On Sun, Apr 23, 2000 at 04:07:26PM -0700, Eric Hagglund wrote: > 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)
Once you get man-db installed, read the man page on LILO for how to install it one /dev/hda and give you the option to boot windows off of /dev/hda1 or Linux off of /dev/hdb1. Booting off a floppy is a little slowing than booting off of the hard drive. > > 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. Install man-db. > > 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 Don't bother editing /etc/mtab. It'll just get clobbered the next time you reboot or if you (u)mount something like /dev/fd0. You'll probably want to mount a win98 partition with vfat, not msdos. I guess you have a newer kernel that understands fat32... > > 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. also, halt or poweroff do the same thing (on Linux). You'll need a kernel with APM support to actually get the machine to turn off. > If you want to reboot to Windows type: > > shutdown now -r aka reboot > 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. > Since XFree86 4.0 isn't packaged yet, I assume you picked it up from Xfree website. You should install all software that isn't part of Debian in either /usr/local or /opt (or /home for testing). Running ldconfig might fix that problem. You should follow the instructions for INSTALL with the tarball. I would humbly suggest you not use 4.0 yet unless you really need it (for support of a particular card). And, you'll need to give us a few more details about how you installed 4.0. -- ¶ One·should·only·use·the·ASCII·characterset·when·compos » ing·email·messages.