[JAMMAN]

Well, I got it installed. I put it as a second on my sons computer. What I did was fdisk an old 2 gig I had laying around and put it as a slave to the ibm 20 gig with win98se on it, then in the bios select "none" for primary master; a trick I used back in the win3.11/ win95 days for pseudo dual boot. Well it worked but somehow LILO found my primary hard drive in spite of the bios. Is this normal? I think RH6.1 is about 5 years old now, does the newer versions give you an option where to put LILO? I set it to time out and boot to windows, but I wish it wasn't there at all (LILO) because now if I pull the second hard drive out the first one boots to a screen full of binary; kind of like a black and white matrix.

I'm not complaining and I'm ceartain I can figure how to fix it- I'm just wondering how it bypassed the BIOS and accessed a hard drive that was written out.

 

[TheTechIsIn]

hmm...

Not sure on that one, haven't used RedHat since 5.0 but the never versions of Linux iv seen (Turbo-Linux,Mandrake, that other one suse?) they all have the option of not installing lilo at all and let you choose how to boot the thing. There should be an option in the GUI of Linux to remove lilo. If not you can remove it via the command line, but I'm not sure how try the following from the command line and see if it yields anything: man lilo or lilo ? or lilo --help one of those should work.


happy :compute:'in

 

[JAMMAN]

Another mystery is "drivers". I downloaded a specific driver for the vid card (.tar.gz format) and for the life of me have no idea how to install it or where to put it.

RPM's rock! does Mandrake support RPM's?

 

[TheTechIsIn]

Yeah they support it but you'll be hard pressed to find any software coming in that format. Most of the time its the .tar.gz format. You'll most likely need to compile the install file after un-taring the file as well.

type tar --help from the command line, it will display a list of options for untaring and gunziping the file all at once.

Or you could decompress the file one compression method at a time ie:
gunzip -d file.tar.gz

then tar -(something) file.tar

then you have to go into that directory and compile the install file using "make" ...that's why Linux hasn't caught on in my opinion its all still to annoying and time consuming.

 

[JAMMAN]

Star Office has a windows style installer that worked just fine. I think RPM's work just as well.

Someone needs to work on a driver installer for Linux. Or an "add device" manager similar to the windows "add hardware" interface.

 

[wmeyer]

I just installed Red Hat 7.3 on a machine with 2 drives 40 gig has Windows XP Rro and Windows 98SE dual booting, and now Red hat 7.3 on the 8.4 gig drive. This version of Red Hat gave me the option of where I wanted to put the lilo loader and I choose the 40 gig drive. when I boot up now I get the lilo giving me the choice of windows or linux, it you choose Windows, it brings you to the Windows dual boot menu. I have never tried removing the second drive, so i don't know how it would react, but the system is running good for me.

 

[exodus]

Lilo is quite advanced. It will see things even if they are disabled in the bios because it does not look to the bios to get the information, it scans the system itself. As far as compileing is not all that difficult. It normally only takes two or three commands to do so and they are....

# tar xvfz software.tar.gz
# cd software
# ./configure
# make
# make install

Thats about it. Easy, eh. And usually if there are more steps, they are documented in the software's README file.

 

[Guest]

Hey Welcome to Tech Support Forums exodus....:winkgrin:

I hope you are well schooled in the way of Linux as we be needin' someone with Linux skills here....

 

[JAMMAN]

Ditto. We need to give him a Tux for his avatar.

Welcome to the forum!