2 Linux (KDE Questions)

[Gamingphreek]

When Edgy Eft was released I decided to give the Linux-RAID another shot.

Well I got it working but I cant get GRUB or LILO to install. Both of them error out. I assume this is because I have my system configured as this:

RAID-0 #1
307.8 GB ext3 /

RAID-0 #2
8.4 GB swap /swap

Am I correct in assuming that I have to create a seperate /boot partition that isn't in the array on both drives?

-Kevin

Edit: Got it working based on my assumptions 🙂. Just need help installing a platform independent build of GAIM.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
When Edgy Eft was released I decided to give the Linux-RAID another shot.

Well I got it working but I cant get GRUB or LILO to install. Both of them error out. I assume this is because I have my system configured as this:

RAID-0 #1
307.8 GB ext3 /

RAID-0 #2
8.4 GB swap /swap

Am I correct in assuming that I have to create a seperate /boot partition that isn't in the array on both drives?

-Kevin

You are correct about the boot partition. The only raid array that the /boot directory can be contained in is a Raid1 array (and even then, you are lucky if it works).

 

[drag]

Yep. Lilo and grub need to read the kernel and the initrd files up into RAM in order to boot the system. If your using software raid or fakeraid (dmraid) that requires special drivers then initrd will prepare the raid array for the system to mount.

(initrd: initial root device.. it's a compressed file that is used as a loopback file system to prepare the system for booting. It does stuff like load sata drivers or activate raid arrays so you can access the harddrive for booting)

The bootloaders are to stupid to be able to figure out how to read information striped across multiple drives. With mirror (raid 1) it doesn't matter so much since the drive can be easily used as a standalone drive until initrd sets up the raid stuff for booting.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Yea I've learned something 🙂 🙂

Well I got it working now, and seeing that your responses matched my suspicions helped a lot.

What I did was:
Format the first SATA drive as follows:
50MB - /boot (I marked this as bootable)
10GB - /
2GB - /swap
148GB - /home

I did the exact same thing to the second HDD except (I figured this out after making the mistake the first time) I did not create a /boot partition, I just left the area as 47.8MB of Free Space.

Installed and it works 🙂 🙂

I decided to use Automatix to get the Nvidia drivers this time and it works like a charm thus far. I think I am definitely keeping Linux right now.

I have one question if you guys can help out that would be great.

The latest release of GAIM is 2.0.0 Beta 4. In automatix the most recent is Beta3. In beta 4 there are a host of new improvements. On my previous installations I tried installing it and what not but I kept having to download libraries and stuff and I never actually got the ./configure and everything to work.

Is there anyway someone can guide me, or point me to something that guides me, how to install it from a platform independent build?

-Kevin

Edit: Oh and when I resize windows (I'm running Kubuntu btw) it doesn't appear to refresh fast enough and I get a lot of ghosting which goes away in a second or two. Is this a known bug or is there something I can do to fix it? If not its no big deal.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
Is there anyway someone can guide me, or point me to something that guides me, how to install it from a platform independent build?

There's not really such thing as a good platform independent build. You're usually best off waiting for your repository maintainers to bump the version. Building it yourself is definitely an option but you're best off figuring out how to do it without root privileges (specify a custom installation directory) until you have a pretty good idea of what you're doing. Of course, you could also get lucky and the gaim programmers might work on ubuntu and the same hardware platform so they could provide you with a build (although they only appear to do rpm based distros).