xubuntu alternate install help
 

233 mhz, 96 meg ram, with 8.5 gig hdd

This is my experimental machine, trying to get something other than 98se to run.

Went through all the steps of loading xubuntu (6.06.6) using the alternate cd. It now boots up into terminal.

The problem is, when I try typing commands, it doesn't seem to respond, just gives me another prompt line. I could change directories and list files. I was most likely limited by my command of the linux language.

What piece of the puzzle am I missing?

What I really need to know is how do I start the xfce desktop?

Thanks for your help

Try startx. It's possible though that in using the alternate CD you forgot to install the desktop (gui). If that's the case, then you need to do sudo aptitude install xubuntu-desktop

We tried startx and the other command you list.

The bad news was that after both commands it went directly to another prompt line.

The good news was that we didn't get any bash message....

thanks

Hmmmm... You should get some sort of message from bash. What steps did you go through for the install? Did you install to the hard disk and then take out the CD and reboot?

What is the output of ls /etc/init.d/ (that's LS -- list files)

There is good news bad news there too...

Good news is we are getting alot of experience trying to load different distributions

Right now an old version of red hat is running. But we plan to load up xubuntu again.

As I said, this machine is for two old fools to goof around with and see if we can get it running better.

It may be a few days until it can xubuntu back installed. I will post the results then. Thanks for your thoughts.

Any words of wisdom for the install?

A quick google says to try startxfce4 instead of "startx"...

I honestly don't use Ubuntu (or Xubuntu) and haven't ever gone through the install. But I use pure Debian, which should be similar to the alternate CD install. I guess I would say make sure you use the space bar to select the "Desktop" when it asks you what you want to install.

Here's the installation guide for low memory systems (gets you a command line install, then you can build on top of it). You could install it this way and then just install xubuntu-desktop. Note you need network access for this...

Here's an Xubuntu usage guide.

Thanks for your help plgvaldez.

Here's what we got so far. We reinstalled, by selecting OEM user, trying to pay attention to everything we did.

As a sidebar, we found using the alternate install cd very vague and very un-intuitive.

In another sidebar, we installed xubuntu using the Live-CD on another machine and it went great. We expected that at the end of installing from the "Alternate" CD that the same thing would happen, you reboot and the xubuntu desktop comes up.

During the initial install from the Alternate CD, it looked like it loaded all the packages. On the reboot, it comes up in terminal, and has you sign in first as "OEM" (with full root priveleges) with a password that we gave in the initial setup screens. It walks you through a few screens to configure the installation. At the end of that it bounces you back to the terminal and it has you enter sudo oem-config-prepare. This is where it deletes user oem and cleans up installation. We did this the first install, but had problems using the sudo command. So this time we wanted to wait until we knew it was going to work.

While at this first terminal, we tried to follow the steps in the Low Memory Installation Guide you linked for us. It was very helpful and seemed to load a bunch more stuff. But on most of the steps of installing it would tell us that 0 bytes were changed or installed.

We then tried to "startx" and also "startxfce4". While trying to load, it clears the screen, then comes back to the terminal and comes up with the following messages:

EE TRIDENT (0): NO VALID MODES FOUND
EE SCREEN(S) SCREENS FOUND, BUT NONE HAVE A USABLE CONFIGURATION
FATAL SERVER ERROR
NO SCREENS FOUND
XIO: FATAL IO ERROR 104 (CONNECTION RESET BY PEER) ON X SERVER ":0.0"
AFTER 0 REQUESTS (OPEN 0 NONE PROCESS) WITH 0 EVENTS REMAINING

QUESTIONS

1) The more basic question is, did we use the correct method of installation? Did we have to use OEM, Server, Text etc. We tried the text and came out the same thing, as when we use OEM.

2) Are our expectations of the Alternate CD instation automatically rebooting into a desktop too much?

3) How do we get to the point of automatically booting and starting the xfce4 desktop?

4) When we did this last time, the machine booted through grub, however, we never got the grub boot menu. How do we fix that?

5) How do you add a user and change his privelges to root?

Thanks for your help in this

Sorry, I've been sick for a few days and haven't gotten to a computer.

First, the errors you getting basically are that it can't find a driver for your video card. Usually to fix this on Debian based distributions you should do sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. If you can't find a "trident" driver, try using the "VESA" driver (a generic video driver).

Now to your other questions:

1) I don't know, I've never used the xubuntu installer, as I said.

2) No, I think that's a good expectation. But sometimes hardware can be difficult, and that's when being a linux newbie is frustrating. Since vendors don't always give out the hardware drivers or specs, it makes it tough to reverse engineer perfect drivers.

3) Fix the driver problem I mentioned above.

4) It might be that the grub boot menu is just automatically passing through. There's a setting somewhere in /boot/grub/menu.lst file that will prompt you for a selection or automatically time out.

5) You add a user by typing (as the root user) adduser joe and it should prompt you for a password and stuff. You never want to give him "root" access, but sudo access. To do that, you need to type (again as root) visudo and then edit the file to add "joe" to the sudoers file. Google for "How to setup sudo" and you'll get a good guide.

Well, as pljvaldez said, the fact that your system doesn't boot into a desktop is due to wrong configuration of your X server (wrong graphic card driver, as it seems). For this, you need to edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. If you happened to get some other distro working, it is a good idea to look what has been used there (maybe you print out /etc/X11/xorg.conf) and correct the ubuntu xorg.conf file. Physically check what graphic card you have (documentation or look inside the case with machine powered down). Old cards are often wrongly detected and need to be configured manually by loading the correct driver. You could also post your xorg.conf file and tell us what card you are using.

Oops: by looking at the error messages, also check if the modes section is correct. Make sure you have specified a supported color depth with a supported resolution (lowest line with first resolution is used, if I remember correctly). You will probably need to get back to 600x800 at 16 bit.

To 5: Do not give a user root privileges, it's a very bad idea. The standard user gets prompted for root password if needed or you can run a command as root by preceding it with sudo.

To 1: Well, I just selected the language and keyboard layout and installed with the default settings otherwise (except for manually partitioning). So, no, if you only want to install on your machine the default install is the way to go. Just note you will need to configure your xorg.conf file before beeing able to use the desktop (if you have one lying around, you could try another graphic card, like ATI Mach64 which is usually well detected).

Update:
We ended up buying a pci 32mb video card, which really went against our frugalness.

But, we ended up with a much quicker boot sequence, even though it still booted to the command line.

The quicker boot sequence gave us renewed confidence and decided to scrap the system and reinstalled using the Xubuntu Live CD, instead of the "Alternate CD" The install was a little slow, but it finally worked through the process and now works beautifully!!

Thanks to all for all your help