Problems and questions with new install

[Guest apatia]

I'm a Mandrake newbie and I'm trying to install 10.1 from the disks on the new Linux Format. (Though I'm new to Mandrake, I have installed and upgraded Suse 9.0 - 9.2, RedHat/Fedora and Slackware 10 previously)

 

Question #1: At some point during the install, the install program analyzes my hard-drive setup and gives me the opportunity to set the locations of / and /home. With the SuSE, RedHat and Slack installs, I had the option to set the location of swap. Does Mandrake not give this option?

 

Problem #2: The install goes ok until the installer asks if I want to check for updates. No matter if I say yes or no, I'm prompted for the Linux Format 60 Disk 1a. The installer doesn't like any of the disks I enter.

 

I get past that point by hitting previous and soon it's time to reboot.

 

I have a multiboot system with Windows XP and SUSE on other partitions. I use grub to boot. I set up Mandrake such that / is on one partition (10) and /home is on a different partition (9)

.

Here's the grub entry used to boot to Mandrake.

 

kernel (hd0,9)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc10 vga=0x311 splash=silent desktop resume=/dev/hdc8 showopts

 

Everything initially seems to go okay with booting to Mandrake. The problem starts when it's time to start KDE. The main KDE graphic comes up, but it doesn't move past 0%. Then error messages appear, indicating that KDE can't start and the /home partition is read-only. I've tried the Mandrake install twice and both times I've had these problems.

Question #3: Any ideas on how to make the /home partition writable and how to start KDE.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

[Floyd]

welcome to musb apatia

There are many highly skilled linux users here i am not one of them.

 

Question #1:  With the SuSE, RedHat and Slack installs, I had the option to set the location of swap. Does Mandrake not give this option?

I don't know if the option is available,I do believe it will use any or all linux swap partitions it "sees" also it will not move forward without nagging "you need a swap partition"

 

Problem #2: The install goes ok until the installer asks if I want to check for updates. No matter if I say yes or no, I'm prompted for the Linux Format 60 Disk 1a. The installer doesn't like any of the disks I enter.

I goggled "Linux Format 60 Disk 1a" Your search - "Linux Format 60 Disk 1a" - did not match any documents.

 

Question #3: Any ideas on how to make the /home partition writable 

I would try mounting mandrake partition from suse and edit the mandrake /ect/fstab /home settings.

 

and how to start KDE.

Can you ?

VeeDubb

to start, isntead of ctrl-alt-f7, try ctrl-alt-f2.

 

That should bring you to a login prompt. once there, log in, and enter the following commands IN ORDER

 

'su root' (may require a password)

'service dm stop' (this will stop X and the display manager.)

'exit' (that will get you out of root and back to your normal user.

'startx'

 

When you type startx, one of two things will happen.

1. the graphical server may start, then we can figure out why it's not starting on it's own.

2. More likely, you'll get a long error message that points you to a log file. if that's the case, post your results here and I or someone else will help more.

from here

[Ixthusdan]

Mandrake will use the existing swap. That is why you get no prompt for it.

 

I am not clear from your post if you are using the same /home for all distros. I have tried, but kde is not nice amomg the distros that cusomize it, including Mandrake and SuSE. I have used both among others, and I set up seperate /home partitions for each distro, accessing the storage I want from my primary /home.

 

I have no idea what Mandrake is asking for in your second question. That's a new one. Mandrake's installer is still a little rough. You may have a bad download. You could try to bail the installation at that point and finish manually after rebooting. There is an operating linux system at that point that should be able to boot.

[Guest apatia]

This is the entry in fstab. Is there something here that would make /home mount read-only.

 

/dev/hdc9 /home ext2 user,noatime,noauto 1 2

[feralertx]

This is the entry in fstab.  Is there something here that would make /home mount read-only.

 

/dev/hdc9 /home ext2 user,noatime,noauto 1 2

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

No, AFAIK to make the partition be mounted as 'read-only' you'd need 'ro' which isnt there...

 

This is, for example, the entry for my cdrom, note the 'ro' statement:

/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec 0 0

 

You can try to add 'rw' (read & write) but i think its not necesary...

[AussieJohn]

Your fstab for /home seems quite large.

 

Here is mine for example and I think yours should be the same.

 

/dev/hdc6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2

 

Try changing it to that and see what happens.

 

Cheers. John.

 

If your /home is actually ext2 then modify my suggested line with ext2 instead of the ext3

Edited December 4, 2004 by AussieJohn

[Guest apatia]

I tried reinstaling Mandrake, again. I had the same problems, again.

 

I selected to have the non-root user automatically logged in on boot. This fails (kde errors and errors writing to /home) When I login as root (no /home partition needed), KDE runs. But during the install, I chose to install Gnome not KDE.

 

I modified the Mandrake inittab to boot to command line (level 3). I modified the fstab entry for /home (added rw). When I tried running Mandrake again, the /home partition did not mount. The non-root user was logged into the / directory. I was able to mount the /home partition manually with no problems. I ran 'startx' and Gnome ran.

 

So now my questions are:

1. What files/settings do I need to modify to get the /home partition to mount ?

2. What can I do to force the system to boot (when inittab is set to level 5) using Gnome not KDE?

[AussieJohn]

There is something really odd here. The fstab entry as I showed you on my computer does not give me any problems whatsoever and it does not have <rw> in it and yours should not need it either.

 

I am inclined to think that there is still something you are not quite doing correctly in setting your partitions during install.

 

If you have data in your home account that you want to save then try to get hold of a Live CD and use it to copy out the data to a CD-R/W. then when you reinstall make sure to reformat the </home> partition as well as the </> root partition. Or are you already doing this since you do not have anything needed to be saved from the existing home partition ???.

 

During the installation routine, when the partitions are selected and you press next or OK it shows a window saying what partitions are to be formatted. At the bottom left there is a button that I think is called Advanced or something like that. I seem to remember that it is about read write aspects of the partitions. I could be wrong because I am just going on memory here.

 

Are you clicking on that and making selections in there as well ? Then if you are, you should NOT until you have more experience with Linux and Mandrake because these are only setting selections intended for highly experienced users. And if you are doing this, then I suspect this is the cause of your troubles. I have done literally a hundred or more Mandrake installs and NEVER touched this part and never had your kind of problem.

 

If the above is not the case then I have no idea what you may be doing wrong. Yes, I still think you are doing something incorrectly and it is not Mandrake doing it.

 

But hey, not to worry on that score because we all had to learn and are still learning ourselves so no need to feel embarrassed if you are feeling that.

 

John.

[Guest apatia]

I'm puzzled. I have installed (and reinstalled and updated) Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 2, SuSE 9.0 & 9.1, and Slackware with no problems. It's very ironic that i would have all of these weirdo issues with the "most user friendly" & "easiest to install" OS.

[Ixthusdan]

Do you have an fstab from the other installations for comparison?

 

I have played with more than a dozen distros. I have found similarities and oddities among them all. Are you sure it is a good burn, good iso's?

 

My fstab:

/dev/hdd6 /home reiserfs notail 1 2

[growler]

apatia,

 

I have had the same problem. I think the installer is broken. If you Use Existing Partitions option you will get the KDE error.

 

Try Custom Partitioning , do not change any sizes just select the root partition and tell it to be /, same with home, tell it to be /home.

 

I found ...use the existing partitions... would setup /home and users on the correct partition but then install another /home on your / (root).

 

KDE would then look at the wrong /home and give DCOP_server errors, etc

 

Anybody care to check ... I did it 3 times before using a bootable CD (DSL) to find this?

Edited December 11, 2004 by growler

[AussieJohn]

Hello Growler.

You are spot on. I remember that now but had forgotten it because for the past 2yrs I have always used Custom Partitioning for that very reason.

Sometimes we forget the reasons we adopted a particular routine.

Cheers. John.