This is one of my laptops, which has MS-Windows
XP Home edition on /dev/hda1, and until recently, had Red Hat's
Fedora Core 2 in other
partitions. For a few reasons, including my preference for
apt-based (i.e.,
Debian)
distros), rather than rpm-based distros, I decided to get rid of
Fedora and try an apt-based distro. When I bought it last Summer,
it had 256 MB of memory, but I upgraded that to its maximum of 1 GB
with a couple of 512 MB sticks.
The last few days, I blew away the Fedora install and put
Ubuntu's latest release, Hoary
Hedgehog 5.04 on it, but I want apps which don't come with Ubuntu,
including
gmemusage,
gkrellm,
ncftp and
fvwm. I do not want to run gnome or KDE;
gnome or KDE apps, yes, but I do not want their cluttered
desktops.
The Ubuntu install went well, no gotchas, nothing puzzling which I
remember. I used Ubuntu's version of synaptic to browse available
packages and those which I selected installed without a
hitch.
So, now I'm live-blogging a
Mepis install. (For the following, it's
important to realize that I put Ubuntu's /boot mount point on
/dev/hda2, and didn't touch /dev/hda2 in the Mepis installation
attempts.)
Booting from the iso image on a CD shows familiar booting output
(apache is running???!!! along with spamd, samba), and it puts me
into a display manager, so X was running by default (this is a
desktop-centered distro, after all), and logging in as 'root'
passwd 'root' brought up an ugly KDE desktop (redundancy; gripe)
with a red background. Existing hard drive partitions became icons,
and kmix launched.
My ethernet interface gets configured automatically, grabbing an IP
address from my router, and I've got nameservers and a default
route, so I can connect to the 'net without any tweaking. With
Ubuntu, I had to configure eth0 with a static IP and put in my
nameservers, so Mepis is simpler. /var/log/messages shows some
attempt to configure my wireless ethernet device, but
/sbin/ifconfig show only eth0 and lo.
On the desktop, there's an icon of a claw hammer and open-ended
wrench, also, titled 'INSTALL ME' (yes, upper-case), so let's
launch that.
Build an fstab (that's what it does, not the title or description
displayed) is what comes up after the copyright notice and clicking
on 'Next'. With selecting 'Custom install on existing partitions',
I can select / swap and /home partitions, but no option for
assigning /usr /var /tmp or any other mount points. Maybe if I blew
away all partitions, I could choose those others, but I'll see
whether after everything's done, I can vi the /etc/fstab to put
them where I want. 'Filesystem type' grants ext2, ext3 or reiserfs,
and I chose reiserfs. Then the filesystems get created (called
'formatting') once I agree to destroy / swap and /home filesystem
contents.
Well, here's a bug: if I complete the filesystems creation, and
click on 'Back' to go to previous screens, then go forward again
and select the same choices as before, the installer tries to
create filesystems on / swap and /home, and it stalls or locks up
at 3% of /. There's no hard disk activity showing on the laptop,
and the iinstaller doesn't detect that the filesystems have already
been created. My mouse cursor is the standard X windows clock, so I
can't select 'Abort'. I wonder if grub is still on the MBR.
Logged out of the X windows session, logged in again as root and
tried to install again, but the install locks up at the same point.
Let's try running QTParted to modify my partitions: the splash
screen comes up, 'getting devices', then ... nothing. About 15
minutes later, and all there is is the splash screen. I had to kill
-9 it.
Logged out of X, logged back in, restarted the installer and
selected ext3 for the filesystem type, and I get an error 'Failed
to prepare chosen partitions. Returning to Step 1.' Nothing helpful
in /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog. Restarted the installer
and selected different partitions for / and /home, and ext3
filesystem type, and it's proceeding to create the filesystems and
copy the distro. Lesson: don't click 'Back' after the distro is
installed.
Now I'm back to the 'Select Boot Method' and 'Select Kernel(s) to
Use' screen, where I had previously clicked on 'Back', so this time
I accepts the defaults (put GRUB in the MBR and select both
kernels). No option displayed for booting into MS Windows XP, and I
click on 'Next', and there's a disturbingly long delay in any disk
activity. Checking the newly created /boot/grub/ directory, there's
no menu.lst, only menu.lst.example, so I copy that to menu.lst. The
install again seems to have locked up: it's now about 15 minutes
since I clicked on 'Next', and I kill the installer. Restart and
this time go to 'Repair Installation Reinstall GRUB Bootloader',
keep what it default detected, and the progress slider bar just
keeps going, and going and going, and GRUB should not take more
than a minute or so to install. Nothing helpful in
/var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog, and those are the youngest
files in /var/log, so I kill this and restart the laptop.
As I expected, because I didn't touch /dev/hda2 when I tried
installing Mepis, GRUB is still in the MBR and I can boot into MS
XP, once chkdsk ran. I've got about an hour and a half before
heading out to work, and I'll try to reinstall Ubuntu so I at least
have a Linux distro on the laptop. Disappointing. I'll brew a pot
of
coffee and see about Ubuntu.