Re: new squeeze
On 9/16/2010 4:12 PM, AG wrote:
On 10/09/10 03:30, Doug wrote:
I just downloaded debian-testing i386 Net Inst and burned the
.iso onto disk. Before I do something silly, I want to make sure
that this is designed to live with other os's on the hd. (I remember
one older version of Ubuntu that took over the drive, and wiped
everything else out.) If everything is copacetic, I'll put it
on my laptop along with Win XP and PcLinuxOs. Please advise.
thanx--doug
Doug
Yes, the Debian distro will play nicely with your other OS's and will -
if you work carefully with the partition manager - recognise the other
OSs on the HD and accommodate to their space requirements.
Windows will automatically wipe the entire HD clean during installation,
whereas Debian will ask you about keeping other OSs on the drive. I
cannot comment on PCLinuxOS though. The trick is, as others have
commented, to go through the disk partition stage of installation *very*
carefully. This process is often aided by having a basic knowledge of
the config parameters of your HD so that you don't inadvertently try to
install on cylinders that have already been taken.
There may be an option for you to look at sharing your PCLinuxOS /home
directory with the Debian install, but there are gurus here who could
advise on that because I have no experience in actually moving beyond
the theory.
Bottom line? Debian will play nicely with other distros/ OSs but
installer beware: know what you are doing when messing with the disk
partitioning process.
AG
Well, this is kind of old by now, and I can report that I got Squeeze
onto the drive with relatively little trouble. As suggested, I worked
carefully, and watched everything that went on on the screen. The only
problem arose with the Grub loader that came with it. When all was
done, the non-gui boot loader would boot Windows and Debian, but not
PCLINUX. It didn't seem to know it was there. What I did to fix that
was to put the PcLOs disk in, and boot up the live version. There's
something there that refers to fixing Grub, I don't remember what the
procedure is, but it wasn't hard to find. When I got thru, in only
a few minutes, I had the PcLOs gui version of Grub, and everything
boots with no problem. I have no way to tell whether this is endemic
to Debian Grub, or whether when they built Squeeze they damaged it, or what.
I may have to go thru this whole rigamarole again: the class I'm taking
in the local community college was going to use Debian (Lenny), but it
turned out to be incompatible with the Windows computers the school
uses--a video driver problem. Rather than trouble shoot and fix it,
it was decided to go with Ubuntu 10.04.1, which seems to work OK in
that virtual disk environment on Win XP. But Ubuntu does not want
to install on my machine, a Dell laptop. So I'm in the process of
troubleshooting that, and I expect that I am going to have to go
back to just XP and PcLOs (I have that part of the drive backed up to
flash), clean off the drive, and start over. Phooey! Debian has
one or two things I like better than PcLOs, but on the whole, I
think I prefer the latter, which, BTW, has done KDE 4.4.5 right.
At least, in my humble opinion. For a good comparison, look at
that against Kubuntu. Arghh!
End of report. --doug
--
Blessed are the peacemakers...for they shall be shot at from both sides.
--A.M. Greeley
Reply to: