Click to visit our sponsors!

homeGeek CultureWebstoreeCards!Forums!Joy of Tech!AY2K!webcam

  The Geek Culture Forums
  Ask a Geek!
  I have installed, now what?

Post New Topic  Post A Reply
profile | register | preferences | faq | search

UBBFriend: Email This Page to Someone! next newest topic | next oldest topic
Author Topic:   I have installed, now what?
Swiss Mercenary
BlabberMouth, the Next Generation.

Posts: 1461
From: All the way from the land of Chocolate, Cheese and Cuckoo Clocks.
Registered: Feb 2000

posted February 01, 2001 11:54     Click Here to See the Profile for Swiss Mercenary   Click Here to Email Swiss Mercenary     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Just installed Linux Mandrake 7.1 on my portable, managed to get it dual-booting with the Win2K partition as well.

Ok, great I now have Linux, just one thing, where do I go from here?

I would like to work with the system, but am a bit daunted as where to start.

Totally confused in Switzerland

IP: Logged

Migrant Programmer
Alpha Geek

Posts: 255
From: Waterloo, Canada
Registered: Jan 2000

posted February 01, 2001 12:58     Click Here to See the Profile for Migrant Programmer   Click Here to Email Migrant Programmer     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Play with it =)

Work with it, tweak it, do what you want to do with it.. what do you plan to use it for? Install the software you need to use on it.

Post to the forums with Netscape on it =) unless you did that with this topic?

There are a bunch of configuration things you can do too. Adding users, setting up preferences, configuring network services and such. Security stuff.

IP: Logged

Swiss Mercenary
BlabberMouth, the Next Generation.

Posts: 1461
From: All the way from the land of Chocolate, Cheese and Cuckoo Clocks.
Registered: Feb 2000

posted February 01, 2001 13:34     Click Here to See the Profile for Swiss Mercenary   Click Here to Email Swiss Mercenary     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Ok, I have another problem now this time to do with Win2K.

I managed to setup a multi-boot so that I can choose to run Linux or Win2K at boot time. Trouble is that everytime I start up Win2K it tells me that one of the disks need to be checked and it tries to run a chkdsk. I let it do this once and it @%&#ed up the boot and I had to re-install Linux.

So now everytime I start up Win2K I get this question, one day I am sure that I will let it run and have the whole mess start again.

Any idea what I can do?

IP: Logged

Mr Bill
Alpha Geek

Posts: 315
From: currently in orbit
Registered: Oct 2000

posted February 01, 2001 17:52     Click Here to See the Profile for Mr Bill   Click Here to Email Mr Bill     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
That's odd, I had a dual boot system with RedHat5 and 98se. 98 never saw the RH partition.
Methinks the boys in Redmond are doing naughty things with 2K.
Check out Maximum Linux magazine (if you can get it in your area) for ideas. This issue they built an MP3 player for a car.

------------------
Life Rule #1: Don't sweat the small stuff.
Life Rule #2: It's all small stuff.

IP: Logged

Swiss Mercenary
BlabberMouth, the Next Generation.

Posts: 1461
From: All the way from the land of Chocolate, Cheese and Cuckoo Clocks.
Registered: Feb 2000

posted February 02, 2001 05:41     Click Here to See the Profile for Swiss Mercenary   Click Here to Email Swiss Mercenary     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I found this, so now I am sitting down to read it.

I just hope that I do not have to re-install the machine from scratch

IP: Logged

supaboy
SuperBlabberMouth!

Posts: 1242
From: Columbia, SC, USA
Registered: Jan 2000

posted February 02, 2001 08:30     Click Here to See the Profile for supaboy   Click Here to Email supaboy     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
quote:
Originally posted by Swiss Mercenary:
Ok, great I now have Linux, just one thing, where do I go from here?

I would like to work with the system, but am a bit daunted as where to start.


Like Migrant Programmer said, what do you want to do with it?

I would start small and work your way up. Learn how to install packages with the package managers (both graphical and text). Learn how to install a program from source (it's usually not much more than ./configure, make, and make install at a command line). Set up your network connection over dialup or LAN. Find a copy of the Linux Newbie Administrator Guide. Change your desktop background. Download 26MB of Propaganda tiles and find a program that'll change your background every hour. Run your own webserver, but set it up so that TCP Wrappers only lets in your laptop. Learn how to stop unnecessary services, by themselves or if they're getting started via the inetd daemon (ditch telnet and get comfy with ssh!). Set up a caching DNS server to speed up name resolution on sites you visit a lot (Geekculture!). Teach yourself some Perl and Python and C if you don't know them yet. Note: it's not a requirement that Perl code look like executable line noise. Write a Perl or shell script that finds the IDs of crashed Netscape processes, and kill -9 'em. Or a killall alias that does the same thing. Set up your machine to download all of your POP mail into a local IMAP server, and then use different mail clients on different days of the week. Seek out procmail recipies to deal with spam. Download new kernel source from kernel.org, and compile it. Set up lilo so that you can boot either the old one or the new one. Compile your peripheral drivers as modules, and learn how to install and remove them from a running kernel. Laugh with glee because Microsoft couldn't do that until last year! Well, okay, the toy Windows could do that with USB already. Find NTP so your computer's clock can be set to within milliseconds of UTC. Find a Linux User Group in Geneva (er, the link was bad when I tried it, though). Surprise someone who doesn't know what Linux and Unix look like these days (I did that at work to some ex-programmers who didn't realize that Unix didn't stand still after they quit using it for Windows on desktops). Remember the early days of microcomputers, where everyone was something of a programmer, even if it was just typing in the code out of Compute!? Type in and compile a Hello, World! program simply because your Linux distro came with the tools to do it. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?

-supaboy, getting a little carried away at the end there.

IP: Logged

Swiss Mercenary
BlabberMouth, the Next Generation.

Posts: 1461
From: All the way from the land of Chocolate, Cheese and Cuckoo Clocks.
Registered: Feb 2000

posted February 02, 2001 11:09     Click Here to See the Profile for Swiss Mercenary   Click Here to Email Swiss Mercenary     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Wow, thanks for the advice supaboy, but I have to go back to set one and re-install my whole machine now.

The thing is that the boot sector for 'hda' is now messed up and I am unable to boot directly into Win2K and set up a multi-boot towards Linux which is the only way to do it so that Micro$haft Win2K does not try to run chkdsk on the harddisk each time and @&#* up the booting.

I did an autoinstall with the Mandrake 7.1 and so LILO was set up on hda instead of hda5 where my /root was thus overwriting the M$ stuff.
Now unless I can rebuild the booting process somehow, I am going to have to backup, reformat and reinstall.

I suppose that at least I can still access my Win2K stuff via the GRUB/LILO OS Chooser.

IP: Logged

supaboy
SuperBlabberMouth!

Posts: 1242
From: Columbia, SC, USA
Registered: Jan 2000

posted February 05, 2001 07:53     Click Here to See the Profile for supaboy   Click Here to Email supaboy     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Hmmm... There might be a way to tell lilo or grub to use /dev/hda5 instead, and then use the WinNT repair option to fix the boot sector, and then edit boot.ini to also boot Linux.

I've never played with making Linux dual-boot, though. Never had a PC that I could straddle the fence with, so to speak.

IP: Logged

Swiss Mercenary
BlabberMouth, the Next Generation.

Posts: 1461
From: All the way from the land of Chocolate, Cheese and Cuckoo Clocks.
Registered: Feb 2000

posted February 05, 2001 09:24     Click Here to See the Profile for Swiss Mercenary   Click Here to Email Swiss Mercenary     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
The repair option of Win2K does not re-install the boot sector, you have to reformat the HD for that if you want Win2K to do a re-installation.

I am going to try this bootmanager and see if that will get me out of trouble.

I will report back on my fun and games.

IP: Logged

MrMachineCode
Super Geek

Posts: 207
From: -, Oklahoma, USA
Registered: Dec 2000

posted February 05, 2001 18:55     Click Here to See the Profile for MrMachineCode   Click Here to Email MrMachineCode     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Your problem with Win2k f*cking up your Linux operating system reminds me of a problem I once had with Windows 98. I had a 500 meg drive bootable to Win98, and I wanted to put in a 1.6 Gig drive as my new C drive, bumping the 500 meg drive to letter D. Since this was my first experience installing Win98 (the 500 meg drive was 2nd hand with Win98 already on it) I didn't want to modify the known-good 500 meg at all, so that I could just put everything back to the way it was before if I made a mistake with my 1.6 gig drive. Well, I did make a mistake while setting up Win98 on my 1.6 gig drive--I had written down my registration key incorrectly, and couldn't continue the install. Simple matter; just put the 500 meg back, and hack the registry to get the correct key. (If you ever need to do this, it's: Start menu - Run - regedit - edit menu - find - search for "ProductKey".) So I took out the 1.6 gig and put my 500 meg back. I restarted and got the dreaded "Invalid boot disk" error on my previously good 500 meg drive. WTF??? After I recovered conciousness, I grabbed a bootable floppy and examined the 500 meg HD, quickly discovering a horrifying fact. I had not removed the 500 meg HD during the Win98 install on my C drive; I had left it in the system as the D drive--I'd naively asssumed that since I was installing onto the C drive, my D drive would be left alone. Not so. Windows 98 setup had removed all of the system files (MSDOS.SYS, IO.SYS, COMMAND.COM) from my D drive, and wiped out the boot sector of said drive.


The only reason I'm here today, and not in prison for attempting to slice Bill Gates's head off with a Windows 98 CD, was that I was able to use sys.com to transfer the system files from the bootable floppy to the 500 meg, and that patched up most of the damage that setup had done. (It didn't patch up all the damage done by Win 98 setup; to do that, I would have needed a Linux install disk.) The moral of this story: Windows was designed by apes, and you can expect them to want to monkey with everything in your system.


I guess I should have put this in the rants section.

IP: Logged

Swiss Mercenary
BlabberMouth, the Next Generation.

Posts: 1461
From: All the way from the land of Chocolate, Cheese and Cuckoo Clocks.
Registered: Feb 2000

posted February 06, 2001 06:08     Click Here to See the Profile for Swiss Mercenary   Click Here to Email Swiss Mercenary     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Continuing the saga.

I have managed to actually get back to where I started from. After a week of trying, I am now back to step one, though without losing and data.

I managed to restore the Master Boot Record (MBR) using fdisk (fdisk /mbr) and so it now boots up correctly to Win2K.
The only problem is that I do not get the boot loader at the start, it goes straight into Win2K server without asking me which OS I want to use.

So now I am re-installing Linux, this time putting the LILO on the correct partition. Then I have to see if I can the dual-boot to work correctly. Weeeeeeeee!

IP: Logged

Swiss Mercenary
BlabberMouth, the Next Generation.

Posts: 1461
From: All the way from the land of Chocolate, Cheese and Cuckoo Clocks.
Registered: Feb 2000

posted February 06, 2001 09:36     Click Here to See the Profile for Swiss Mercenary   Click Here to Email Swiss Mercenary     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Yay! Finally seems to be working correctly. I now get boot menu when I start the portable and can choose to start Win2K or Mandrake.

Had to do an 'Expert' installation to ensure that nothing was written to the boot sector (hda) and then followed the instructions set out by Little White Dog.
It was finding that damn boot.ini file that took me time. I had to unhide it using the command line (attrib -s -h boot.ini) before it would show up in the explorer.

Now down to business, see how long it will take me to mess up my disk again.

IP: Logged

101010101
Newbie

Posts: 6
From: Columbus Ohio
Registered: Feb 2001

posted February 18, 2001 17:03     Click Here to See the Profile for 101010101   Click Here to Email 101010101     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
dude.. add to /etc/lilo.conf

other=/dev/(ntfs partition)
label=win2k

then at the #
type "/sbin/lilo"
(without the "s)

-h

IP: Logged

All times are Pacific Time

next newest topic | next oldest topic

Administrative Options: Close Topic | Archive/Move | Delete Topic
Post New Topic  Post A Reply
Hop to:

Contact Us | Geek Culture Home Page

� 2002 Geek Culture� All Rights Reserved.

Powered by Infopop www.infopop.com © 2000
Ultimate Bulletin Board 5.47e

homeGeek CultureWebstoreeCards!Forums!Joy of Tech!AY2K!webcam