After installing the Novell Linux Desktop (SuSE Linux), I reboot and all I see is the prompt.

grub>



Why didn't my Gnome GUI interface launch? What's a 'grub' anyway?

Thanks!
Neb

GRUB is a bootloader. This is what loads up your operating system when you boot your computer. If you are getting this, it probably was not configured quite right during the install. If you remember what partition you installed linux on (/dev/hd....) then I could likely help you at least boot into your system so you could fix it to boot to the GUI like you want.

jrtayloriv

grub> is the grub prompt. grub is one of two common bootloaders for linux, the other being lilo. usually, grub is configured to automatically boot the system, though not always. I believe you can type help at the prompt for some help on loading your system with grub.

I believe it's the hda2 partition, but I'm at a loss from there.

Thanks for the help!
Neb

did you create a /boot partition in addition to the root (/) partition? or did you just create one linux partition and install everything on there?

basically all you need to do is look up how to write a grub.conf file (the config file that is used when installing grub) and run those commands from the grub prompt to get your system up and running

assuming your linux boot partition was hda2 and your root partition was hda3 you would say something like this: (type enter after each one)

grub> root(hd0,1)
grub> kernel /linux-kernel-filename root=/dev/hda3

NOTES:
1) the first command root tells it where to look for the kernel NOT where your root partition is, so on the next line after the "kernel" command, /linux-kernel-filename is the relative path from wherever you told it to look for the kernel.

2) The second part of the second line tells it what you actually want to mount as the root partition after it has found the kernel.

3) remember this is assuming that you did create a /boot partition and that your kernel is located in /boot. if you did not create one, and instead installed everything on one partition, you would still set the first line to root(hd0,1) BUT also set root=/dev/hda2 in the second line with the kernel file path being relative to the "/" directory.

Feel free to ask if you have any more questions or if this does not work out for you. Try searching for how to work with grub though, it will serve you well in the future

hope this helps,
jrtayloriv