quote: Original post by Arfa

Sorry to hear you had a bad experience with installing Linux, but I have a friend who successfully dual booted Win'98 and Mandrake 7.0 on his laptop with no problems reported. Another friend - a 100% Linux novice - got
Mandrake 7 dual booting on his new system in under an hour. You are the first person I know who's had a problem with Mandrake 7 (or 6 for that matter).

I think the point is that it's not been tested widely enough. It may work wonderfully smoothly on most machines, but apparently not all.

quote:
The <1024 boot partition error that occurred is because due to the way x86 hardware works,

Yes, I know this. But that's still no reason to flash up an almost undecipherable error message. I knew to relocate the boot partition - a less knowledgable user would have had no idea.

quote: Since you were installing to a second hard
disk, I wouldn't have thought that you would need to do either of these things - the install program would create the /boot partition automatically before the first 2GB of your second drive.

I was initially going for a 40% FAT32 partition, a 2nd 40% FAT32 partition, then 20% divided among Linux. Obviously it didn't like that. But when I moved all the Linux partitions to the start of the drive, it made corrupt FAT32 partitions for me, which is simply not acceptable - I can't afford to devote 17gb solely to Linux.

I had actually intended to use a boot disk, but the docs don't seem to make any mention of being able to use a boot disk -instead- of having something in the first 1024 cylinders, just as a backup in case Windows overwrites LILO.

quote:
As for the lack of KDE, it seems like you accidentally deleted part of the package. Mandrake should have an option to let it decide what partitions and packages you need. Perhaps this would have been the best option to choose?

Heh, no. It said 'what packages would you like?', I scrolled down to ensure everything was checked and hit ok. I wasn't in expert mode so there was no way I could have removed part of a package even if I'd tried. I can only assume that it ran out of disk space before it got that far.

quote:
Another point: you have to remember that almost every Linux distribution, including Mandrake, is a commercial product. The retail box would contain a very thick manual containing a detailed step-by-step guide on the Linux installation process. That's one of the things you pay money for. The
manuals are usually included on the distribution website or on the disk.

Well, I read and digested the Mandrake install guide before I installed, and basically it covered none of the problems I mentioned. It said it would be able to resize partitions for me and it couldn't, and it said it could make FAT32 partitions for me and it couldn't. I don't know what there is by way of documentation that might be better in the commercial version.

quote:If you want an easy install program that I can guarantee works, download SuSE. Ask your friend with the CD burner to download SuSE the 6.3 or 6.4 eval from the SuSE ftp site (ftp.suse.com). The setup program - YaST - is very easy to use, and it shows you how big the packages you are installing are.

I can't really go downloading Linux distributions as my connection isn't up to it. I have Mandrake and Corel Linux on CD and chose Mandrake as I heard it was more fully featured and more secure. I am tempted to try Corel Linux to see if their partitioner is any better, but I really need those FAT32 partitions to be left intact. I also don't have the money to go buying commercial distributions or books just to set up what is essentially a free operating system. Disappointing!

Edited by - Kylotan on 4/12/00 10:05:21 AM

quote:Original post by DerekSaw

First installation, I had problem with the partitioning program came with Mandrake 7.0 (diskdrake, izit?). I used it to resize my 6.4GB drive (already partitioned as C=1GB, D=2GB, E=1GB, F=2.4GB), however in the end, corrupted FAT32 volume and some files in Windows have negative sizes!! But linux happen to be ok. This is not what I want. So....

Yeah, it looks to be somewhat flaky to me.

quote:
Later, I use the simple MS FDisk that came with Windows. Repartition everything and leave 1GB for linux. I reinstall Win98 1st, then Mandrake.

I had over 1GB for Linux, but perhaps I had the wrong proportion of space in each partition. Either way, it didn''t start up with KDE, like it is supposed to, nor did it even seem to be running X properly, but then I don''t know it well enough to make a judgement. When I installed Red Hat in the past, I could at least bring up menus and things, so I assume there was no window manager set up in my Mandrake installation. Either way, the install process still needs some serious work on it if Linux is going to progress past geek level, sadly.

quote:Anyway, off to www.linuxnewbie.org and www.linuxdoc.org (Shelrem)

To be honest, I''m finding the Linux sites very unhelpful. That''s why I''m posting here, mainly. But since I can''t seem to get any good non-destructive partioning working without paying money for it, I figure this will be both my first and my last thread in this Linux forum for a good few months yet. Thanks for the help and suggestions, guys.