ianw1974

My apologies, I didn't realise it was a pirated version. I won't link anything as such in the future!

When you boot, how are you booting?

I used failsafe from my LILO menu, and then went from there with the login stuff I mentioned before.

I've just had a play around and I've managed to copy and overwrite the files once I used su to get root privileges.

I know when I installed MDK 10.0 Official on the following spec:

AMD K6/2 475MHz, 284MB RAM, 10GB HDD.

that I had to have a large swap drive because it ran like a dog if it was any smaller. It maybe because MDK 10.x wasn't designed for this type of machine.

I expect when at CLI it wouldn't be too much of a problem, but when in KDE it was sooo slow. You couldn't even run the game Frozen Bubble! It wouldn't load. :o

And when monitoring the memory, you could see it was all maxed out! That was with a 520MB swap.

I booted single mode today for a problem I had.

I just typed login ian

supplied my password

and then carried on in the normal way using su to get into superuser mode and do everything I needed to.

Try the similar to this and let me know how you get on, or have you done already and still got problems?

What are you logged on as? If you are logged in with your username, do the following commands:

su [return]
enter password for root account.

Then copy the file into place - cp is the command for copy.

You don't need to use Partition Magic for the Linux stuff.

I am guessing, you resized the Windows partition to free up some disk, or already had it spare.

Then all you need to do is leave the rest of the disk empty. Don't use Partition Magic to create the partitions. When you install Linux, you will do all the disk config on there. You can choose the option to let me choose what to do, and then go from there.

If you want Linux permanently, then configure / partition, home and swap. An example:

/ = 60GB

HOME =38GB

SWAP = 2GB

Then for upgrades, you can leave Home as it is, and just replace the / partition with the new Linux OS.

Do you have anything else installed on the system?

If not, when you see the disk representation, first have your EXT3 partition set up as big as you want it to be, then to the right of it, configure the swap.

If you have Windows on it, then Windows will be first, then EXT3 for data, and then the Swap.

If you have the system permanent, then there's another way.

Windows first, then EXT3 for /, then EXT3 for HOME, then Swap. This is so if you upgrade, you don't lose your data in /HOME.

It's entirely up to you how big you have the EXT3 partition. But make sure is EXT3, so that you get the added features of journaling in case of a system crash. It will help recover for you then!

You have 100GB free, so if you want to give 99GB to Linux EXT3 and 1 GB to swap, then that would be fine. Maybe 2GB for swap would be best though. Depends if you want to use the rest of the disk for something else!

Note, you can't see Linux partitions in Windows, but you can see the other way around. Just in case you want to use some of that 100GB for Windows.

Hope this helps.

This sounds to me like the graphics wasn't configured during setup, and so X wasn't installed, and which is why you can't get into KDE.

You would still be able to login to the system with your username or the root user from the CLI prompt.

If you're new to Linux, then best thing would be go through the install again (don't upgrade - new install), and then when you come to one of the screens listing config for screen, network, etc, etc, check that the graphics is marked as configured, and not configured. My laptop does this on install, so I have to ensure it's configured for everything to work straight after install.

On reinstall, make sure that LILO is installed in the MBR and nowhere else.

Did Linux detect your video card OK?

As a rule, the doubling only really applies when you have < 1GB, which is how I normally do it. If you have 1GB or more then you can do it differently.

Example, my laptop has 1GB of RAM, and my swap is 512MB. This is suffice for anything I do on it, but if you heavily use your system, then you may want to have 1GB for the swap.

It depends if the install you're doing now is a permanent solution or not. If just for messing, you can set it to anything you like, but if permanent, go for 1GB it'll be enough.

This is true in case you need to rebuild.

If you're just mucking around with Linux and unlikely to have data there, then just two partitions would be fine.

So, if you're planning on keeping the install as a permanent thing have /, HOME and SWAP partitions.

Mine is just / and Swap, but then I just mess around with it mostly on my laptop. My desktop has the 3 partitions because its a permanent solution! The laptop is for learning, rebuilding again and again if things go pear-shaped. Bit like a testing system perhaps!! :P

Yeah no problems, Linux can access NTFS partitions, but it cannot write to them. At least, not in the conventional manner.

If you want to be able to save to the partition, convert it to FAT32 (you will need Partition Magic to do this).

How big's your hard drive?

Bear in mind you need a swap partition also, and the usual way is to have it twice your RAM. So, if 256MB ram, then 512MB of disk space for Swap.

I thought I would try it just to learn a bit more, and feel like I contributed more to my installation! Sad to say it wasn't that great.

It would work fine, in the sense that if you didn't set the OS to autoload XOrg. If you logged in at CLI and then ran startx, it was fine. When you shut it down however, you had a real bizarre yellow border around the edges of the screen about 2 cm wide. But it worked. When you set it to autoload at boot, then you couldn't log in because you couldn't type in the login box! But you could shut it down OK, etc.

In the end failsafe, and a urpmi to thac and it installed some stuff, overwriting of course and away we go again without a rebuild which is great.

KDE 3.4 I think I will leave for the time being, cos after two days of downloading updates and XOrg etc, I just want to enjoy myself relaxing that it works, than attempting updates and failing with it :P

Either that or I really need to get a faster link, 128kbps is OK for download, but something else would be much better when rebuilding!

Were they changed/updated in the last few days then?

I think I did my KDE upgrade attempt on Weds, rebuild Thurs with all updates applied and then XOrg upgrade today (I did try from the source and compiling but it failed partially and I then ended up downloading Thacs rpms anyhow!).

So now I'm at the stage of MDK 10.1 OE with updated kernel of 2.6.8.1.24-1-1mdk and XOrg 6.8.2.

It's OK now. I solved it :D

Booted failsafe, did the following:

service network start

urpmi the source for thacs rpms, and then installed Xorg over the top of what seems to be my partially failed compilation.

When I rebooted normally, I could get in fine. Seems something went amiss somewhere, don't know what, but I'm back to normal!

And no rebuild either, cool :P

Huge huge problem now!!!

I decided to go into the MCC gui, and changed it so XOrg runs automatically. Now I've done this, the mdkkdm screen will not let me type in it or anything.

Sounds like the xorg has got screwed somewhere. Before this however, I was loggin on getting to the CLI prompt and then typing startx and all was fine.

I can run failsafe, but I don't know how to turn off the run XOrg automatically option. What's gone wrong to stop me logging on the GUI?

Well, it seems to have compiled and installed OK so far.

I guess it must all be OK!!!!! :P

Have you checked in harddrake to see that the USB device is recognised?

With the USB, you should normally have to configure a PPP+ device to be able to get a connection.

The dialer string is a combination of your VPI and VCI for the DSL connection. For example, where I am now the dialer string is:

P 0,35

The VPI is 0 and the VCI is 35. Don't forget a space between P and 0. This will be different settings for you however.

Is the USB a totally separate device that connects to DSL than your father over ethernet?

Hope this helps.

Cool, just done that so re-running now to see what happens!

Will keep you posted in case any more pop up!!

Thanks v much!

I downloaded the single source .tag.gz from one of the mirrors and am currently compiling XOrg. I know I could use an RPM to do this, but I wanted to learn along the way.

However, I'm getting a problem. This is what I've done so far:

Pre:

Made sure that I had installed gcc, make, bison, flex, zlib, ncurses, fontconfig, expat and Perl. The only thing I couldn't check was C library development package, am assuming it's installed, because I don't know what the RPM is called for it.

1. Create a directory called "build".

2. Ran "lndir ../xc" to create a shadow link to "build".

3. As I use bash (Bourne), I typed the following: make World > World.log 2>&1

It's now bombed out with the following error messages:

gcc -m32 -O2 -fno-strength-reduce -fno-strict-aliasing -ansi -pedantic -Wall -Wpointer-arith -Wundef     -I../.. -I../../exports/include   -Dlinux -D__i386__ -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=199309L                                 -D_POSIX_SOURCE -D_XOPEN_SOURCE                                 -D_BSD_SOURCE -D_SVID_SOURCE            -D_GNU_SOURCE                             -DFUNCPROTO=15 -DNARROWPROTO       -c -o xcursorgen.o xcursorgen.c
xcursorgen.c:35:17: png.h: No such file or directory
xcursorgen.c:140: error: syntax error before "png"
xcursorgen.c: In function `premultiply_data':
xcursorgen.c:144: error: `row_info' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:144: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
xcursorgen.c:144: error: for each function it appears in.)
xcursorgen.c:146: error: `data' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c: In function `load_image':
xcursorgen.c:165: error: `png_structp' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:165: error: syntax error before "png"
xcursorgen.c:166: error: `png_infop' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:167: error: `png_bytepp' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:170: error: `png_uint_32' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:170: error: syntax error before "width"
xcursorgen.c:174: error: `png' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:174: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_create_read_struct'
xcursorgen.c:174: error: `PNG_LIBPNG_VER_STRING' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:178: error: `info' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:178: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_create_info_struct'
xcursorgen.c:181: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_destroy_read_struct'
xcursorgen.c:185: warning: implicit declaration of function `setjmp'
xcursorgen.c:210: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_init_io'
xcursorgen.c:211: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_read_info'
xcursorgen.c:212: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_get_IHDR'
xcursorgen.c:212: error: `width' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:212: error: `height' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:217: error: `PNG_COLOR_TYPE_PALETTE' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:218: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_set_expand'
xcursorgen.c:220: error: `PNG_COLOR_TYPE_GRAY' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:223: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_get_valid'
xcursorgen.c:223: error: `PNG_INFO_tRNS' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:227: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_set_strip_16'
xcursorgen.c:230: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_set_packing'
xcursorgen.c:232: error: `PNG_COLOR_TYPE_GRAY_ALPHA' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:233: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_set_gray_to_rgb'
xcursorgen.c:235: error: `PNG_INTERLACE_NONE' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:236: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_set_interlace_handling'
xcursorgen.c:238: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_set_bgr'
xcursorgen.c:239: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_set_filler'
xcursorgen.c:239: error: `PNG_FILLER_AFTER' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:241: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_set_read_user_transform_fn'
xcursorgen.c:243: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_read_update_info'
xcursorgen.c:252: error: `rows' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:252: error: `png_bytep' undeclared (first use in this function)
xcursorgen.c:257: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_read_image'
xcursorgen.c:258: warning: implicit declaration of function `png_read_end'
make[4]: *** [xcursorgen.o] Error 1

Can someone tell me what I seem to be missing, so that I can carry on with the build?

Much appreciated!!!

As another note for file systems:

EXT2 is similar to EXT3 except no journaling. This means if your system crashes it will be harder to recover from.

EXT3 is the same as EXT2 except has journaling meaning that if it crashes, it can run checks on your system and sort itself out.

There are other journaling file systems like Reiser and XFS of which all have different advantages and disadvantages. Stick with EXT3 it'll do all you need anyway.

Sounds like you have some partition problems!

This is what I suggest you do, since the system won't boot and it can't read your lilo.conf.

First, boot from the Linux 10.1 Official CD up to the point you can start to install. Go through this, and then when you come to configuring disk, choose the option that allows you to change it (I can't remember the wording).

Are you wanting to just use Linux on the laptop? If so, delete every partition that exists. Then you want to choose EXT3 and set the required size for the partition. You will need to leave some spare for your swap partition, which is normally your memory x 2. So, if you have 128MB ram in the laptop, set the swap to 256MB. Also, you don't need to set a HOME partition. This is just to keep your user files separate in case you upgrade the system at a later date. I only have two partitions, one for / which is 3.5GB and SWAP which is 512MB.

Then continue through the installation. If you get asked about where to install LILO, make sure it is in the MBR and not the other options. This may be why you have boot problems now.

Give that a shot, and let us know how you get on. Since the install only takes about 30 minutes, this is your easiest route to fixing it as it stands.

I installed the kernel-2.6.8.1.24mdk-1-1mdk and also the kernel-source-2.6.8.1-24.

System rebooted fine, and I removed the old kernel of kernel-2.6.8.1-12.

I had to reinstall the drivers for my Intel video card, but this wasn't a major deal, and worked OK. I kind of expected I would have to, as they were installed on the old kernel.

The only thing I did notice was that when I reboot the system, the blue mandrake shut-down screen has a yellow border about half an inch wide around the extents of the screen!

The way my system boots at the moment is that it doesn't load Xorg straightaway. So I login at prompt, and then startx, which then loads KDE for me.

Any ideas as to the yellow border?

I don't have the machine near me, but I believe it's a USR Internal PCI WinModem.

I checked the link that was left by adolfix and it says "No Available Status". So am assuming that this modem is not supported?

I managed to download MDK 10.1 DVD version. This may have everything you require, as I've not noticed anything missing - but then I only use as desktop environment rather than server environment.