Guest Canby Posted January 23, 2007 Report Share Posted January 23, 2007 I tried to install Mandriva 2007 (the 4 cd version) onto one of my systems over the weekend. I downloaded the .isos and checked the md5s ok. The burns went without a hitch. I was going to add a 10gig drive (ok - small, I know) to an existing system and set up a dual boot for a trial. The first system I tried was a QDI KinetiZ 7E motherboard, normally running w98. The system rebooted with Mandriva disk 1 in the CD reader and displayed the blue installation/boot screen. At this stage the keyboard and mouse were both locked, so I could not move the bar to highlight 'install' (or indeed, do anything). The next system I tried was an Abit KT7. Same problem. Then I tried a Compaq SFF. This worked, but I did not have enough space to put the extra drive in. Does anyone know what the problem could be? The keyboards and mice are all standard PS/2 items. I could find nothing in the BIOS that looked like it was stopping the keyboard from being recognised, but, of course, you may know different? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted January 23, 2007 Report Share Posted January 23, 2007 Go into the BIOS and check if Plug'n'play is activated. If yes, disable it and try again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Canby Posted January 23, 2007 Report Share Posted January 23, 2007 Thanks a lot for the tip, Arctic. I will try it when I get back home on the weekend! I thought that Linux was a Plug'n'play O/S? My limited reading on other sites suggests that it supports it. I found no obvious warning about this on any site I have visited to try to sort the problem out myself. If this is a common problem (2 out of my 3 machines) it seems like a major one. It will be hard to get desk-top acceptability if the install process doesn't work smoothly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted January 23, 2007 Report Share Posted January 23, 2007 Actually, most systems do not have this problem. E.g. Fedora has over 1 Million installations counted - alone for Fedora Core 6! The problem is - as always - the hardware combination. Sometimes things fite nicely together, at other times they cause outright problems. I do not know if disabling Plug'n'Play will definitely help, as there are no error messages you can report. Thus it's a bit trial and error. And as it "freezes" right after launching the CD, it is quite probable that a BIOS setting is causing the problem you ran into. It is rather unlikely that the PS/2 devices cause the lockup as I have yet to read about a PS/2 keyboard or a mouse that is incompatible. BTW: I forgot to say: Welcome aboard :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Canby Posted January 23, 2007 Report Share Posted January 23, 2007 Thanks for the welcome, Arctic. I suspect I'm not on board yet, though - dangling between the ship and the quay probably describes me best at the minute! I had assumed it was a bios/hardware problem - what else could it be at this stage? So I tried a couple of different keyboards on the initial machine, but came up with the same problem. One problem machine is not much of a concern, but when I found two I thought that this might be a more common issue. I assume it's Mboard/Bios rather than the kboard. What I am trying to do is put a dual-boot Mandriva system onto a small home network. I will use it for office/internet (Opera) first and then try video, maybe even some games. Then hopefully expand from there! Where I expect to have problems is in printing. At the moment I use a network-shared printer which is connected to a W2k main office machine, and I can't change this easily. So I was hoping that I could use Samba to see the printer share, and then CUPS to get the Mandriva machine talking to the printer. It's an Epson Photo Stylus RX700. Does this seem possible? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted January 23, 2007 Report Share Posted January 23, 2007 So I was hoping that I could use Samba to see the printer share, and then CUPS to get the Mandriva machine talking to the printer. It's an Epson Photo Stylus RX700. Does this seem possible? Although I don't have Epson printers, it should be possible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Canby Posted January 23, 2007 Report Share Posted January 23, 2007 Thanks. If the PnP fix works, I should be able to load a working system next week and try setting up various apps on it. I hope to be able to get the wife and kids able to use windows or linux interchangeably to do standard tasks like write documents, email, browse or view DVDs. It will be interesting to see what the issues are! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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