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I get owned by linux *Please help* gui no load, and I need to boot in a different way.

Y

Yossarian451

Senior member
OK, I am experimenting with linux on an old hard drive which I put on in addition to my regular hard drive. I just stuck it on the same ide cable as my regular hard drive, set it to slave and loaded linus on it while I had my other hard drive disconnected.. It worked fine for me for a couple of time, rebooted and did some stuff to try to get the feel for it. Now when I boot into it the gui doesn't come up, and I am dumb noob and can't live without the gui, i get owned. It is mandrake 8.2 and from all the times I have seen before, it just brought up a screen and I logged into it with a gui. Now I get a console, and I get owned, I know cd, su and ls. That is it, well maybe exit too, and help. So help fixing that would be nice, I don't want to stay noob forever but being stuck where I can't read manuals without slow rebooting, and no trials is really hard.

Also, I would like to set it up so I use a floppy to boot into linux, rather than a dual boot, I share this computer and if for any reason, moving arrows or whatever, my oparents get stuck in linus, they would die (they barely understand indows), I guess I could dual boot if absolutely neccessary, but I want a failsafe. Anybody know how??? Also windows doesn't even see the extra hard drive I put in, why is this, and will this prevent me from dual booting. I have them set slave and master, adn everything is fine in bios, I can even set the bios to load from the linux hardrive, but windows, doesn't see this, I find this a good thing, so no one can mess with it accidentally. Any help getting me to be able to boot linux ,either way, would also be appreciated above and beyond getting a gui back. Thanks in advance.

P.S. I am runnning windows 98 se, if it makes any difference.
 
You obviously have done little to no reading.
Linux.org Docs
LinuxNewbie.org NHFs
Linux-Mandrake.com User Guide
When you boot into Linux, you should see a $ (unless you log in as root, which is stupid for security reasons). Type $startx and you should be good to go...
As for the dual boot, this is how I do things. Win2k and FBSD are on different hard drives. I just install the the boot loader into the MBR of each hard drive and select in BIOS which drive I boot to...
 
I am dual booting right now, using the bios, but I need to idiot proof the thing, because I share this computer, so if I forget, my parents will not, even if I leave simple complete diagrams on how to fix it, be able to change the bios back, so I was wonderin if I could use a disk or maybe just make it dual boot through a menu.
 
ok, this is what I'm doing.
winXP on hdd1 w/ boot loader installed into the MBR of hdd1
fbsd on hdd2 w/ boot loader installed into the MBR of hdd2
when I turn my computer on I hit 'del' and go into BIOS. I select which hard drive to boot to and then exit. I never get asked which OS to boot to, it just boots to it (because technically there is no dual boot)...
 
Yes, I am doing the same, but that is because my parents are not using the computer right now. Iw ant another way other than bios to simply acces the second hardrive. Iw as thinking a disk to tell it to boot from the secondary hardrive rether than telling the bios that the hardrive is the place to look manually because the option stays so if i forget my parents would be screwed and never figure it out. I have little exsposure to this kind of thing so I was hoping someone knew how. Ohh and the problem was I was using someone elses advice to get the mouse wheel working and that is why the gui didn't load, becasue their example was wrong, so I had to edit it and I finally got it working. I had read the entire quide at mandrake-linux.com before I installed, but it didn't go over that. But thanks for trying to help me. I am just new at this so I figure there are going to be times when I just get stuck for a while. But thanks also I would like to get my sound working, not sure about the specs, I think it is a riptide soundcard, with built in modem, I would kinda like to get the sound working, and I also have one of the intellipoint optical mouse and would like to get the scroll and side buttons working, it is the one with 5 buttons total, including the wheel. Thanks for helping me, I am quite eager to learn linux, and I know it will be a slow, but worthwhile process.
 
Originally posted by: Yossarian451
OK, I am experimenting with linux on an old hard drive which I put on in addition to my regular hard drive. I just stuck it on the same ide cable as my regular hard drive, set it to slave and loaded linus on it while I had my other hard drive disconnected.. It worked fine for me for a couple of time, rebooted and did some stuff to try to get the feel for it. Now when I boot into it the gui doesn't come up, and I am dumb noob and can't live without the gui, i get owned. It is mandrake 8.2 and from all the times I have seen before, it just brought up a screen and I logged into it with a gui. Now I get a console, and I get owned, I know cd, su and ls. That is it, well maybe exit too, and help. So help fixing that would be nice, I don't want to stay noob forever but being stuck where I can't read manuals without slow rebooting, and no trials is really hard.
Click to expand...

its XFree 4.x.x so xf86cfg or xf86config for setting X
then edit /etc/inittab and somewhere there says init:3, then set init:5

Also, I would like to set it up so I use a floppy to boot into linux, rather than a dual boot, I share this computer and if for any reason, moving arrows or whatever, my oparents get stuck in linus, they would die (they barely understand indows), I guess I could dual boot if absolutely neccessary, but I want a failsafe. Anybody know how??? Also windows doesn't even see the extra hard drive I put in, why is this, and will this prevent me from dual booting. I have them set slave and master, adn everything is fine in bios, I can even set the bios to load from the linux hardrive, but windows, doesn't see this, I find this a good thing, so no one can mess with it accidentally. Any help getting me to be able to boot linux ,either way, would also be appreciated above and beyond getting a gui back. Thanks in advance.

P.S. I am runnning windows 98 se, if it makes any difference.
Click to expand...

use Lilo and an image ... there you can say Windows and Linux and set Window the default ... they wont even press a key ... 😉

anyway mkbootdisk 🙂

matheus
 
Originally posted by: TheOmegaCode
ok, this is what I'm doing.
winXP on hdd1 w/ boot loader installed into the MBR of hdd1
fbsd on hdd2 w/ boot loader installed into the MBR of hdd2
when I turn my computer on I hit 'del' and go into BIOS. I select which hard drive to boot to and then exit. I never get asked which OS to boot to, it just boots to it (because technically there is no dual boot)...
Click to expand...

i have Slackware, FreeBSD and Win2000 and run lilo ... perfectly 😉

matheus
 
Originally posted by: matheusber
Originally posted by: TheOmegaCode
ok, this is what I'm doing.
winXP on hdd1 w/ boot loader installed into the MBR of hdd1
fbsd on hdd2 w/ boot loader installed into the MBR of hdd2
when I turn my computer on I hit 'del' and go into BIOS. I select which hard drive to boot to and then exit. I never get asked which OS to boot to, it just boots to it (because technically there is no dual boot)...
Click to expand...

i have Slackware, FreeBSD and Win2000 and run lilo ... perfectly 😉

matheus
Click to expand...
That's all fine and dandy if you run slack, or any linux variant which uses LILO, but not on FBSD/Win2k...
 
Originally posted by: TheOmegaCode
Originally posted by: matheusber
Originally posted by: TheOmegaCode
ok, this is what I'm doing.
winXP on hdd1 w/ boot loader installed into the MBR of hdd1
fbsd on hdd2 w/ boot loader installed into the MBR of hdd2
when I turn my computer on I hit 'del' and go into BIOS. I select which hard drive to boot to and then exit. I never get asked which OS to boot to, it just boots to it (because technically there is no dual boot)...
Click to expand...

i have Slackware, FreeBSD and Win2000 and run lilo ... perfectly 😉

matheus
Click to expand...
That's all fine and dandy if you run slack, or any linux variant which uses LILO, but not on FBSD/Win2k...
Click to expand...

i really didnt realized what you mean ...

you said you had to enter setup to make it ... and i said i dont need to do this ... so, there is a possible to not need to enter setup everytime ... just this ...

no need to get rude ... :////

:/

 
i really didnt realized what you mean ...

you said you had to enter setup to make it ... and i said i dont need to do this ... so, there is a possible to not need to enter setup everytime ... just this ...

no need to get rude ... :////

:/
Click to expand...
Oh, trust me, that wasn't rude. Maybe a tad bit snide. I never you had to dual boot using the BIOS method I mentioned. I do it simply because I hate to see a choice of operating systems every time I boot.
My last comment was no more than a snafu. I thought you were insinuating that I needed to install LILO (which would make no sense), because I had already told Yossarian451 to edit LILO and go from there.
 
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