Kent West wrote:
Ethan Vos wrote:Can I run this from a Win98 C: drive and install to a Linux D: or E: drive?The binary-1 CD has most of the commonly wanted software. The other CDs have additional software, but you can start out with the first one and get the other stuff as needed/desired (either by downloading and using the extra CDs, or better still, just directly downloading the various packages).The instructions seem a little daunting... Ethan Robert Sheets wrote:On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 17:19:59 -0400, Ethan Vos <ethan.vos@sympatico.ca> wrote:Good afternoon all.The mirrors that I have looked at have binary-1 through binary-7. Whichis the correct one to use?Concerning your second question (which was top-posted, a practice frowned upon on this list; instead, post your responses so anybody can come in six months later and start reading the post at the top and understand what's going on in the conversation):Debian is a completely different animal than Windows; it requires its own partitions and/or drives. I assume by your question that you already have a D: and E: partition and/or drive. Yes, Linux can be installed on those partitions/drives, but they'll have to be repartitioned/reformatted, and they'll essentially become invisible to Windows. The names "D:" and "E:" will no longer apply; that's strictly a Microsoft invention.Rather than running from the Win98 C: drive, you'll probably want to boot off the binary-1 CD, and install it from the CD to what you currently are calling D: and/or E: (wiping out any data on those partitions/drives in the process). Normally this won't affect your current Windows setup, but if you don't understand partitioning, you can make a mistake and wipe your Windows setup completely. So either make sure you know what you're doing, or make a backup of the entire Windows drive first (which is a good idea anyway).If D: and E: are separate drives and not just separate partitions, you might feel more comfortable unplugging the data/power cable from the C: drive to make sure nothing happens to it during the install. The problem with that is that because of the way the boot-up process gets installed, your machine probably won't be able to boot into Debian after the install (I'm assuming that since you have Win98 you have an older machine that expects to boot off the first drive on IDE0), or if it does, you'll find you can't boot Windows after the install without some tweaking on the Debian side.My suggestion to you is to make sure you understand the installation instructions, which seem a little daunting, or decided to do away with Win98 completely for now until you've had some experience with Debian, or to get your feet wet with a Knoppix CD (http://www.knoppix.org) instead of installing Debian to your machine. The Knoppix CD lets you boot off the CD into a fully-functioning Linux environment, and then when you exit out of Knoppix and remove the CD and reboot you're back in Win98 like Knoppix never existed. It's considerably slower than a real Linux installation (since everything's running off the CD), but it's a good way to introduce yourself to Linux.
Before I installed Debian on my Gateway 500 I had only a 12 GB hard drive. I installed more system memory and installed a second hard drive. I read the installation guide off Debian.org and made notes on all the stuff attached to the computer such as COM ports, the type of printers, graphic card, modem type, floppy drive, ZIP drive, etc. I also read a couple of books about Linux: Running Linux, 3rd Edition (BTW, the fourth edition is out), and Linux Cookbook. Both of these are listed on Debian.org. In the Linux Cookbook, be sure to read the section about the virtual consoles. Once installed, my Linux boots into the GUI. Ctrl_ALT-Fx (where x is a number from 1 to 6 inclusive) will get the user into one of the virtual consoles. On my system then Ctrl-Alt_Del will reboot the system, (but the GUI screen will capture those keys). Rebooting the system allows you to get back to the LILO menu.
I used a utility from the vendor that made the second hard drive to set up the partitions and to format it. From the installation guide I know that I wanted a large partition or partitions for the root system and data areas. I also set up a small partition to use as the swap partition. On your Windows boot diskette you should have Fdisk. If you accidentally destroy your MBR, remember that fdisk /MBR will restore the Master Boot Record. When you answer questions about the X sessions, it might be a good idea to choose medium or simple. The advanced selection is for those hardware gurus whose equipment is so specialized that only God and they know what the parameters are. This section is where you answer questions about the graphics card, type of mouse, keyboard, etc.. You may wish to know whether you want gdm, tdm, or xdm as your windows manager. You'll have to ask the others here about those choices. I just chose the first one off the list.
Then I was ready to install Linux. The boot CDROM gave me a choice of kernels. I had to choose bf2.4 because that was the only option that could see my hard drives. The program cfdisk was used only to initialize those partitions on the second drive that I had decided would be Linux. Those partitions will 'disappear' from your Windows Explorer or whatever you use for a file manager. The installation CDROMs let me put LILO onto the MBR. Now when I boot, I have a choice between Windows 98SE and Linux. You can customize the LILO menu, but you can save that question until after installation. I needed to 'wife-proof' my menu to let the machine boot automatically into Windows after a delay.
(Mr.) Gayle Lee Fairless Linux Gcomm 2.4.18-bf2.4 #1 Son Apr 14 09:53:28 CEST 2002 i686 unknown