Hello!
I have two questions:
1. My bootloader - I think its Lilo, and it comes up as Linux, Failsafe, Windows and Floppy with a 7 second time delay.
How can I change this? I think its file://etc/lilo.conf, BUT, I cannot write to the file. The owner is 'root' and I login as 'kayfelix' So I guess I somehow have to chmod the file and then edit it?
Oh, yeh, what I want to do is to order the OS, windows at the top, and change the time dealy.

2. I have Linux Mandrake - 9.1 I think, the newest version. It takes about three times as long as windows does loading. First there are all them Text based loading things and than it goes on to the graphical based loading. Is this meant to be that slow?
Are there any other versions which are faster?

1. To edit /etc/lilo.conf you need to be root. You can type su - and enter root's password.

Alternatively, the Mandrake Control Centre has a nice graphical utility which will do everything you want. Launch the control centre and it will prompt you for root's password.

2. Mandrake 9.2 has just been released, but I don't think booting is faster. There are a couple of general reasons why Windows boots faster than Linux. One is simply that Microsoft has put a lot more effort into improving the boot times than the Linux developers have. The other is that Windows allows you to log in before its finished booting : log in and its still loading up services and apps around you.

There are ways to speed up Linux boot times. The easiest is to only start the services that you need (e.g. if you are starting a web server, telnet etc. and you never use them then disable them). There are more complex schemes involving running certain startup tasks in parallel but they are still at the geek trick stage.

Of course, the flip side is that once Linux has been booted it generally stays up a lot longer than Windows so needs rebooting less often (unless like me you have a laptop that glows red after a few hours).

su to Root user on the command line then

gedit /etc/lilo.conf

Change the timeout setting to reduce the 7 second delay

Change the default = line to the label name of your Windows stanza if you want LILO to boot automatically into Windows.

Make sure you save lilo.conf after any changes made then type

/sbin/lilo

as Root user again to make the changes take effect

The easiest way is to use drak services in the Mandrake Control Centre to stop any unneeded services from starting at boot up.

Lol. Dont know what I did wrong. I went through "Mandrake Control Center" and set up the boot loader. I must have dont something wrong, because it seemed to have 2 bootloaders now, the second one loading when I select "windows", when I select windows again it loads lilo again.
Funny thing that. I'm installing Mandrake again, perhaps that will help...

Kayfelix

Nope, It didnt. Linux was installed, new bootloader but no WINDOWS. Great. I booted of my ME bootable CD which I had to burn, than formated my C drive and installed windows. The C drive was a lilo partition. I'm finally online.
Next time I use linux it'll be red hat.
cya,

Kayfelix