Thomas Merritt Draney wrote:
I did very well I must say for a new user to linux. I got debian installed to the point i am sitting there with a command prompt.But i am now lost. Where is Gnome or how do I start up into it? When I run startx it says something is broken?I need to dual boot Windows 95 sadly with Lilo and it says permission denied when i try to access lilo.conf.Can anyone send me a good help site for these problems or any other assistance would be much appreciated because I really want to try out Debian but I might have to go with Progeny to start out it appears.
Q. Are you running Stable (Potato), Testing (Woody), or Unstable (Sid), or some other older version?
In order to edit lilo.conf, you must log in as the root. To do this, log in as yourself, then give the command "su" (to become "SuperUser"); it'll ask for the root password. Edit lilo.conf (and do whatever other root-admin-type things you need to do), then "exit" out of root mode (so you don't accidentally do nasty things to your system (Lesson 1, Grasshopper; only be root when you need to be root).
To start fixing X, run "dselect" (as root), do an Update, then an Install. It has been my experience lately when installing Sid that X is always broken after an install, but after doing this step (and installing an additional 50MB or so of stuff that for some reason has been selected but not installed), I have a much greater chance of getting X to work.
Also, when trying to start X, give the command "startx 2> startx.log", which will create a "startx.log" file containing the errors on the startup of X. Then post those errors to this list for additional help.
Kent