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Re: Newbie installation questions



On Sun, Apr 23, 2000 at 04:07:26PM -0700, Eric Hagglund wrote:
>   Is
> > it possible to set up the boot floppy so that the system does boot
> > from it, but once it does, transfers to the Linux kernal on the hard
> > drive (/dev/hdb1)?  Is that a sensible question?
> Sure! As soon as the floppy goes to the LILO prompt, you have a couple
> of seconds in which to pass boot options. This is where you need to
> type the parameters for the kernel you need to boot (see the
> Installation HOW TO which should be in your machine on usr/doc/HOWTO;
> I'd love to give you the details on how this is done, but I've never
> done this myself and you asked a bunch of other questions to which I
> do have more exact answers)

Once you get man-db installed, read the man page on LILO for how to
install it one /dev/hda and give you the option to boot windows off of
/dev/hda1 or Linux off of /dev/hdb1.  Booting off a floppy is a little
slowing than booting off of the hard drive.

> > 2. My installation does not recognize the Linux "man" command.  How
> > can I install it, and the man pages for system commands?
> 
> The presence or absence of man commands should be determined by the
> options you choose for documentation at the time of the install. Are
> you getting "no man page exists for (command) or are you getting
> "command not found". If the former, check dselect for the desired
> documention. If the latter, you probably need to retrace your steps in
> installing the software.

Install man-db.

> > 3. How can I mount my Win98 FAT32 partition on startup?  It mounts
> > fine after Linux boots up if I enter the command "mount -t msdos
> > /dev/hda1 /mnt/win98".
> You can mount your fat partition at startup by inserting the text
> above into two files in the /etc directory. These are respectively
> mtab and fstab.  Again, the instructions for this can be accessed from
> the  HOWTOs that should be present on your hard drive under
> usr/doc/HOWTO or, assuming that you were able to get a standard
> install with X Windows, you should also be able to get to this by
> clicking on your start menu - applications - tools - Debian On Line
> Help or, try http://www.linux.org/help/ldp/howto/howto.html

Don't bother editing /etc/mtab.  It'll just get clobbered the next time
you reboot or if you (u)mount something like /dev/fd0.

You'll probably want to mount a win98 partition with vfat, not msdos.
I guess you have a newer kernel that understands fat32...

> > 4. When I boot Linux, I get a message about hdb1, the Linux hard
> > drive on my system, not having been cleanly unmounted.  How do I
> > shut down Linux so that the Linux partition is cleanly unmounted?
> If you are in X, pull up an xterm session by clicking on the picture
> of the monitor. If you want to safely shut down your system type :
> 
> shutdown now -h
> 
> This will shut down and halt your system.

also, halt or poweroff do the same thing (on Linux).  You'll need a
kernel with APM support to actually get the machine to turn off.

> If you want to reboot to Windows type: 
> 
> shutdown now -r

aka reboot

> This will shut down linux and reboot your system. It's very important
> that you properly shutdown your machine properly. This is one area
> where Linux and Windows differ greatly. If files are left open before
> Linux has a chance to write them to disk, they can be corrupted. If
> this happens to a crucial system files or the partition table, you
> could be looking at a major problem.

> > 5. I've installed release 4.0 of XFree86, and run xf86config.  When
> > I enter "startx", I get the message "xinit: error in loading shared
> > libraries.  libXmu.so.6: cannot open shared object file: no such
> > file or directory".  I can "find" libXmu.so.6 in directory
> > /usr/X11R6/lib.  How do I tell the system where this file is
> > located?
> 
> I'm not sure how to fix this problem and will defer to those more
> knowlegable on the fix (you probably need to edit inittab to run
> startx by default or something); but a workaround in the short run
> would be to try starting X by typing xdm at the command prompt.  You
> will need to be logged in as root to do this, but it will take you to
> a graphical login where you can use your own (safer) user id. You
> might also have wdm, which I prefer because there are more options
> available. 
>  

Since XFree86 4.0 isn't packaged yet, I assume you picked it up from
Xfree website.  You should install all software that isn't part of
Debian in either /usr/local or /opt (or /home for testing). Running
ldconfig might fix that problem.  You should follow the instructions for
INSTALL with the tarball.  I would humbly suggest you not use 4.0 yet
unless you really need it (for support of a particular card).  And,
you'll need to give us a few more details about how you installed 4.0.

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