I haven't given up on debian yet!!

what I did do is install debian with it booting from floppy.
this takes forever to boot!
any idea how I could boot debian from grub?

I am keen on keeping grub because thats what my M$ XP and Mini-M$ (redhat) use.

I have tried editing the grub.conf to what looks like should work but no luck.

as an alternative any ideas on how to convert grub to lilo?

oh! I think i did use tasksel initially, do I have to keep using it?... where would I go from there?

Ok, if I understand correctly, you have RH using grub already. correct? In that case, don't do anything in Debian. Boot RH, edit THAT grub.conf by adding another entry for Debian (pointing to the correct partition), and do whatever you need to make the changes permanent (I don't use grub.

Doesn't matter what you originally used. i would still say use apt-get for everything from now on. If you are not to keen on the interface, there are other options:
apt-get install synaptic
for example, will give you a gui to apt-get (problem is, you already need X working).

If you don't have X working yet, I say start with that. I can;t remember, but maybe xfree86-common & xserver-xfree86 will be the only thing's you'll need (the dependencies should work themselves out) + some window manager/ KDE/GNOME/etc.

Once you do that, try to get some default X running, using xf86config. You should be able to get going with that...

mm..

have been editing grub in redhat, tells me file not found

time for a new thread methinks on grub..

thanks for all the other info, not really fussed about the gui at the moment, since I broke kde on redhat I'm getting quite handy on commandline stuff.

Ow Ow Ow!
That hurt!!
My woefull attempt to install debian failed miserably
Not only could I not get x-windows running, but when I installed the bootloader I managed to lose all access to redhat...
I only managed to get redhat going again by re-installing that..
seriously nasty stuff.

my only thoughts on debian/xwindows problems is that my laptop is too new for debian. I have a radeon mobility 7500 grphics, i845Mboard and 15" LCD running 1400x1024(or summat) natively, which didn't appear in my list of configuration options.

with boot problems, Debian/Lilo refused to see my RH partition at all, and when I edited lilo.conf, lilo kept telling me my RH partition had an invalid boot signature... I think this might have something to do with me running XP, I know when I installed RH it wasn't happy about me booting from the partition I wanted it to.

Oh well, Back to the drawing board

I have never seen a Debian that had X working out of the box. If you're still interested in Debian, search for previous threads on help - there's so many of them out there - if you still have problems I guess you can post back with more specific errors.
It's not a matter of being outdated; true their software is a little older but very stable. People usually just download the newest nvidia drivers, etc. and install those seperate of the debian's install.
; )

As for booting, didn't I warn you about installing lilo in debian?...since you already had RH's grub setup I figured it would have been easier to just add a Debian entry to that one.

Installed debian again!

now I seem to have lost the cdrom driver..
did 1st part of install fine, after reboot set password etc, came to install packages, couldn't find cdrom..
tried mount /dev/cdrom
message returned:
hdc: driver not present
tried insmod cdrom module not found..

any ideas?

I have posted this elswhere on the site after doing lots of seaching, so hopefully someon has come accross this before.

my debian install doesn't seem to have kernel sources installed, I presume because it can't find the cd anymore to install them, so am at a bit of a loss..

is the cdrom found by bios?
in that case, you will need to check /dev/cdrom. This is a symbolic link -> check that this goes to where its supposed to (depends on if this is scsi or ide). Also, if something goes wrong with mounting, after checking /dev/cdrom is what its supposed to be, check the relevant /etc/fstab entry. Once you're cdrom is recognized you can add package lists by using apt-cdrom.

As for kernel sources, I don't think they're installed by default. Use apt-cache to figure out what they're called, and then yuo can just apt-get them.

hi cuckoopoint,

I have this topic in another thread, I've supplied more detailed information here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...739#post255739