Linux installation from hell

[Joe Auman]

Well, after going bald from ripping my hair out, I decided to share my saga.

It all started on a crisp morning in the mall, staring at three types of Linux. After looking
at each box, I decided to get Linux Mandrake 7.0 complete. I liked it's easy install options,
and the overall look. So I brought it home, waiting calmly until I could break away from
windows.
I popped the CD in my Dell Dimension Lc500, thinking I would be in Linux before
supper. I installed Partition Magic, and went to install BootMagic. Then the troubles
began. It gave me one of those "hard drive is to large" messages. I kind of figured
something like this would happen; it looked all to easy on the box. After consulting with
the installation support team, I found out that I would have to create a boot partition, and
another half dozen other ones. I decided I did not want to push my luck. Went to remove
the partition made by PartitionMagic, it wouldn’t. Just froze. Only a format got the two
gigs back. So I went to install Linux for Windows, thinking this would be much easier.
How feeble minded I was. First of, the manuals description was as clear as fog.
Everything was different. Only if I could install it. I nice "Kernel panic" stopped the
installation in its tracks. So I went back to the support team, and with there help, I
managed to get past the kernel problem. Then on to the first installation.
“Initializing CD-ROM...” it glared at me. There was no DrakX, as described so
thoroughly in the manuals. No, just the text installation. Then the computer liked to freeze
at this moment, leaving me with only one choice, a nice and handy Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Asked
the support team what happened, and they said my CD-ROM is not supported. Oh, great.
Just what I need. So of I went screaming at almost taking a swift kick to the computer.
Then I said “Screw it...” So I took I nice stroll over to the uninstall program and said
good bye to two weeks of work ( The support team liked making a habit of only replying
a day later). How I love my life.
Then came the regular installation. The support team suggested that I just do a regular
install without the LILO. So of I went. Adjusted the BIOS to boot of the CD-ROM, and
then some more trouble. No DrakX as once again described in the manuals. Again, a text
installation. I thought I bought this product because of its ease to install. I must have been
wrong. Anyway’s, I got through until the final part, configuring X. Another bundle of fun
was about to face me.
“Which graphic card should I use?” it asked me in those blue and yellow colors. I also
thought that this installation was supposed to detect and install this device? At least that’s
what the manuals told me. (I’m starting to think my now that the manuals are not entirely
correct.) So I went through trying to look for mine, Intel 810 Graphics chipset. Guess
what? No, really, guess what? Take a moment to think what possibly could
happen.........................................................Got an idea? Well, my video card wasn’t
there. (Could this get any worse? Wait.) So I tried all the ones that where closely related.
Nope, none of them worked. Just a fun little predicament, isn’t it? So I tried the
“Unlisted” option. No, of course, it did not work. By this time, it would restart the X
configuration. Then it would come up with an error, and try to start it again. Then it just
went in a loop, how I love these type of things.
The handy keyboard command came in use again. Then the installation was from square
one. Of it went again, another hour to install. Then X configuration came up again. I
decided to trick it this time. I chose “Unsupported VGA compatible.” It works!! IT
WORKS!!!! Oh, thank you computer god, THANK YOU!!!!! I screamed in joy. I only
had 16 colors, but I could get the drivers from a site that the support team gave me. Now,
one, and only one question. I know that Linux can “see” the windows partition, but if I
download, lets say, the video drivers on the windows partition, would I be able to use
them in Linux? I have a win modem, and at the time I bought Linux, I had no idea that
they were no compatible. Thanks to all who read this, and let it be known, it’s not as easy
as the box says.

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If it ain't broke, it will be soon!

WARNING!!
All "advice" taken from Joe Auman should be used with caution!! Joe Auman is not responsible for natural disasters, epidemics, loss of sanity, nuclear war, a second ice age, or
Armageddon in the result of using his "advice".

[Statica]

We'll let it be here so anyone who puts in Linux with : Assumptions that they will know what Linux is intuitively without reading adequate documentation : shall be warned.

The most basic rule of installation is .. find out whther your h/w is part of the supported list.

[Smoke24]

I agree with Joe, the documentation that comes with Mandrake 7.0 is as clear as fog. I have what looks to be a good clean install but the books do not give much if any info on configuring the system. I have 17 icons on the desktop and 15 more in the task bar and nothing in the documentation tell what any of these are for. I guess they figure that you will figure it out by trial and screw up.

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We have done so much for so long with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

[mairving]

Actually my install of Mandrake was the easiest install of any OS that I have ever had. Didn't quite know what to do with it when I installed it but I am learning. One thing that worked well for me was to install it on a separate HD. I just gave it it's own space and things worked well. I have Windows 98, NT and Linux on the same machine. It has been two months since I have used either of those OS's on this machine. It has been nearly that long since I have rebooted the system. It's a challenge learning the ins and outs of a new OS but very worth it. Sorry that you had a bad experience, Joe. Don't give up just yet though.

[mairving]

Which icons? Give us the icons and we will try to help either here or in a new post. The KDE desktop is good but often times using the command line is faster and more powerful. It also gives you a better understanding of Linux. The command line is not at all like the command line in DOS. There are bunches of shortcuts like the use of the TAB key to complete the line and the MAN command, etc. Learn enough of the Linux syntax and you can do a bunch. Let us know.

[Toaster]

Answer to your problems? RED-HAT.
The only things to be VERY afraid of is SIS video and win-modems.
RH 6.1 is VERY stable and support for hardware is almost COMPLETE with the exception of the above. I use SCSI devices and RH never balked at drive sizes of 18GB+.
IDE may present other problems but folks suggest that "large" drive support is included.

[shafe1]

I took the recommended install on Mandrake 7.0 and had no trouble with it finding a 13.6GB Western Digital Drive. I also let it set the partitions... It gave me a 1.5 GB root, 250MB Swap, and a 11.193 GB home. Only problems I had was impatience in selecting video, because I didn't have the monitor documentation and Win98 had listed it as "unknown". I'm going to go back and reinstalling this weekend and trying the Customized option. By the way Joe, My CD_ROM didn't want to initilize (a Samsung) When I had it set up as a Master or CS (Jumper). Make sure your's is attached as the Primary IDE slave, not to your sound card, and it may help with that problem...

[artsapimp]

I guess I should take both sides of this. I have uninstalled and reinstalled my Mandrake 6.5 at least 8 times now and never have gotten everything to work correctly. I can't blame anything other than myself though. I have since changed all PCs to some version of windows. On 5-16-00 everyone will be hearing from me again though, I will be trying it again for the 9th time, you know it's going to work right.....right?

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If you think an education is expensive...try ignorance.

[Joe Auman]

UPDATE

Well, I majorly messed up X by trying to install the video drivers. So I decied to re-re-re-reinstall. It went as smooth as sandpaper, just as usuall. Another great thing has come about. Since I don't have LILO iinstalled, I have to use the boot disk. Well, what could possibly go wrong at this moment? Any ideas? I can give you one. The boot disk is curropted. Oh, just so much fun!!! I could do this all day!!! Well, it reads from the disk, says "Error 0x10," it reads from the disk, says "Error 0x10," it reads from the disk, says "Error 0x10," it reads from the disk, says "Error 0x10," it reads from the disk, says "Error 0x10," it reads from the disk, says "Error 0x10," it reads from the disk, says "Error 0x10," it reads from the disk, says "Error 0x10," ect. Any ideas? Let me guess, a re-re-re-re-reinstall?

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WARNING!!
All "advice" taken from Joe Auman should be used with caution!! Joe Auman is not responsible for natural disasters, epidemics, loss of sanity, nuclear war, a second ice age, Armageddon, ect. in the result of using his "advice".

[Paul Victorey]

Why not try Mandrake 7.0 on a completely clean, unformatted, unpartitioned HD?

You only need 3 real partitions: boot, swap, and root. if you make a /usr partition make it your biggest, everything installs there programwise I believe.

I have installed Linux and never had probs except on a 386 that I tried just for fun to make into Linux machine, but the CDROM was bad and I didn't feel like doing network install or swap out the drive.

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Paul M. Victorey
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I am not responsible for any problems that may arise as a result of following my advice. This includes, but is not limited to, computer failure, loss of data, nuclear war, famine, boils, no clean laundry, your daughter running off with a biker gang, or armageddon. Take my advice at your own risk.

[Statica]

Did you follow the installation how-to's or partition-how-to's? Are you using a new bootdisk or re-using any previous bootdisk? The err. code could mean quite a bit, quite possibly not being able to find the root/boot partition. Or as Paul suggests .. start afresh and not try to reuse anything. Most importantly check out your hardware and make sure its right for Linux.

[bdunn]

Have done several linux installations Caldera Open Linux was easiest. Slackware was toughest.

Good luck
Bruce

[mairving]

It really depends on your hardware. I had an awful time with OpenLinux 2.2. The reason was I had a Voodoo Banshee video card. I installed Mandrake and it was a breeze. The reason is that Mandrake used a kernel that supported my video card.

[Byte 2.0]

I am very new to linux but Mandrake 7.0 was the easiest I have ever installed. However I have never got sound, modem, or a network card working in any verison, but at least I got my video working in X with mandrake 7.0, so I was able to play with it.

[Cymbeline]

My few cents on the issues in the thread:

1. Toaster, you are right; SiS video chipsets are quite a problem to get working under X. However, it is quite possible and when you do get it to work, it works like a charm.

2. I've had problems with RedHat (or its variants, like Mandrake). The reason is that RedHat places all its configuration scripts in scattered places, connected by symbolic links (which gets EXTREMELY annoying). The easiest distribution that I have been able to get to work is Slackware.

Cymbeline

[nightsky]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Ex-Static-Cling:
We'll let it be here so anyone who puts in Linux with : Assumptions that they will know what Linux is intuitively without reading adequate documentation : shall be warned.

The most basic rule of installation is .. find out whther your h/w is part of the supported list.

---

So where do i find the Hardware Supported List?

[cobra]

try visiting the os manufacturer website.
I have tried them ALL, and Caldera was the easiest to install on my 400 celeron machine.
it did not work on my p2-266 w/ monster fusion video, neither did ANY redhat. I got Redhat 6.1 and mandrake 7.0 running on a dell GX1 500mHz at work, and it(mandrake 7.0) looked awesome. Linux can be a pain, and trying to get it running right is nearly impossible for a newbie. I did get my machine at work(dell GX1 400 mhz) on our network and got samba running, but could not get it on the net....strange because we have a linux dns server, haha(which I hate) the internet "police" set that up. All I can say is you have to do ALOT of reading and pend ALOT of time to get linux running as smoothly as windows( ) Don't give up.

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Miami, flee it like a native.

[Joe Auman]

*Another Update*
I fianlly found time this afternoon to re-re-re-re-reinstall. I was thinking that maybe I could improve the speed from the usuall one hour install. I went and set the cd-rom to boot, then off I went. When the Install started, I typed "expert mem=125M" thinking that this MIGHT give me all 125 Mb of ram. It worked, and better than I expected!! DracX acually ran!! No more text install!! I could almost cry. The install went fairly smouth, and it only took 16 minutes!! What a little ram can do.

Well, I went to install the video servers (trying to get the new vocab down) and I was trying to get to the console. The manuals don't explain how to do this, but I remember that on this site I heard about pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. After three times (it restarted X), I got it to the console. In the directions to install the servers, I found that you need to know the XFree86 version. So off I went to type, logged in as root, X -version. I typed "X -ver" that's all the farther I got and it restarted X. Any Ideas on what I'm doing worng?

Also, where should I have the servers to install them? The dirctions say to type "rpm -Uvh XFCom-i810-glibc2.1-1.0.0-rh60.i386.rpm" and then it shoudl install, but it says "error opening file." I had to download them since i have a winmodem. I put them in the folder called "vdrivers" and then coppied that folder to the KDE desktop (the root desktop). Any ideas on how i could get this done? I'm beyond new on this, so please help.

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For every computer fix, another problem arises.

WARNING!!!
All knowledge posted here at PCMechanic by one Joe Auman is used at the individuals own risk. Joe Auman can not be held liable for events that result from using Joe Auman’s knowledge.

[shafe1]

I'm with ya on the trouble of installing... I keep reading different opinions, on the same distributions... one person says it's a breeze another says it's a living nightmare. My problems start after the software install finishes I tried setting the X config to the actual monitor type and Video card I have and the test usually asks me to try again. I've been told that I should try the Xconfigurator from a console and not in the Grahical mode, and also not to test it and to also play with the resolutuions. Another problem is I have a sound card that Windows said was a ESS 1868, which Mandrake Supports (it's ISA PNP). When I try to detect it Mandrake reports "The following erro occured in mpo..." but doesn't tell me the error. I tried to manally configure the card in Lothar, it didn't like that... and if you read any of my other posts you'll see I've lost all the desktop Icons before,for no apparent reason. Recently after I had it installed, I decided to take a break before trying to reconfigure the default video that was working and I let my son peruse some of the games. He played asteroid and Smiletris (he loves Ktron though I don't know why). I watched him a lot and He really didn't do anything wrong. But later when He tried to log back in and play those games again, they wouldn't start. The menues would close like they were starting but nothing would happen. I logged into another page and started X and ran the games as root, and myself... but he couldn't. Then after I restarted the PC I started getting a message that Hda5 was uncleanly unmounted. Neddless to say (I haven't had time yet but I will this weekend) I'm going to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-install it but this time I'm starting with only the Video card in. Then once I have that working, I'll go to the sound card (which by the way wouldn't work even when I told it the settings for IRQ and DMAs that Win98 reported) I think I need to run the pnpdump and isapnp then recompile the kernel to get it to work (I have read a little, you see). Then I'll get to the nic (an intel 16 bit), then hopefully I can get the Printer on my old win95 486 setup as a network printer on Linux (IF I can figure out the addressing it requires.... Even if I can only use the Lexmark inkjet for printing Text... it would be nice). Anyways, I've decided to give Mandrake a couple more tries, then if I can't get it working I'm going onto Corel Deluxe (at least they give you a cool looking game to help get the jkids into the new OS... They also give you a littel 3 inch penguin mascot :-) ... I hope they put as much thought into their setup)I really don't want to drop back to Windows 98, I recently thought of doing a dual boot system (since I was having so much trouble with gettin Mandrake going solo) and after I finally got Winblows 98SE to rcognize the bigger hard drive (13.6 GB- required the overlay because my MB only supports up to 8.4 GB) I started getting errors again from Win98. Once again I wiped the drive and removed EZ-BIOS from the disk. Oh yeah one last problem... I installed StarOffice following the istructions which were basically non-existant (open a terminal and run rpr -blah, blah, blah!) It finished the workstation install and said it was adding it to the Kde panel and then somwhere else 9can't remember where) well after It was done I couldn't find an icon for it anywhere. I thought maybe I had to restart X (or maybe it told me I had to... it was a couple weeks ago) and I still couldn't find it. I even looked in my user directory to see if there was anything in there (since I had done a workstation install there should've been something) Nothing! One more plus for Corel it comes with WordPerfect 8 for Linux Suite. But, I'm a fair guy (and sometimes cheap :-) ) I'll give MAndrake more time to prove itself.

[Joe Auman]

*Update, once again*

Finally, something good happened. I consider myself a fairly patient man, but this is pushing even my limit. I'm detirmened to get my $30 worth, even if it kills me. I decided to try to install the video servers once again. This time I was extermely careful. With the most luck any person could have, I did it. I got it to work for a brief 10 sec.!! I did it, but one thing refused to work. I needed to create a symbolic link from /usr/X11R6/bin/XFCom_i810 to /ect/X11/X. I got to the console, but X was still running. When logged in as root, it shows I'm in the root direcotry. How would I get up one more level as root? When I try to create one in the root directory, it says it can't because it can not find the directory or file. Please help me before I go insane!

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I fear explantions explanatory of things explained.

[shafe1]

Joe,what do you mean by "get up one more level as root" ? If you mean how do you get to a sub directory as root, use the cd command (change directory) you can give it a relative path or an abolute path. for example say your in a user's home directory and wanted to got to the etc/lib directory. you just type "cd /etc/lib" and enter. giving it the absolute pathename. Or say your in a sub directory of your home directory called garbage and you want to go to a different sub directory of your home directory (say it's named bogus). you could use the relative path like so..
"cd ../bogus" then enter.

Also, when I tried to run the install for StarOffice. I had to give it the whole path for the setup file or cd to the directoryand run the rpm statement as shown in the instructions. THen I was able to login again to the gui and run the workstation install for my username.

If this doesn't help or isn't what you were referring to, I hope you'll accept my apologies.

By the way, I don't know who is writing the guides for Mandrake, but they sre not very good writers. Their instructions only give you part of the process. Don't believe me? try going to CD #3 and reading the readme for the StarOffice Installation. Then try to follow the instructions EXACTLY as written as any newbie would. You Ain't gettin too far datta way. You have to read into what they are trying to tell you.

[shafe1]

Something I forgot to add... If you were talking about creating a new directory (if the link is what was giving you the file not found message) try the mkdir command. I think that's the command, that's what it was in UNIX and I'm sure I saw it somewhere in the Mandrake docs. YOu could also try going to the file manager in X and creating the subdirectory like you would in Windoze.
Again, sorry if this is wasting your time.
Just tryin' to help where I think I can.