No boot with DSLForum: Laptops Topic: No boot with DSL started by: Rasheed Posted by Rasheed on Feb. 18 2006,20:29
I have made the CD-ROM drive my boot drive and when I boot the computer, Windows starts, af if there is no DSL to be booted.There seems to be an autoexec.bat missing in the root directory of the CD image. Is that normal? My laptop is a: Toshiba 1640-CDT (AMD Mobile K2-2), 491 Mhz, 192 MB RAM, 6 GB HD, running Windows 98SE, with unofficial Service Pack. I've tried DSL embedded, but that was soooo slow. An application needed 2 minutes to start after double clicking it on the GUI Desktop. And the boot from HD took around 15 minutes. René Edit: I found out what I did wrong: copied the files instead of burning the ISO image. It now works like a charm. I will try to partition the laptop's harddisk tomorrow with free Partition Logic and see if I can put DSL on it, using the tohd option and later reboot using the fromhd option. I want to be able to run Python 2.4.2 on the laptop, so I can check what my Python apps look like in a Linux box. Posted by Rasheed on Feb. 21 2006,10:22
I tried Partition Logic 0.61 and it crashed on boot. Because I have read comments from others having the same problem, I have sent an e-mail message to the creator, hoping that he will offer me a fix or workaround to this problem.I give him one week to send me a reply and otherwise I'll be forced to try one of the commercial vendors for a partition software solution. BTW I understand you can use DSL on a unpartitioned harddisk, using the dsl fromhd=/dev/hda1 boot option, but this renders HDA unmountable and I want to be able to use both my harddisk and CD-ROM player as mountable devices, so I can store locally and read data and programs from CD-ROM. René Posted by doobit on Feb. 21 2006,13:38
DSL will recognize and write to FAT formatted hard drives. With that in mind, you may choose to simply boot and run DSL from the CD and use the hard drive as your backup device and a place to store downloaded applications. That way you don't need to create any new partitions or reformat anything.If you do decide you want to get rid of Windows altogether, or keep it and make a new partition on the same disk, then you can use the program called parted.dsl to shrink the Windows partition and then create a new partition from the free space to put DSL on. I recommend the Frugal install because it just works very well on my old laptop. Posted by Rasheed on Feb. 21 2006,21:02
I tried parten from the parten.dsl repository (my PC is not connected to the internet, so I had to manually install it by copying the downloaded parten.dsl file from a CD-ROM disk to the PC's harddisk), but at the moment it is just too difficult to grasp for me. All those commands inside parten and no menu; very frustating. And it seems you have to unmount the harddisk, otherwise access is denied.If anything can go wrong, it does go wrong with me. So isn't there a more foolproof method than with parten, cfdisk and grub frugal harddisk install? All this technospeak is very alien to me. I don't want to learn what is under the hood, but just drive the d*** thing. Posted by doobit on Feb. 21 2006,21:20
If you don't want to learn to drive it, then DSL is probably not the best distro for you. You need something more automated, like Mepis lite, or Ubuntu, or SuSe, or Mandriva.
Posted by Rasheed on Feb. 21 2006,22:17
Hmmm, the folks at the Ubuntu forum directed me to DSL, because Ubuntu is just too bulky to fit on a 6 GB (6,000,000,000 bytes) harddisk (Ubuntu minimal install: 2 GB, typical install: 4 GB). And because I can't find any larger harddisks for my laptop, I would be forced to buy a new PC, just to run Linux.I was reading through the install documentation of Fedora, but that stated that you have to have GRUB installed on your harddisk and Fedora does no partitioning on its own to make room for its installation. So there is a lot of geeky stuff to do before you can install Fedora. And Ubuntu doesn't seem to be any better at it. I hoped that after all these years Linux had grown beyond the technogeek stadium. It seems I was mistaken. Most issues in the Linux fora are very, how should I put this, technominded and more about solving technical problems of the OS than problems with applications. How many more years do we have to wait until Linux is a user friendly OS, that is invisible to the user? Sorry if I seemed very harsh, but this stuff is very frustrating for someone who is used to Mac OS X, which has most geeky stuff hidden and replaced with easy-to-use apps. So now I have to become a technogeek myself, just to be able to partition the harddisk, how quaint. René Posted by doobit on Feb. 21 2006,23:06
If you had to install Windows, or MacOS, then you would go through the same processes. Most of the time, you don't have to install those because they are already on the system that they are sold with. Installing Linux is at least as easy as installing Windows. You just have to be able to follow instructions. Takes patience and maybe persistance, but not necessarily brains. Well. maybe you have to have more brains than a doorknob. I don't want to discourage you from trying it. Once you get it going it just works better.MacOS is a form of Unix, by-the-way - but try installing it and running it on the system you have now. You cant! Posted by Rasheed on Feb. 22 2006,10:24
I agree I'm probably not able to install Mac OS X on an PowerPC computer which has already another OS installed. The same applies to installing Windows on a x86 computer with a pre-installed OS.So the problem seems to be: - how to split a partition safely, without losing data - how to set up a multiboot The available instructions aren't very easy to understand. Terms like MBR, Lilo, Grub, etc. are very alien to me. I have never had to go into that detail of the computer hardware. Most instructions asume a level of computer knowledge which I don't have and should aquire before being able to follow instructions. It would be nice if these instruction were accompanied with a kind of computer hardware 101, or point to an article covering that subject. René Posted by Rasheed on Feb. 22 2006,12:28
And it gets even worse. If you try to install ActivePython it is installed into /opt/ActivePython-2.4. However, this gets lost after reboot, probably because /opt is stored on RAMdisk. And because the HD installed version of DSL is the same, but from another device than a CD-ROM drive, it will get lost as well.So I guess DSL is not for me. I want a Linux variety that is easy to use and where it is easy to install new applications, not necessarily present in the DSL repository. Well, you don't seem able to do it with some degree of ease. At least, I don't see any easy way of doing it. Thanks for all the answers, to help me understand I have to look for Linux elsewhere. René Posted by cbagger01 on Feb. 22 2006,17:31
You are describing the "Frugal Install"If you want all of your directories (including /opt) to be stored directly on the hard drive, then just simply do a "DSL HD Install" instead of a "Frugal Install". Problem solved. Posted by Rasheed on Feb. 22 2006,18:52
I guess I rather try Debian Linux.René Posted by Rasheed on Feb. 24 2006,17:29
I take that back. Debian is too old (or lagging far behind in development), e.g. Python 2.1 instead of 2.4 and the supplied windows managers (Gnome and KDE) are even less well developped than Win98SE with Unofficial SP. They are somewhere in between Win 3.11 and Win95 in look and feel IMO. Furthermore, Debian has almost no active support. (Who still uses a mailinglist nowadays? All the other Linuxes use a webforum for community support.)The only Linux that behaved "normal" on my laptop was Ubuntu (LiveCD version). However, the HD version is as hungry for GBs as Windows. So I would have to partition my HD very, very carefully and tweak the Windows partition so it will keep running fast and efficient (well, as efficient as Windows can be). René Posted by doobit on Feb. 24 2006,17:51
You are beginning to learn some things, but keep on researching. Everything is not as it seems at first glance!
Posted by cbagger01 on Feb. 25 2006,06:31
You can get newer Debian packages by repointing the line in yout /etc/apt/sources.list to go to Debian "experimental" or Debian "testing" instead of Debian "Stable" if you desire.Just make sure to do an apt-get update to get a refreshed list of available packages. Posted by Rasheed on Feb. 25 2006,08:45
I'm sorry, that is not going to work, because this laptop is not yet connected to the internet. I have to buy a PCMIA wireless network card, an Apple AirPort extreme card and a wireless router to enable that. That is a bit too pricy at the moment.René |