try the following and / or think again about what you are doing:-

mount -t vfat /dev/hdb6 /mnt/fat32

Now, if this works, change directory into /mnt/fat32 with this command

cd /mnt/fat32

if you do a

ls

command, you will get a listing of the contents. Is that all of your stuff? Good. Now, we want to make the partition be always mounted when we boot up, to do this we will need to edit a configuration file called /etc/fstab, which stands for file system table.

Here is what /etc/fstab looks like :-

/dev/hda5 / ext2 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
/dev/hda6 /games vfat uid=500 0 0
/dev/hdb5 /images vfat uid=500 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hdb6 /home ext2 defaults 1 2
/dev/hdb1 /vault vfat uid=500 0 0
/dev/hda1 /win9x vfat uid=500 0 0
/dev/hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /dvd-rom udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/cdrom1 /cd-rw udf,iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/ataraid/d1p6 /raidstripe ntfs ro,uid=500 0 0


You want to add an entry to tell linux to automatically mount the device with certain parameters each time. try creating an entry like this:-

/dev/hdb6 /mnt/fat32 vfat uid=500 0 0

(note that the mount points can be anywhere, not just in /mnt, but that's the convention. I normally choose to break it these days....)

BUT WAIT! You should first get the uid if you are logging on a a user other than root (which you should be!!!!!) to get both write and read access. If your account name is paul, try this:

cat /etc/passwd | grep "paul"

you will see something like this:-

paul:x:500:500::/home/paul:/bin/bash

Take a note of that number and use it in your /etc/fstab file in the uid= bit above. If you are (in the bad habbit of) only logging in as root, then use this command:-

cat /etc/passwd | grep "root"

to get the information that you need.

post back here if you need any more help.