I got aptitude working, helped me alot cause you can see what you want to tinstall..

there is gnome and kde, i installed gnome so far. but how do i start it? this is easy question i hope someone can answer it quickly.

Type in This starts X.

Also, if you're interested in a graphical login screen, aptitude install gdm (or kdm or xdm).

I think you need to type this before you type 'startx' to have GNOME start automatically. Otherwise you need to type after X is started.

yes startx doesnt work, I did what arow said, still doesnt work, says command not found...

and if i do the code gnome-session, i get cannot open display:

thanks in advanced

When you tried startx, did it give you some real ugly looking windows? Aqua titlebars with white workspace kind thing? I guess what I'm asking is did you install and configure X?

I dont get any of that, how do i install configure x >.<

Aha!!! Well, there's probably something in the Debian repositories called xorg. Use aptitude to see what you can find that and install it.

Once that's installed, type this Xorg -configure to try and autoconfigure X. If you're lucky you won't have to manually edit anything. But if you do, you know where you can find help.

After you get X working, then try gnome-session.

If you installed Gnome it should have installed X already (Gnome depends on X and aptitude would have installed it also).

dpkg -l |grep xserver (that's L, not 1) should tell you if X is installed.

dpkg -l |grep xserver

it doesnt find anything matching xserver, but if i take away that thing infront of grep it finds somethng, but status is not installed, and uppercase=bad but below it it says, Name grep, version 2.5.1.ds1-4 and a description as if it was found. and then as i said before, below it it says no packages found matching xserver.

its just the cd1 im using. on my laptop.

I downloaded the 2 dvds now, I want to install onto my main pc, which has os already on it... I need to know 2 things before i do it.

1. How can i stop it from making it every time i boot my computer i decide what to boot.

2. How can i get my usb stick to be bootable, it says those commands, do i just do it off the cd? without already installing?


thanks in advanced, (I will try all this stuff again and if ie doesnt work, I will be posting again )

You should be able to install X from the first CD or two. Or if you have broadband, that's the preferred method because you can just download a 150MB Netinstall CD and install the rest from online.

Try as root typing tasksel then use the arrow keys to highlight "Desktop environment" and hit the space bar. Then go to OK and hit enter. This should install all the things needed for a desktop.

1) I don't understand what you want to do. I read it as you want a menu to let you choose. This happens by default. There is a timeout set in the /boot/grub/menu.lst that will automatically boot one of the options.

2) This is a really complicated thing to do. Even if you get your USB bootable, it may not be bootable on other machines...

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Ok

1. It installs a kernal ( if i remember corectly) so when you book your computer, if you have more then one os, you can choose windows xp or debian... Thats the menu im talking about. I dont want that to happen, I want it to be if i put in the usb stick, it will just boot off that.

2. I dont need it for my laptop, just for one pc, my laptop is just for fooling around.

thanks alot, and thanks in advance.

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Not sure how to do this.

I could guess that you need to format the USB key as ext2, copy -a /boot/* to the key, edit your fstab so that /boot points to the USB key, then do something with grub-install to make it isntall grub to the MBR of the USB key. There's probably some specific grub-install options you'll have to do to make sure grub is setup correctly...

To format it ext2, do it do it when im installing it? Or is there a specific program? and when do i copy -a/boot/

how do i edit the fstab so it points to the usb key, and hopefully someone reads this to know the sepcific grub-install, but what would be a guess onto how to grub-install onto usb?

thanks, im total newbie, sorry.