Writing them down so you can post them here is the best way to get a solution I think. Keep it up Lorax, you'll get there.

Kind regards,

Eric

Lorax,

Your 'hands-on' attitude into Linux can matter much in hastening familiarization of the new OS. This speed of improvement can be more enlightened and more effective when aided by a good tutorial. Download here a good tutorial, don't read it all at one time, just use Ctl+f to find the right topic for the right answer each time you need. Tutorial consultation is faster than posting here. This if you are interested, but you may ignore my suggestion.

Hope it helps.

Good luck and welcome to the club.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hey Lorax
Where are we at now?

Are you installing to Hard disk, USB or both?

This thread is pretty long now and I'm lost cause
I'm doing 8 things at once

Just breakdown for me what your having issues with and we'll all help dude

Hi guys,

I second that offer. At least it will beat reading through a 600+ pages book from 2001 any day. Although the book advised is a good source to acquire knowledge and understand how, what and why things work in Linux, in my opinion LinuxQuestions beats it on one foot.

Kind regards,

Eric

Hey man;Slayer is hammerin AOL radio!

OH; maybe you should check out Portable-Qemu Lorax

That way you can install multiple Linux systems to virtual hard drives
and they run just like a real Linux system, just a little slower cause its virtual world dude

in virtual world you can hack partitions, destroy drives,etc
all in complete safety to your real system.

it runs from a folder on your windows/linux desktop
off cd. and usb too, no doubt

I got it so's I can even mount real drives from within virtual world too
its all real groovy right??

so, that way you can do whatever
One time I made 3 qemu-img's (virtual drives)
each about 3GB
installed a bunch of systems to them
and hooked'em all together via scripts and grub
it all runs on a couple scripts, both .bat and .sh scripts

you wanna check out maybe??

HA! Linus! Groovy, no doubt, but baby steps, brother!
Eric, the encouragement keeps me going when I just want to give in and go to sleep! HA! So, Eric, it's your fault that I haven't slept in 30 hours! I'm turning into a real puter techie, POTS of coffee n all!
Mustang, thanks for the tutorial resources. Yes, I am interested. I accept all suggestions.
On that note, I do not throw out anything that Linus says, just, I think some of his suggestions are a bit beyond my skill level. Or, maybe I'm just afraid of typing/manipulating menus, especially since I really have no idea what grub is.

UPDATE:
On one Debian KDE attempt today, the install was interrupted by the following:

"Error informing the kernel about modifications to partition /dev/hda5 - The deviceor resource busy. This means Linux won't know about any changesyou made to /dev/hda5 until you reboot - So you shouldn't mount it or use it in any way before rebooting.
[selection choices] IGNORE (highlighted by default) or CANCEL "

I have seen this on most of my installs. I don't really understand what's going on. I have experimented with both choices there, IGNORE, and CANCEL. They both eventually bring it to fatal errors, if not kill it dead in its tracks right there.

NEXT:
On my second Debian KDE attempt, I actually completed the installation, as far as I can tell. It was exciting when that final reboot started. But.... The dreaded "black screen" with white text (somebody please tell me what it's called, I'm sure there's a name...) had asked me for my Login and Password. No biggie, I use a clever system for logins and passwords for everything important, so if I don't write it, I can still figure it out... I wrote it anyways. There's no way in micrqsoft's office that I'd screw up my logins and passwords.
It said Error (sorry, I didn't write down exactly what it said), then the next line had this:
neal@ubuntu:~$
That seemed to be the prompt on the black screen.
Neal is my first name, which I used to set up my Debian user account, and Ubuntu was the default (something) that I arbitrarily used.

FINALLY:
That second Debian attempt was done on the C:\ drive. I was assuming I could make it the default OS (if there is such a thing). When that attempt failed, I completely started over, reinstalling windbag on C:\ and leaving the rest of the HD clean, unformatted.

So, friends, I'm not sleeping until I get this right. So, HELP! I'm tired!!!
Time to brew another press of Sidamo bean, and cook a pot of Chai!

Namaste!

.

Btw, all this playing around with my hard drive has caused some inconsistent, erratic behavior in winders.
The boot selection menu never went away either.
This is why I reinstalled winders. At least this way, I have a connection to the "light", while I am still on the dark side...
Peace!

Hey Linus, I see you there!

whats up Lorax
I'm making my DVD right now

KNOPPIX-6.2
Mandriva-2010.10-LXDE
PCLinuxOS-Phoenix
GRML-2009.10
503box-Live
Phalanx-9.04
Fedora-12-i686-Live
Puppy-4.31
PartedMagic-4.6
Slax-6.1.2

so far

what are you doing?

Ha, I'm bracing myself for the next install attempt! Do you have any advice for installing Debian or Kubuntu via CD? I can't just blame it on my CD drive, which actually is faulty nearly half the time...
I MUST be doing something wrong.
Ok, partitioning ext3 is good, right? is that better than ext2 or ext4?
After an install is supposedly complete, and the box reboots, and it brings me to the black screen (what is tha name for the damn black screen?), what am I supposed to type to get into my new OS?

And, if I want to keep a partition just for various media files, usable in Linux, winderz, or both, what formatting would I use? NTFS? FAT? ext2-3-4? etc...

Linus, brother, if you have an Iron Maiden distro, you ROCK! Have any screen shots of it?!

Hello Lorax,

Seems like I missed out on some of the fun. Sorry, was sleeping. Could you post what exactly you've done when partitioning and formatting, every step of the way please? I'm starting to suspect that when you install to a partition, that partition is mounted somehow by Windoze before the partitioner can deal with it.

Have you repartitioned using Windoze and formatted from there?

The blackscreen is a console screen or terminal screen, whichever you prefer.

Kind regards,

Eric

Fun? Sleep? Ha, you not funny... :-D

Hey Lorax,

What's up? Sometimes a man needs a little sleep to recover, so I make it a point to sleep my 5 hours per night.

How are things going with the She-Beast?

Kind regards,

Eric

When partitioning, Debian has selections, like:
Format? yes, to ext3
Size? (I entered size, or left default if sufficient)
And other stuff. I certainly was careful from the start, but keep getting more nitpicky as I proceed, trying to catch myself in a mistake. I avoid changes that I know nothing about.

Between my last set of posts (11:00ish) and now, I have been RE-installing Debian, on a FRESH HD, with a FRESH winderz. Very simple. Only 20 GB, 2 partitions for 2 OS', and a SWAP space of about 1.5GB. The 60GB drive is set aside.

I was very slow and careful with this install.
I received this happy notice on my screen:
"Installation Step Failed: 'Select and Install Software' "

I reverted back to the main install menu, and tried, and tried, and tried again. That's why I have been gone for four hours. So I skipped that step and finalized the installation, and rebooted. It takes me to the (THANK YOU ERIC! It's the CONSOLE!) console and I enter my login and password. Seems to accept it. I'm simply granted a nifty prompt with my login attached to it:
nrc3@debian:~$

Silly me. I was expecting a GUI type system.

Now what?