kip0569

Hello.

I have tried several linux distros in the past few weeks. PclinuxOS, Gentoo, Open Suse 10.2, Ark Linux, Ubuntu, Kanotix, Suse Linux Professional 9.1, and some others I don't recall.

None of these installs have been on dual boot systems.

Any that I have tried from a live cd have worked great. I .can usually get on the net from most live cd's.

Kanotix and both Suse distros installed fine. Although the others seem to install OK, when booted from the hard drive they hang during boot and show "Grub 1.5 Error 17" or something similar.

I suspect that I am causing this issue although i have no idea how. Have tried 3 different hard drives so I don't think that is the problem. Machine is a P3/533 beater. 256 meg ram. Unknown video card.

I am just trying different distros to see what they are about. Any information about the issue I am experiencing would be appreciated.

FYI. I like the look of Gnome. Use Firefox and Open office at work by choice. Did not like Thunderbird so still using Outlook. (It works)

Any suggestions about distros that would be good for me to look at also welcome.

Thanks!

Kip0569

K-B

GRUB Error 17 possible causes:
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p15.htm#17

I myself prefer PCLinuxOS, if you can sort out the Error 17 problem I'd install that...keep in mind that with many distros (including PCLinuxOS) you can install GNOME window manager and use that instead of KDE.

Bartender

I was really into dual- and triple- booting various Linux distros, but have since given up on that. Too much hassle, and even after you've got it all set up the next kernel upgrade can easily make a mess of everything, requiring a bunch of terminal work fixing fstab, grub boot menu.lst, etc.
If you've got 3 drives why not just install one Linux distro to each, and physically swap them around until you pick a flavor you like?
That's what I've been doing.
It's good that you're experimenting, and trial-and-error is a good way to retain knowledge. But stop for a moment and think about where you might be a few months or a year from now. At some point you're probly going to get a little bit tired of the constant upheaval and settle on one distro you like. When that time comes the things you learned about multi-boot won't really be of much use any more.
If a new distro comes along that looks really good, it'll be much easier to just install it to one of those spare drives and spin it up.

kip0569

Thanks for the great input guys.

Thanks to the link K-B provided I have Ubuntu up and running just fine now. Seems to be pretty slick. Install went very smoothly.

I should have thought of just swapping the drives around Bartender. That is so simple. Think I will do that and try PClinuxOS as well.

Anyone have any other ideas?

Thanks!

K-B

Would you mind just telling us real quickly what solved the GRUB problem? (Or was it never a problem with Ubuntu?) Maybe it can help someone else in the future.

Some BIOS versions have a feature where you can press one of the "F" keys during boot and select which drive you'd like to boot from. I don't know whether or not that's been proven to work slick, I just dual boot the normal way (GRUB bootloader installed to Master Boot Record).

EDIT: Thank you for supporting TSF!

kip0569

Sorry for the delay in responding.

The link K-B provided eventually led me to a site that told me how to make a Super Grub disk. I followed their instructions, booted up on the Super Grub disk, poked around a bit, installed Ubuntu and all was fine.

Wish I could provide more info than that, but that is what happened.

Thanks again for the input guys!

Doing nicely with Ubuntu now.

Bartender

You can spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out GRUB errors. Some have said that GRUB is essentially an operating system in its own right.

Bah! I just want the damned OS to load up, not deal with the frustration of learning GRUB.

Scotso

Ubuntu is my preferred Linux OS, it's really easy to use and I appreciate the WONDERFUL community of support they have. Probably the most friendly and helpful forum on the internet.

But one problem that you will probably run into with the newer versions of Ubuntu is that 256MB of RAM just won't cut it. Your processor is also on the slow side, but the RAM is really more important. You really need 512MB or more to run the newest Ubuntu versions well.

If you like Ubuntu and don't plan on upgrading your RAM, you should really look into Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.org/). It uses XFCE rather than GNOME, which uses a lot less resources, but it still looks and fuctions much the same as the GNOME version.

Scotso

Which is another reason to use Ubuntu, they've really made the install process painless.