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? Sure! As soon as the floppy goes to the LILO prompt, you have a couple of seconds in which to pass boot options. This is where you need to type the parameters for the kernel you need to boot (see the Installation HOW TO which should be in your machine on usr/doc/HOWTO; I'd love to give you the details on how this is done, but I've never done this myself and you asked a bunch of other questions to which I do have more exact answers) > 2. My installation does not recognize the Linux > "man" command. How can I install it, and the man > pages for system commands?
The presence or absence of man commands should be determined by the options you choose for documentation at the time of the install. Are you getting "no man page exists for (command) or are you getting "command not found". If the former, check dselect for the desired documention. If the latter, you probably need to retrace your steps in installing the software. > 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 can mount your fat partition at startup by inserting the text above into two files in the /etc directory. These are respectively mtab and fstab. Again, the instructions for this can be accessed from the HOWTOs that should be present on your hard drive under usr/doc/HOWTO or, assuming that you were able to get a standard install with X Windows, you should also be able to get to this by clicking on your start menu - applications - tools - Debian On Line Help or, try http://www.linux.org/help/ldp/howto/howto.html > 4. When I boot Linux, I get a message about hdb1, > the Linux hard drive on my system, not having been > cleanly unmounted. How do I shut down Linux so that > the Linux partition is cleanly unmounted? If you are in X, pull up an xterm session by clicking on the picture of the monitor. If you want to safely shut down your system type : shutdown now -h This will shut down and halt your system. If you want to reboot to Windows type: shutdown now -r This will shut down linux and reboot your system. It's very important that you properly shutdown your machine properly. This is one area where Linux and Windows differ greatly. If files are left open before Linux has a chance to write them to disk, they can be corrupted. If this happens to a crucial system files or the partition table, you could be looking at a major problem. > 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? I'm not sure how to fix this problem and will defer to those more knowlegable on the fix (you probably need to edit inittab to run startx by default or something); but a workaround in the short run would be to try starting X by typing xdm at the command prompt. You will need to be logged in as root to do this, but it will take you to a graphical login where you can use your own (safer) user id. You might also have wdm, which I prefer because there are more options available. Hope this helps. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send online invitations with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com
