Re: Installing Suse Linux 10

On Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:05:30 +0000, Ben Crain wrote:

Thanks for your continued help. The Cyberwalker article is nice, though I
was already familiar with how to get into BIOS. In fact, after I
encountered this problem I went into BIOS to see if my second hard drive,
where the Suse 10 base installation is presumably stored, could be made the
first one in the boot sequence. But it wasn't clear from the listing just
which thing is my second hard drive -- or even if it was in the sequence at
all. (But I'll look at it again.)

In any event, I'm quite annoyed -- almost to the point of throwing Linux in
the trash -- that this kind of problem can arise.

I'm quite annoyed that you're acting so juvenile about this. You have the
book, but you obviously didn't read it before doing the installation. If
you had, you wouldn't be having these problems. I have three books on SUSE
10.0 open in front of me. Every one has step by step instructions,
including screen shots, of every stage of the installation, with button by
button explanations of how to go about the installation. Every screen shot
shows that instructions are clearly given as to what your options are at
every stage of the installation. The problem is that you have to read
them, then follow them.

I pay good money to get a book with a Linux distribution that, by now
(Suse 10!!), should be configured for easy installment, so novices like
me can get straight to working with Linux itself, and not have to worry
about Grub and things like that, at least not at the outset.

How stupid is that last statement? Grub is your boot loader. Without that
you can't boot the system. It's imperative that you deal with grub
immediately, if you want to have a running system. If you'd have read the
book, you'd know that, and where and when the installation asks about
where you want grub installed, and why it gives you choices, and what
those choices are.

This is not a Novell/SUSE thing. This applies to any Linux operating
system. If you were to choose lilo as the boot loader, you'd still have to
know the same things. SUSE gives you that choice also. You just didn't
look. Paying good money for a book is not important. Reading that book,
and understanding what you've read is.

Morever, the book (and others I've looked at) all say that installing
Linux on a second harddrive, and thus not having to partition the
harddrive containing Windows, is the "ideal" solution.

It is, and having that drive as your boot drive is the most ideal
solution, as it eliminates the possibility of Windows overwriting the
Linux boot loader. Windows will do that, if you do any repairs to it. It
will not warn you, it will just do it, if it gets the chance. You need to
know how to fix it, or avoid it beforehand. If you want a dual boot system
you need to learn about your boot loader now, not sometime later, when you
feel like it.

The installation, and directions in the book, should be configured to
easily handle the "ideal" solution. But it says almost nothing about
how to set-up a dual-boot, other than just remarking that YaST will give
you to option to do that. (Which it emphatically does not!)

Bull***, bull***, and more bull***. That "Expert" tab you were too
afraid to even look at is where all that valuable information is at, in
great detail. You should have looked. If you had really read the book, you
would have known that too. You can look at every tab, and every button, to
see what it offers. You can try every option, and every page offers you the
option to say "never mind," and go back and try again, until you have
everything exactly as you want it, before you commit to the actual
installation. The book says so, and every window of the SUSE installation
says so. The information was right in front of you, all you had to do was
read it. Those buttons and tabs are not put there for decoration. They're
meant to be clicked on, and explored.

Moreover, the Suse help web page has disappeared, being replaced by
rather confusing/convoluted help pages at Novell, for all Novell
products.

Did you think to use google?

http://en.opensuse.org/Welcome_to_openSUSE.org


Second item on the hit list, with the only entry in the search dialog being
"suse". You might try clicking on that link. The answers to your questions
are obviously not going to be on that first page. You'll need to try the
various links.

You might also have much better luck getting good help about SUSE 10.0 on
alt.os.linux.suse rather than here. If you wish to check that out, I would
advise you to lose the whiney attitude first, and not start out making
claims that the SUSE installer is somehow missing components that everyone
there knows exist. Some of the people that hang out at a.o.l.suse are the
same people that put together the opensuse.org web site, contribute code
to, and build packages for the openSUSE distribution. As such, they are a
great source of help, but won't listen to, or but up with any bull***
stories about YaST. They know it inside out.

And I can find no way to contact the author of the book.

Trust me, he doesn't want to hear from you, and if he does, he'll tell you
to read the book. The answers are there.

I appreciate your help, and will try a few of the things you suggest,
but if it requires me to dig into technical details about bootloaders
and whatnot, it's just not worth it. Simply installing the thing should
be mature, seemless technology, by now!

It is, and it will, if you just keep hitting the next button, do an
installation just like Windows does. No fuss, no muss. Of course, just
like Windows, it will blow away everything that previously existed on your
hard drive, but you will have a nice shiny new SUSE in it's place.

Or, you can choose to read the instructions, choose how and where you want
the installation to be done, and end up with a nice dual boot system. If
the latter is what you really want, get used the fact that you will have
to loose the attitude, and admit that you screwed up, not SUSE. No other
distribution is going to make up for your own mistakes either. You have to
be willing to make an effort, and learn some new ways of doing things. If
you screw up, figure out what you did wrong, and try again.

Linux is not Windows. If you're not willing to learn new things, there's
really no reason to install SUSE, or any other Linux distribution. Again,
Linux is not Windows. It's different, so it's a necessity that you learn
how to do things differently than you've been doing them with Windows.
That's not an opinion, that's a simple fact

J.O. Aho has been trying to help you, but does not run SUSE, so is
unfamiliar with YaST. If you say something was missing, or didn't work as
advertised, he must take your word for it. Same thing with grub, which he
also doesn't use. I on the other hand have been running SUSE since 6.x
days, with my first installation on my own machine being SuSE 6.4. I
currently have SUSE 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2, all installed on this machine,
as well as Mandrake 10.1, Mandriva 2007, PCLOS, and Slackware. I also use
grub as my boot loader, to boot all of these, and Windows too, if I choose
to put the Windows drive back into the machine. I've been using grub since
when SuSE 7.2 was new.

"J.O. Aho" <user@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:51h9ilF1ie3hhU2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ben Crain wrote:
Thanks. It's still a bit unclear just exactly what I should do, but
with the help of the link you provide I'll try to work it out.

1. When booting up the computer (when the screen still is quite black
and microsoft not yet been loaded, press your 'Delete' button) you
should enter the BIOS menu, here you have the option to choose which
device to boot from in first place.

Here is a short howto: http://www.cyberwalker.com/article.php?id=28

This is good advise. You need to set the disk that supposedly has SUSE on
it as the boot device, to see if grub was actually installed there. If you
then get a grub menu, you need to hit the down-arrow key, to stop the
default timer, insert the installation DVD back into the drive, and then
pick SUSE to boot. SUSE will then complete the installation process, if you
didn't accidentally abort the installation midway. It's hard telling,
what really happened, from what you posted.

Your reply to J.O. Aho would be -- here -- if you had not top-posted.

--
imotgm
"Lost? Lost? I've never been lost... Been a tad confused for a
month or two, but never lost."
.