Hi all,

I've begun experimenting with Linux for the first time over the weekend and so far things seems to be easy going. However, I've run into a problem as GRUB doesn't display SUSE 9.2 as a bootable OS, although Windows 2k3 and Mepis 3.3 shows up. Any advice on how to get SUSE to show up in 9.2?

Sorry for the lay description, but I'm not acculturated enough with Linux yet to write in specific terms.

Thanks for reading.

what you need to do is:
open /boot/grub/menu.lst (as root).
then mount suse somewhere (we'll assume /mnt/suse)
then navigate to /mnt/suse/boot/grub and open menu.lst
take the suse section of /mnt/suse/boot/grub/menu.lst and put it in /boot/grub/menu.lst, save /boot/grub/menu.lst
then run:
that is assuming your harddrive is /dev/hda, rather than /dev/sda or something else.

Thank you for your help.

What I did was booted into Mepis, mounted hda2, went into /boot/grub/menu.lst and lifted the code with whatever said SUSE. I then appended it to the menu.lst in hda1. Rebooted, and voila SUSE 9.2; did I do it right? I haven't tested Win2k yet but I think it'll work. I must say, SUSE is the most user-friendly I've come across so far as it is most Windows-like, probably because Novell supports it I guess.

What I wanted to do was setup a partition that all three OS's shared because I want to setup a FTP server for all three platforms; how should I go about partitioning that segment of the HDD so that the data can be shared across all three OSs?

Thanks again for helping.

I had a bit of trouble working out how to do this best, but I think setting up a fat32 partition is the easiest way to do it. Both Linux and Windows can read and write to it natively.

What you need to do is, make the partition (using Yast is easiest) and then boot into Windows. Open My Computer, and there will probably be an unformatted partition there, right click on it and format it as fat32.
If the partition isn't there, go to Control Panel > System > Hardware List > Hard Disk then look around that menu to find the bit about partitions.

Its been awhile since i've done anything technical on windows (and last time I did it, it was on XP) so I hope I got that right.

Ah. So then Linux can't read or write to NTFS partitions?

Thanks.

not reliably. You can make it do it, but chances are you will lose data from your ntfs partition. I think you need to recompile the kernel to make it work, very few distros activate it natively.

Thanks again for replying. I know standard protocol is to RTFM and the Linux Wikis but I'm sort of pressed for time these days; your advice has been most appreciated.

So, say I wanted to dl JRE 5.0 and then eclipse 3.0; if I put it in the fat32 partition, would both Linux and Windows be able to execute it? Or would I have to download both versions for both operating systems? If so, if I download and install the Linux and Windows version, will both Mepis and SUSE be able to run the Linux one?

Also, I seem to have done something in that SUSE now boots to bash; any quick key strokes or settings so I can return it to booting to KDE?

Many thanks.

I'm pretty sure that the versions of JRE are different for windows and linux, but I only thing the changes are in the binaries they use, rather than the libraries.

I'm not so sure about Eclipse. Does it require compiling or come in an .rpm/.deb file?
If it is just a case of extracting it to a folder, then both suse and mepis will be able to access it, maybe even windows. I can look into it and get back to you.
As you can see, I have oodles of time on my hands (school holidays).