Brand new to Linux, and I want to use it.

My DSL 3.4.7 live cd boots up just fine, though it doesn't run sound and I have no idea how to dial into aol's service. My Fedora 8 cd crashes to bash, tries to have me make a folder to continue loading, and tells me good luck...thanks.

Anyway, here is my problem. After doing an HDD install to my thumb drive through DSL (Because I'm tired of hearing my CD drive eat itself while continually running dsl through it.) I reboot from it and it tells me "Could not find Kernel image: linux"...I've seen this problem with a lot of people who have a lot of distros...Nothing has helped me at all since I have no idea about code, kernels, or linux.

Is there a way I can basically "give" my usb device a copy of this kernel image that it is missing? Do I tell it a path to this kernel image? If I have to tell it a path...why the hell was dsl made not knowing the path? I'm fairly confused and seeing no hope in sight any time soon.

If you know anything that would help, please reply or email me.
Thanks,
Nalec

In my opinion DSL is one of the many specialised Linux distributions that are not at all suited for a Linux newbie. Since you have already tried Fedora 8 without succes, i would recommend Ubuntu or OpenSuse both of which are known to be quite easy to install and also very good at autodetecting hardware.

Your error description:

"My Fedora 8 cd crashes to bash, tries to have me make a folder to continue loading, and tells me good luck...thanks."

is very cryptic - my guess is that you have no "crash" at all, but that the Fedora 8 installation is unable to detect your video card correctly and therefore defaults to the commandline because it cannot start the GUI without knowing how to handle your graphics.

Aaaah, that Fedora 8 diagnosis sounds pretty right and makes a lot of sense now that you've put it that way. Alright...well, I guess I'll just scrap that one and get a copy of Unbutu. I would still like to have a usb copy of linux for the sheer "look what I can do!" factor. Since DSL is more specialized and not newbie oriented, would puppy linux be more suitable to someone of my extremely low level of linux skill? I'll start researching now.

Sorry, accidentally posted it twice.

If you want to use a usb version of Linux then try Puppy or one of it's close relatives or should that be canine relatives.

Takes about 50M and is quite useful on older computers.

You could also give Mandriva 2008 a try. You can download free versions and set it up on a bootable USB key. Mandriva actually sell a USB key with almost everything on it and 2Gb left for data.

Mandriva is a VERY EASY distro to work with. Most of the changes that you are likely to want to make are made through the Mandriva Control Centre - a nice GUI.

All the best with your linux education. It seems to go on and on and on. At lest it doesn't become boring!!

Tony Littlejohn

Fedora 8 not working with your display during installation is not a reason to choose a different distro, but it is an opportunity to learn. Other distros will use very similar software and techniques for dealing with your display, X.org, most likely so there may be no improvement in that situation. According to this link
you might try
linux text

At boot time for the installation CD, there should be a prompt for some options. Poke around there for "text install" or something like that and the installer should take you where you want to go. You may need to edit a configuration file after the installation, but it is not a big deal and you will have a bootable system most likely. It takes little time to do the installation and see where it goes.

I have not used Fedora for many years, but most distros put out some kind of a menu for function keys that help you select some choices. Choosing text makes the installer not try to set up the graphics during the installation. You, being smarter than the installer can do a better job later.

The usual reasons why the GUI does not work during installation is that a frequency range is too narrow or off or the driver does not work. Often there are two drivers that can be used: vesa is supposed to work with almost everything, but you get more features with the driver designed for your particular video adaptor.

OKay, I've written it down...and short of a few buffer I/O errors, #178496, this is all it says.

Okay, booting the Kernal

Warning cannot find root file system!
Create symlink /dev/root and then exit this shell to continue the boot sequence

Bash: no job control in this shell
_ (blinking)

I imagine it's a simple problem to solve...I just have no idea how to solve it. I'm on dial-up and broke, so I was lucky to obtain these two distros. I definately want to tackle the task of getting them to work before I go in search for a distro that better suits my needs.

Now we have a clue about the problem!


Did you get this message when booting the install CD or when booting the installed system? It means that there is a misconfiguration or that some file is missing.

I have seen this from booting the installed system, in which case you got to that point from the GRUB menu on booting. If you hit <esc> during the boot menu, in GRUB, you can edit the menu items or interact with GRUB.

If the installation CD itself will not boot properly, it likely means you have a bad CD, the drive is defective or that the ISO file was downloaded incorrectly. You can check the ISO file by running an MD5SUM check on it or checking the md5sums of the files on the disc. Since the CD won't boot, you will have to use another system or OS to do the checks. In GNU/Linux you can mount the ISO to check the CD if there is a list of md5sums on the CD.
#mkdir t
#mount whatever.iso t -o loop,ro
#cd t
#ls
#md5sum -c md5sum.txt
I am not familiar with the layout of a fedora CD to give you the location of the md5sum checks and I have not the bandwidth here to do a download to figure it out.

Actually, they don't use md5sums anymore... see
http://forum.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=171420

There is a verification function on the CD but if it will not boot, you cannot use it:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Instal...allation_Media

It's a bad CD. I sha1sum checked it and my downloaded Iso matches up. I burned a new copy at 8x to attempt to insure a successful burn...and I thought I had it. The newly burned cd goes past that part and gets to a place that says "Press 'I' for interactive setup". Right on! Well, I press I and it seems to stall...not really lock up, but the program does nothing for a while...and then some funky stuff. Either way, I'm bailing on Fedora 8 I think. I'm at work right now and downloading the newest copies of puppy and ubuntu...and this time when I burn them I will use a burner that isn't in my tower...since they're both giving up the ghost I think.

is for experts. A newbie should ignore that and let the installer boot normally...

Oh, I see...I might not bail on Fedora 8 than. Anyway, I ended up getting puppy 3.01...I was going to get Unbutu 7.1 but I feel asleep at my desk and kicked the power supply when I woke up and well...we all know the series of curse words that follows from there. I think I have things sorta under control for a little bit. Thank for all the help! This just proves what I've read, Linux users are normally more than willing to help any non-linux user use linux.

Thanks again,
Nalec

Fedora is a testing ground for RedHat. As such, it is popular and has a loyal following. A newbie should poke around a bit to find a community which suits his/her needs. I gravitated to Debian GNU/Linux because, while the organization seems large and cumbersome, it does work to produce a very reliable system. RedHat is in the business of serving some very fussy businesses so you could also look there. My chief motivation is being able to configure wonderful terminal servers with all kinds of resources for schools. Only you know what you need and exploring GNU/Linux will take some time but it will be worthwhile. GNU/Linux is a product and a tool of the whole world and you have your place in it somewhere.

Good luck.

If your Cd/DVD drive is iffy, I'd expect that prob. I had similar issues trying to install FC6, would sometimes(!) install, then not run.
Turned out CD drive was flakey, although it checksummed the CD ok sigh....
Bought a new CD/DVD drive, prolem solved