On Sun, Apr 23, 2000 at 10:22:46PM +0000, David Jenkins wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> 1. I need to keep Windows98 on the primary 12 Gbyte hard drive, and
> would like to boot Debian from a floppy. (That way, the rest of the
> family won't even know Linux is on our machine, until I get everything
> working properly.) I created a boot floppy during installation, and when
> I boot the system with it in the floppy drive, Debian does indeed come up,
> but it takes a very long time. 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?
Adding to the existing responses -- the speed of booting from a floppy
depends on what you're pulling off of the floppy disk itself. If your
boot kernel is *on* the floppy, there's going to be a significant lag
while you pull ~1MB of data from disk. Floppies are slow.
What you want to do is configure a floppy disk to provide *just* the
boot record information -- essentiall, read 512 bytes (rather than 1
MB), which point to your root partition and boot kernel, which are on
disk. See the LILO and BootDisk documentation (try
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/) for more information.
> 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 want to add this partition to your master filesystem partition
table, /etc/fstab.
/dev/hda1 /mnt/dos vfat defaults 0 2
One post advised you to add an entry to /etc/mtab, the mounted partitions
table. THIS IS INCORRECT. /etc/mtab is updated automatically by your
system as you mount and unmount partitions. While you won't hurt
anything by modifying it, you generally don't want to do so directly.
You can restore it to the proper state by running
cat /proc/mounts > /etc/mtab
Some people advise linking /etc/mtab to /proc/mounts. I've found this
creates problems in certain instances, most of which you probably won't
encounter. In particular, mounting and unmounting loopback filesystems
doesn't free device files.
> 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?
Look at /etc/ld.so.conf. It should probably contain a line for
/etc/X11/lib. If it doesn't, add this line and run "ldconfig".
man (8) ldconfig
man (8) ld.so.conf
for more information. "ld.so" is the dynamic linker/loader, which
provides management of the equivalent of DLL files under Linux.
ld.so.conf sets the library search path. You can also specify the
environment variable $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, though this is usually done in
wrapper scripts for specific applications with unusual library
requirements. Avoids library conflicts, though.
> I know this is basic stuff, and I'd be very grateful for any & all help
> getting myself going.
No problem. Some of these are fairly basic, some not. If you don't
have yourself copies of _Linux in a Nutshell_ and _Running Linux_, both
from O'Reilly, I'd strongly recommend them. For a deeper understanding
(though some outdated information) on Unix, try Kernighan and Pike's
_The UNIX Programming Environment_, from Prentice Hall.
And I was a newbie once myself.... Still am, in areas.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http:/www.netcom.com/~kmself
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/
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