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installing debian on mandriva box


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I dont think you have to use sudo, you can just log in as root. :P Isnt there an xorg metapackage which installs everthing, I think you are missing big parts of X?

 

If you are not having so much luck with your install, why dont you try Kanotix or Knoppix?

Edited by ffi
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2. used nano to look at my xorg.conf file. Note: actually its /etc/X11/xorg.conf, not /etc/x11/xorg.config.
Sorry for the typo. :wall:
there are lines with Driver "kbd", and Driver "mouse" that are causing problems.

 

some errors after booting are:

 

Warning, couldn't open module kbd

Warning, couldn't open module mouse

No devices detected

No screens found

Aha. That leads us somewhere. The xorg-modules for keyboard and mouse were not installed yet.

I think this one should solve it:

apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse

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yay!! I guess that's all it was. installed the kbd and mouse modules as arctic said, and now here I am using debian. X works fine now. Weird that the install doesn't install those. I've installed several distros, including mandrake, RH, three of the FC releases, and ubuntu one time, and I think the kb, mouse, and X worked on all those post-install.

 

Anyway, so do I now finally have a "rolling distro"?? It's good to see that I'm using firefox 1.5 now, instead of 1.0.6 under mandriva.

 

grub has debian as the first boot option, which is what I want. (btw, how do I give myself a few more seconds of time to make a boot choice?). Some other questions:

 

1. want my /home stuff under mandriva accessible under debian. would like a shortcut mandriva home folder on my debian desktop. I'm using a diff username under debian than under mandriva as arctic said.

 

2. I have tons of folders/bookmarks on my firefox bar under mandriva. can I grab (import) those to my new firefox under debian?

 

I think I am going to like debian. Fortunately, since I used FC2, FC3 and FC4 for quite a while, I remember some things about using apt. So hopefully the learning curve will be very short. Plus I know there is tons of help for debian on the web, so I will be googling when I have questions, and I'll bookmark some of the better debian help sites, so I don't bother arctic too much! ;)

 

:deb:

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Grub: Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Change default

timeout		 5

to anything you prefer (number of seconds).

 

/home: This is possible, but you have to probably change the permissions on your Mdv /home folder.

 

Firefox: Sure. just copy the hidden .mozilla folder from Mdvs /home to Debians /home folder.

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I marked this thread Solved, thanks arctic, gowator, and ian, and others. So far I really like debian, or at least the newer gnome.

 

I plan to only boot into debian after I am sure I can get to all my mandriva /home stuff. Its mostly some docs, lots of family pics, and tons of mp3s.

 

What I want to do eventually is to wipe out the mandriva partitions completely and make the space available to debian. However I will probably leave 10-12 GB of free space in case of me wanting to do a test install of a future linux distro.

 

I'll start a new thread when I'm ready to do something...!

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ok, I spoke too soon. It's not quite solved...

 

I booted into mandriva a while ago, and when I got to the log in screen, the kb & mouse did not work.

 

restarted, and then when booting again, mandriva would not boot... just get "filesystem errors" and it asks me if I want to correct Y/N. I said No, and restarted into debian. Debian boots fine.

 

I don't really care too much if mandriva is trashed... but is it really trashed or not? I did back up what I wanted, before installing debian... so it's not like I'll lose anything.

 

I kind of wish that I had let debian use the entire disk...

Edited by null
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Most probably it ain't trashed but only the grub entry not being 100% correct (this happened to several people).

 

In order to correct this, please post the output of

 

fdisk -l

 

and the contents of your /boot/grub/menu.lst file that refers to Mandriva.

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ok will try that later today. Note: the first few times I booted into mandriva after installing debian it booted into mandriva fine.

This was a couple days ago.

 

The only reason i would want to go into mandriva is to maybe get some files I did not back up.

 

I would like to make a shortcut on my debian desktop to my mandriva /home files.

 

or else just wipe most of mandriva's space, and re-use it for debian.

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ok will try that later today. Note: the first few times I booted into mandriva after installing debian it booted into mandriva fine.

This was a couple days ago.

 

The only reason i would want to go into mandriva is to maybe get some files I did not back up.

 

I would like to make a shortcut on my debian desktop to my mandriva /home files.

 

or else just wipe most of mandriva's space, and re-use it for debian.

You can just mount the disks and copy the info then for instance change the mount point of /home to that partition...

 

So if your mandriva home is /dev/hda4 (for example) you can just make a mount point like /home/null/old_home

with mkdir and then mount

mount /dev/hda4 /home/null/old_home

 

If you are using testing then I'd repeat arctic's earlier suggestion and think of using sidux... its 99% identical but sometimes when tweaks come out or a buggy package hits the unstable/testing mirrors it will be fixed in sidux sooner + you get a lot of tools to keep it up to date...

It depends a lot on how you and to keep up to date though...

If your happy doing big almost reinstalls then no need but if you want to try and keep current its much easier. Somewhere inbetween its no big difference...

 

That is if you use sidux you apt-get upgrade often (weekly or so) and you get any warnings first... if you don't then the current upgrade can be outa step (not usually it just can be) so incremental updates are better carried out through sidux ... whereas if you wait 6 months then you will have a bit of playing about but apt always fixes it for me.

 

This might sound strange, but once you get used to the Debian rolling upgrades it will make more sense ...

 

(what might happen for instance is libs get outa synch .. so you update but some are still unmet deps... usually you just repeat the update until there are no more changes... but sometimes for huge changes like xfree -> xorg (or HAL/DBUS) you might have a few changes this is where sidux helps because the tweaks are already done and a script usually exists...

 

Also you then get an excellent forum (less friendly perhaps than here but more tech based and with the devs answering the questions which makes a huge difference){its not unfriendly btw just more tech focussed :D }

 

See contuinue here button:

http://sidux.com/

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I'm stuck at work now, but....

 

 

I think I want to keep my debian testing install. I think I will like it, and I've never been one to have to have the latest updates quick quick quick. I probably would only do the apt upgrade every other month or so.... unless there was something particular I wanted quickly.

 

I'm kind of confused on sharing /home. I have googled this several times, and everybody basically has different thoughts... some are, "yeah, go ahead, but have to do it correctly" some are "don't do it, too much trouble, you will bork something" some are in between.

 

 

1. I don't want mandriva anymore. As discussed in the first page of this thread, arctic helped me to resize my mandriva /home to give debian approx 10.5 GB of space.

 

2. I would like to wipe mandriva's space and make it available to debian... but first there may be some mp3s in mandriva's /home that I did not back up, so I'd like to boot into mandriva one more time to grab those files.

 

3. after that, then I'd like to wipe mandriva's space and make it available to debian.

 

thanks for all the help!! this is my favorite linux board, and luckily there are members here that know something about every distro out there. I'd like to stick with debian for quite a while.

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Okay... again: post "fdisk -l" and we can continue, when we know which partitions are the debian partitions and which ones the Mandriva ones.

 

For moving all files over to Debian, the easiest approach would be from a terminal.

 

mount -t ext3 /dev/hdX/ /mnt (= mount Mandrivas /home on /mnt in Debian)

 

cp -R /mnt/home/bob/MP3 /home/bob1 (copy reversively all files in folder MP3 of bob (Mdv) into bob1's /home folder (Debian).

 

For repartitioning and assigning the free space, you can install and use e.g. gparted. An easy to use partitoning manager.

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