Linux QUESTIONS & ANSWERS on INSTALLS of Linux distros OLD Questions-and-Answers, on old distros --- circa 2005

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(on OLD Linux distro installs)

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INTRODUCTION : This page is a continuation of Questions-and-Answers on INSTALLS of Linux distros --- from an INSTALLS-of-Linux section of a main 'Linux Answers' page. See that main-page for more explanation of the source of these questions-and-answers. The Q-and-A's on this page are, for the most part, older Q-and-A's --- many questions from before 2006. Some questions (and especially their answers) may not have much relevance to installs of modern Linux distros. Each of the links below will take you to page that gives the complete question and answer. (The initial part of each question is shown below.) After viewing a Q-and-A page, click on the Back button of your browser to return to this page.

INSTALL-of-Linux issues : (install issues of various distros, finishing touches, etc.) Incorrect keyboard layout/mapping in SUSE 10.1 I have had a hopefully minor glitch in installing SUSE 10.1. When I key in the at sign I get ". Similarly, double quotes gives @. I definitely selected English and UK in the setup as this was shown in the confirmation before the installation panel. H... Locked out of Ubuntu: 'session only lasted 10 seconds' When I try to log into my newly-installed Ubuntu I get a message saying: 'Session only lasted 10 seconds'. When I check the log I see: 'Failed to set permission 700 to .gnome2_private'. I can only log in to a terminal, so how do I fix this? ... How to dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu I currently have Windows XP on my computer but am looking to change over to Linux. Can I load Ubuntu without disrupting my XP? The reason being I have broadband and my ISP doesn't support Linux. If I do load Ubuntu will the partitions it puts disrupt... Create a boot CD containing Grub to dual-boot Windows and Linux I belong to a computer club that is 98% Windows-oriented and I'd like to install Mepis 6.0 on the club's laptop to demonstrate Linux and perhaps persuade some members to try it. Installing Grub on the MBR [master boot record] is not a good idea as th... Ubuntu installation: GRUB being installed in Dell hidden partition My father in-law recently expressed some interest in GNU/Linux, so I told him to download the brand-new-to-Linux distro du jour, Ubuntu. I really, really, expected the install to go smoothly, but he ran into a problem that has me stumped. The answer ... Will CentOS work on an AMD CPU? I installed CentOS 4.3 on my Pentium III, Windows 98 computer and it worked great. It says I need a Pentium CPU. I also have an AMD FX-53 with Windows XP and Fedora 5. I would like to replace my Fedora 5 with CentOS 4.3 on this computer also, but am ... Add more swap space in Linux without any unpartitioned space I need to add more swap space to my Linux machine but I don't have any unpartitioned disk space. Is there anything I can do? ... Best Linux distro for an IBM ThinkPad T22 Can you make any suggestions for a distro on a laptop, an IBM T22 with 256MB of RAM? I have tried the Live CD Damn Small Linux and it works great with my Winmodem. I would like to install it to the hard drive. Any suggestions? ... Fedora not installing on partition created in Partition Magic I bought a copy of your Get Started With Fedora special and followed the instructions for installing the software, but I have run into a problem. I have Windows XP installed, and partitioned my hard drive with Partition Magic to give 10GB of hard dis... Adding more information to the Bash login prompt How do I customise a login prompt? I want the penguin, CPU info, memory info, bogomips rating and an actual prompt. Can you help? ... Best Linux distributions to replace Windows in schools I am a network manager in a large secondary school. I am interested in trying to reduce ICT operating costs by using Linux and open source software. I currently use an FC4 server for our intranet and web server, but I would like to extend the use of ... Best Linux distro with 64-bit support I am interested in getting away from Windows and running Linux. I need to be able to design websites, edit photos, use MS Office, email, use the internet and play flight simulators. I know there are some Office replacement options and things like VMw... Slackware installation fails on Advent 7081 CELM350 laptop Since I first heard of it, I've been very keen on open source in principle, but I felt that it required too much technical wizardry for me to benefit from. Computers are expensive and I didn't want to take a wrong turn and end up ruining one. As I ha... SUSE installer stopping with 'storage modification failed' I have just tried installing SUSE Linux 10.0. It stopped at the partitioning table stage with error 3027, 'storage modification failed', while shrinking partition /dev/hda1 to 12.6GB. I am using an old Intel Celeron-based PC running Windows XP Home S... GRUB error 18 after installing SUSE This my third attempt at installing Linux and I am at my wits' end with this system. I bought the DVD/CD edition [of SUSE] because of the advertised back-up from Novell. The installation went according to a couple of reports I have read until the fir... Red Hat not detecting SATA hard disk I (a newbie) want to dual boot with XP and Red Hat 9.0 but have encountered a problem: RH9 cannot detect my SATA hard disk. Where can I find a device driver to load it, and how do I do that if the Red Hat disc is in the CD drive and I have no floppy ... Mandriva failing to boot - hanging at Initialising Cryptographic API I've been trying to get Mandriva to run, but alas, all the bad press I've heard about Linux has been proved true. It doesn't work and there's little help available in deciding even where to begin when it doesn't. There were problems installing Mandri... Fixing DCOP_SERVER not working error message Having heard so much about PCLinuxOS and its foolproof installation, I thought I'd give it a go. I tried version 89a and it ran sweetly from the CD, so I clicked Install To Hard-Drive. The installation appeared to proceed absolutely fine: no hangups,... What is the best laptop for Linux? Which 'notebooks' (the things that used to be called laptops) are best suited for running Linux? I'm looking to buy a machine and will only be able to afford a one-off, so it will have to be a little forward-looking in terms of hardware, even if the ... Mandriva: insufficient room to complete the installation I'm running Mandrake 10.1 on one of the partitions of my PC. At the third disc a dialogue box appeared stating that there is insufficient room to complete the installation. I am totally stuck, as I can't get back to Mandrake - it's just a black scree... Debian not booting into graphical mode, only text mode I installed Sarge from a DVD distro. Everything seemed to go OK. At the end of the install, it asked me to log in and then dumped me in a full-screen Bash shell. I expected to see a desktop environment. I repeated the procedure using a net load ISO f... Triple booting Windows, Fedora and Knoppix I have a 40GB hard drive split into two 20GB partitions for Windows XP and Knoppix. I made a new 10GB partition and installed Fedora, wanting a triple boot so I could choose Windows, Knoppix or Fedora. When I rebooted after installation, only Fedora ... Looking for a lightweight Linux distro I have got a laptop computer and want to run Linux on it. At the moment it has Red Hat 8 but it is so slow. These are the laptop's specs: Processor Intel Pentium 133 Memory 48MB Video 2MB controller chip C&T HIQV32 (CT65550) Hard drive size 2.02... Installing Kanotix to the hard drive I have burned a Kanotix ISO, and it booted quite happily on my second system. I really like the look and feel of it as well as all the abundance of software installed. But my question is, how do I install it to a hard disk? Booting from the CD is kin... Mandriva freezing on boot I recently decided to give Linux another try. I partitioned my drive into three logical drives: FAT32, Linux native, and a Linux swap partition (2GB) as well. I installed Windows first, and then tried to install Mandriva. All went well until after th... Expanding space on the root partition I had SUSE 9.2 installed on a new computer, and since the full install needed about 5GB, I reserved 6GB for the root partition and the rest of my hard disk for /home. Having OpenGroupware.org installed and a few other things that reside in /var, /opt... Mandriva rebooting into text-mode Being a very, very new user of Linux and an octogenarian to boot, I decided to try Mandriva. Everything seemed to run very well until it was time to reboot the system. I was then faced with a black screen with a request to login, which I did; but thi... Downgrade Fedora distro to earlier release I recently installed Fedora on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop after about six months of using Fedora and I'm having mixed feelings about it. I love how it automatically finds and configures my widescreen display, but I'm rather disappointed that since ... Fedora GRUB problem after installation I am trying to install Fedora as a Samba server for the Win98/ME boxes in my workshop. During installation I receive no messages of anything unusual, but after rebooting it comes to a halt at Grub. It is completely stuck and it's not possible to writ... Segmentation fault when installing Mandriva I managed to get my laptop to install Mandriva 2005, but I'm having a problem installing to my desktop from the DVD version. All seems to go well until reboot then I get a segmentation error and the boot halts. I've tried doing a fresh install with o... Installing a new kernel on Gentoo I am using Gentoo Linux 2004.2 and am installing gentoo-dev-sources for the 2.6 kernel. The instructions said to use make && make modules_install && make install at the command line to build the kernel and install it in /boot and se... What a turn-off I have installed SUSE 9.2 and have a problem with switching off my Acer laptop. After I select Turnoff from the KDE menu everything goes fine until I receive the message, 'The system will be halted immediately'. After that the system reboots instead ... Running 32-bit Linux distros on 64-bit CPUs I have the latest Ubute AMD64 processor, and every version of Linux I have tried with it so far gives the message 'out of sync' after the welcome screen. I presume that is because Linux is a 32-bit operating system and is incompatible with the 64-bit... Dual-booting Linux and Windows I'm thinking of switching my operating system to Linux. I am currently running (limping) with Windows XP and have purchased another hard drive to load Linux on to. I understand Fedora expects unassigned disk space, but I'm not sure about Ubuntu. Shou... SUSE Linux rebooting without graphical mode - only text mode Having long wanted to get away from Windows and associated programs I installed SUSE Linux 9.2. Installation went a treat it was all really easy - up until the reboot, that is. At the end of rebooting Linux asks me for my login and password. Then it ... Best server hardware for Linux compatibility? I've got a good one for you. I'm not sure that this can be categorised as a technical question but the only other places I can find answers are bound to be biased. I'm a Linux business user. Most of our back-end servers and services are Linux-based. ... Chain loading grub with two hard disks I have two hard drives in my PC, labelled as hda and hdb. Hda contains MDK 10.1 and Win2K. I put in hdb yesterday and installed Ubuntu on it, hoping that the boot loader (Grub) would detect the operating systems on hda. It did so - however, when I ca... Bash crash I am trying to install Gentoo Linux. I've been using the handbook, but when I get to Chapter 5 (chroot /mnt/gentoo/bin/bash) everything falls apart - I think it's something to do with /bin/bash. Also looking at the handbook, doing a Stage 3 install y... Best Linux distro for information kiosks? I am about to start developing an information kiosk that will run from a bootable CD. This is not an internet café-type application but rather what one might see in a mall or similar offering local information. I would appreciate your suggestions ... Dual-booting Linux with SUSE I'm guessing that a few readers have tried dual booting SUSE 9.2 and Windows XP. Given the problems with 9.1 (and several other distros, not just SUSE) a few months ago, my question is, does Grub get along with the XP boot loader straight out of the ... Can a RAM disk replace a swap partition? I'm trying to perform an experiment on my Fedora box, to set up a RAM disk to use as a swap device to replace the swap partition. There seems to be some debate over whether there's any point to this so I thought that I'd set it up and test the perfor... Linux across two hard drives I can dual boot my Linux/XP PC on my 20GB disk. I just added a separate 8GB disk drive to my machine. Now I've got two separate drives: 20GB and 8GB. I want to put Linux onto the 8GB one. I was just wondering if the process is still the same, given t... Red Hat install problems I recently bought an Intel 865 desktop board. I have a Seagate 120GB SATA hard drive. I tried installing Red Hat 9 on it, but with no success. Can you tell me which Linux flavour I should use? Will Mandrake 10.1 detect my Seagate SATA hard disk? ... Mouse problems in Fedora I just received your December issue with the Mandrake 10.1 disks. I've installed the system, but for some reason it just won't boot. My computer is home assembled with an AMD CPU, an ATI Rage 128 video board and a two-button mouse on COM2. I have two... Fixing missing dependencies I have SUSE 9.1 installed on my computers at home. The boxes all have KDE 3.2.1 installed. The SUSE web page has KDE 3.3 to download. I have downloaded all the required files. Now, how the heck do I install it? YaST doesn't let me see the files or ma... Putting Linux on an old laptop Hope you can help! I have a laptop which is not being used, but I would like to replace Win98 with Linux. It is a Sony pcg745 with a Pentium 266MHz with MMX, 128MB of memory and a 3GB drive. I have unzipped SUSE 9.1. I'm unable to find out how to get... AMD vs Intel support for Linux I have finally gained the intestinal fortitude to have a go at using Linux. I have been interested in the concept of Open Software for some time and I use Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office as my main programs of choice. While I like to think that ... Should I upgrade Linux or reinstall? A couple of months ago I bought the Complete Linux Handbook 2 with the Mandrake 9.2 distro on the DVD, and decided to install it. Since then I have spent a very long time teaching myself Linux; most of the time has been getting all of my peripherals ...

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