I am going to show my total ignorance as a true newbie. I purchased Linspire after getting ticked at XP for that last time it will ever lockup on me again. When I run the installer is stops after about 30 seconds on the progress bar. So I then went to run as a disc only live demo to try that and it took locks up when it is trying to mount something. Part of my question I guess is do I have to reformat my drive to FAT? Instruction said that I could have Lspire do a total install which would wipe out XP which is okay with me. I am going to DL Knoppix and try it on that machine just to see if another program will work. It will take me a while to readjust my lingo to unixese but am fed up with MS.
Frustrated
Mike

I loaded Knoppix and it booted right up without a hiccup. So now I am at a loss for the moment. Guess I will have to wait for tech support if there is such a animal for them
Mike

Most installers hang up if they have trouble determining the correct settings for the video card--and each distribution seems to have slightly different "weak spots." Linspire 5.0 has been out for over two years now (they were supposed to have released a new version by now, but they are behind schedule), so if you have a relatively new video card, it may not detect it. (I say may not, since video card detection may not be your actual problem.) It has been a while since I installed Linspire, but I seem to recall that they have an "advanced" option that will allow you to use a "generic" video card driver (VESA). You might poke around in the documentation and see if you can find something along those lines that will help.

You might also want to check their approved hardware list (stuff they guarantee will work) and see what you have that is not on the list. Workarounds probably exist for most everything, but you need to know what you are looking for before you can start applying fixes. Good luck in any case.

Thanks for the reply. Seems it didnt like my USB keyboard and mouse. So once that was in place with older ps2 connections then I can now load the demo disk but new problem. If I try to install now it comes up and says that it cannot see any disk drives. The quik install manual does not say that you need to reformat in FAT only that when you click on install it will overwrite your existing system which I assume means that it will format it. But since it doesnt see any drives it sits there fat dumb and happy.

Thanks
Mike

You are welcome. Let me start by stating I do not care for Linspire's installer. Although "user friendly," it is woefully lacking in options. If you have any other distributions around, you might try using their installer up to the part where you create a partition and then abort the installation and restart the Linspire install. Once the partitions are installed, things should go smoothly. There is an online walkthrough that may help you located here --> http://www.hdxzone.com/linux_install-linspire.htm

SUSE and Slackware have great installers (I am a little biased), but the installer that comes with the "alternate install" Ubuntu/Kubuntu CDs discussed in the link I cited is good as well.

I do not recall Linspire's default file system, but it is either reiserfs or ext3. Incidentally, you can ignore fat (fat32) for most Linux installations unless you wish to create a partition shared between Windows and Linux where they can both read and write with relative ease.

Well was I ever wrong. I installed SUSE 8 and then 9 and then 10 all without a hitch and then try to go back and Linspire 5 OH does not even see a partion. The error message indicates it cannot see any partion to install on and bombs out. I can run from the disk w/o issue but danged if I can install it. SUSE goes right on as it should

Hiya Mike
Have been having exactly the same problem of not being to run "live cd" or "install" Linspire to the hard drive. Could i ask you how you got around the problem please. Many thanks

I love to tell you but I still dont have it working yet. Customer support told me to check my hardware, but I can run from the CD. They told me to format to fat32 and then tell it to do a takeover. Still doesnt work. I bought partition commander and formatted it 37 ways and still no good. But again SUSE loads and works everytime. Im ticked because I spent $99 bucks and got the extra CD and I cant do anything with it.

so I will continue to putz around with it.

Mike

Mike they will refund your money as a last resort... been part of the team who helped many people who just couldn't get it to work when I was doing beta testing of 5.0 and 5.1

There are different problems with hardware for different types of Linux.

Do you want to pursue this thread? If so, please give a full description of your hardware, as I'm slightly confused as to what is what, and what is formatted what, etc.

Importantly, Linspire up to 5.1 needs a partition to install to, formatted to FAT32, available. You can't prepare with a Linux type like ext2 or ext3 - and it will format the partition as reiserFS during the process.

It does not use the FAT32 filesystem, it just needs to see it. As someone said, the installer is unusual.

Someone mentioned a spare FAT32 partition. That is because read/write to NTFS is unreliable at times in the write process. Reading is fine. So if you dual boot, you need have spare space that both systems can write to. Some distributions have write to NTFS disabled or the module not provided. Linspire 5/5.1 is one of those.

Also you can download the Gnome Partition Editor called gparted - this is quite brilliant, and runs rings around my old Partition Magic


Richard

Thanks,
I do want the program and will get it running. Thought it strange that it would run from CD and not install. I will try the above soon. Am right in the middle where work gets in my way.

Mike

Interesting experience! Personally, I never used a fat32 partition and still managed to install linspire just fine. IMO there are better choices out there anyway but losing money sucks of course.

I may not be much help but I will try. I have installed Linspire to hard drives right out of the box. Sometimes if there is another os I was trying, I used fdisk to delete any material and the put the Linspire CD in and install. I never ever try dual booting. People tell me it is easy but they are techies who forgot what it was like the first time regardless what they tell you. I use removable hard drive racks. Three for each of my two desktops. One pc has a hdd with 98SE but rarely ever used. Possibly one reason why I rarely have any issues is I use low end integrated mobo pcs. One is a 1.3g cpu (circa 2002) bought from local computer store. The other is a Walmart Lidows/Linspire 4.0 configured pc with 1.4g cpu (circa 2003). All I have to add is a pci firewire card to each pc for an external hard drive. Linspire uses all my original windows files rtf, doc, pdf, avi, jpeg, jpg, bmp, png, thm, html, txt, etc. with no issues. I know I missed a lot of different file type but that is generally files I use. Three different scanners work with Kooka the scanner application. All USB devices are recognized. I use the mobo audio, video, Ethernet. usb. I added a DVD/CD burner to each pc with no issues.
I have a CNR subscription good to 12, 2011. Remember, I am a user and do not care what the os is as long as it works and this one works very well for me. I never liked working at the DOS prompt years ago and do not like working at the command line now.
Right now I am using my wireless laptop at my brother's home. My home and his home are set up for wireless.

List your hardware to the group. Good luck.

Rich

There may have been a misunderstanding about the concept of using a FAT32 partition.

All along, up until the current switch to using ubuntu as a base (still in alpha testing), the installation instructions - for Lindows and Linspire, and even the version 1 of Freespire - were that a partition had to be prepared in advance of putting the CD in for installing. This was to be created using an existing fdisk utility, and as the original concept was for a dual boot with MS Windows, this presented some potential problems in losing existing disk or partition data.

The Lindows installer (up until the middle of the 4.5 system) and the Linspire installer (thereafter) needed a FAT formated partition that was visible, or else there were frequently install problems. By definition, a FAT formatted partition was FAT-32 if the size of the partition was over 2Gb as that was the size limit of the FAT-16 system.

Linspire was NEVER actually installed on any other filesystem other than the Reiser to which the installer formatted the partition.

The philosophy of this was simply that their custom installer - which I liked because of its very few questions, and excellent autodetecting of hardware - deliberately had no partitioning utility as a favour to "newbie" users who could destroy what they already had on the computer, with consummate ease.

There was a period in late 2006 (from memory) where in the Advanced option under the Grub bootloader an ext3 file system could be tried by insiders doing update testing. It worked nicely.

It might have been around this time that Herr Reiser was having problems in the courts over a matrimonial matter - which I read about on-line, although the information wasn't exactly shouted abroad.

I read that there could have been a problem that his wife could lay claim in law to ownership of the file system he had created. I can't vouch for this. This article from a print media house would seem to suggest that development and bug-fixing would likely cease as a result.

It was also a requirement in 2003-2006 to burn the CD from the ISO at the slowest possible speed; I used to do this at 1x or 2x and never had a bad one, mainly because I had two elderly computers that had old, slow, CD burners; they are also still in perfectly order, having replaced several much newer 40x speed units in other computers. There were many problems reported in the forums that others had with burning too fast.

Regarding low end mobos, yes I suspect you may be right. I too run a whole lot of them for test beds. Those who pay big bucks for (specifically) nVidia graphics - although other specialised drivers also have problems - know there has always been a saga with them, even in Microsoft Windows.

Those who slang off at wireless not being properly working in Linux might be interested to know it doesn't always work in Unix either, nor even in MS Windows! The problem seems to be a proliferation of psuedo standards in the absence of one agreed standard. In many ways like the fights over VHS vs Beta videotape formats of yester-decade.

Win98 has a very good defragmenter for the necessary FAT formatted data storage partition or drive on a dual boot system with Windows because of the inability of other systems to regularly achieve successful writing to an NTFS format drive or partition. IMHO works better than the NT5 one. Win98 also runs things like my mp3 player and a range of other things that require direct access to ports, which NT5 won't.

A slower boot than other OS's - while it can be annoying - is still really only a matter of seconds longer than some other OS's. Why isn't relevant, when once it's running it purrs along. If you power it on when you get up, and turn it off when you go to bed, the extra time is lost in the cup of coffee routine, lol

There you go, I live life to enjoy it, not to be continually with my knickers in a knot about things over which I have little (or no) control.

I really did like Sun's JDS v2, and sadly they discontinued it on Linux after a lengthy beta program... keeping solely for Solaris, which I can't get to run unfortunately. There was a company which was building a licenced version as open source up until about 12 months ago, but they pulled the plug and vanished. There are always plus and minus in life

Hope my viewpoint doesn't incur the wrath of a skim-reading moderator who won't look back and see what happened with many many nasty posts in here over a number of years.