Linux Install Woes

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apHytHiaTe

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Jul 9, 2004
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OK, this is gonna be a sad story.

Computer: A64 2800+, 512mb RAM, 120g Seagate SATA HDD, NEC 16x DVD burner, DFI km800 miniatx mobo.

I've tryed installing Fedora Core 3 several times, on a different HDD as well. (80 gig hitachi sata deathstar) After half an hour of installing, all i get is "GRUB Loading Stage Two". So, i've tried formating the mbr-(fdisk /mbr) with a bootdisk, and ended up killing the first partition. I prolly did it wrong. SO ooo I tried slackware linux 10. I didn't know it was that difficult to install. I was asked to partition the hdd, and poked around. that didn't work. I retried FC3, but got errors.

BUG
Assertion (heads > 0) at disk_dos.c:485 in function probe_partition_for_geom() failed
(ignore)(cancel)

BUG
Assertion (sectors < =63) at disk_dos.c:490 in function probe_partition_for_geom() failed
(ignore)(cancel)

when i clicked ignore, it kicked me out of install. If i clicked cancel, it would come back several times, but i got through the installation by just being persistent. When I rebooted, i got "Partition Signature ! = 55AA" Could this be from chosing no boot loader the last time?

I was thinking of trying fdisk /mbr, then running killdisk to write that bitch over with zeros, then installing again.

WTF am I doing wrong?
 
after doing some searching around, it appears to be a FC3 specific problem.
you could: try a different distribution (i'm personally going to pimp gentoo, it's AMD64 support is very mature)
wait until FC4 Test2 hits the mirrors (march 21st, projected release date)
go back to FC2 and upgrade (however fedora handles upgrading, i'm not familiar but forum posts imply it's not very difficult)

gentoo links you'll find useful should you decide to check it out
technotes (what works, how it works, etc: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/amd64/technotes.xml?part=0&chap=0
extremely thorough install documentation: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/2004.3/handbook-amd64.xml
download it: http://gentoo.ccccom.com/releases/amd64/2004.3/livecd/

edit: i just realized you've got a Seagate SATA hard drive...these are often picky with linux (well, they were back around 2.6.0 through 2.6.3. it's very possible that's been fixed in the latest kernel sources but a lot of livecds still use older kernels)
 
If you keep having bad luck with linux distros, FreeBSD uses a completely different kernel and driver set, so it might work better. Or worse. :D

(The SATA-support in 5.3 seems to be solid, so it's absolutely worth a try.)
 
It's because It's so very freeeeeeee! Yay! :D

(Fixed now.)
 
I think i'll be risky and try free bsd and gentoo.

Can i get any help with a dual boot? plz?

I have no idea about partitoning, can someone point me to a good place to figure it out?!



Oh and thanks alot!!
 
For the BSD, the easiest way is to install the FreeBSD bootloader when it asks. When you boot, you'll get a menu that says something like
Code: 
F1: ????
F3: FreeBSD
, depending on the partitioning. The unrecognized one is windows.
Press the correct F-key to select one; it'll default to your last choice after 5 seconds. I'm not sure what it does the first time.
That's all there is to it. You can't configure it, and it'll work fine no matter what you do to the BSD partitions.

As for partitioning:
If you have one HD, use partition magic or something to make some empty room. 4Gb or more would be nice, 10gb is playing it very safe.
Don't bother making a partition there, just leave it as empty space, and make sure it's not inside an extended partition.
In the fdisk screen of the installer, create one partition filling the empty space, and accept the default type (165).
You can press Z to change the size units in the display, to get a better overview.
Q to save and exit. It'll ask you if you want to install a bootloader, and you do.

In the Disklabel editor, press A for auto-defaults. They're not exactly as I'd have made them, but ok. Q to save/exit, again.

A short explanation of fdisk and labels might be in order:
Fdisk creates normal partitions. FreeBSD calls them slices, for some reason.
Inside a slice (normal partition) you can create sub-partitions, called labels. It's not unlike how extended partitions work, but not too many systems understand them.

It doesn't want to install to extended partitions, but only needs one primary partition, no matter how you want to split it up.

If you install to the second primary partition, and the HD is the primary master, that is /dev/ad0s2 .(AtaDisk0, Slice 2)
If you have a root partition, swap partition and /usr inside that one, they will be
/dev/ad0s2a for /
/dev/ad0s2b for swap (swap is always on b)
/dev/ad0s2c for /usr
(and so on if you have more labels.)
 
ok well, i was thinking of making 1 partition for gentoo and 1 for freebsd. nothing else. Will qtparted on my overclockix cd work for partitioning?
 
Well, that should in theory be easier, though in practice it's not. It's possible to make grub boot FreeBSD, if that's what gentoo uses. You could also install lilo or grub to the beginning of the linux partition, and the BSD bootloader to the beginning of the disk.

edit:
I'd suggest putting the BSD in first, then the linux, and writing grub to the MBR.
In grub.conf, add something like this:
Code: 
title FreeBSD
        root (hd0,1,a)
        kernel /boot/loader
You'll have to find the right hd() line, but it should be possible to extrapolate from the settings for booting the linux.

QTPartEd is fine. Just delete everything, create the linux partition(s), and leave space for FreeBSD.
 
at least for gentoo, the most common partition setup you'll find is
Code: 
Partition1: 2xmem; swap space
Partition2: 5-10GBs #5GBs should be sufficient (mine uses 3.3GBs, this is where all programs get installed)
Partition3: 5-5000GBs for /home #this is useful so that if you reinstall or change distros, all your personal desktop settings and files, aka documents, music, movies, etc are maintained
Partition4: >20GBs? whatever's left over that's reasonable for FreeBSD
also common is to have a linux /boot partition about 50-100MBs, but this is far from mandatory

going under the assumption that you only have one hard drive, and the BIOS is set to boot from the SATA hard drive first, your grub line for FreeBSD would be:
edit: messed up the parenthesis (sp) correct way:
Code: 
title FreeBSD
        root (hd0,3,a)
        kernel /boot/loader
 
MTB2Live said:
at least for gentoo, the most common partition setup you'll find is
Code: 
Partition1: 2xmem; swap space
Partition2: 5-10GBs #5GBs should be sufficient (mine uses 3.3GBs, this is where all programs get installed)
Partition3: 5-5000GBs for /home #this is useful so that if you reinstall or change distros, all your personal desktop settings and files, aka documents, music, movies, etc are maintained
Partition4: >20GBs? whatever's left over that's reasonable for FreeBSD
also common is to have a linux /boot partition about 50-100MBs, but this is far from mandatory

Going under the assumption that you only have one hard drive, and the BIOS is set to boot from the SATA hard drive first, your grub line for FreeBSD would be:
hd(0,3,a)
Click to expand...

As the FreeBSD install requires a primary partition, you might consider stuffing all this into an extended partitions, or limiting yourself to only three linux partitions. (You can't make more than four primary partitions on a disk).
The suggestion above is fine, so I'd recommend not adding /boot or anything else.

How much swap to allocate is one of the never-ending questions. 2 x mem isn't too bad, though I have aimed for swap = (2gb-mem) on a few installs. I doubt you'll run out of swap if you have even 512Mb, and if you do, more swapspace isn't the right solution.

As for SATA in FreeBSD, SATA-devices get allocated numbers after any PATA-controllers. If you have two PATA-channels, they'll occupy ad0 to ad3, even if there's nothing connected, so the first SATA-disk is at ad4. (It's done like this so no device names will change if you later add a disk with a lower number.)

Grub does probably not use the same numbers as FreeBSD when refering to a specific disk, so hd(0,3,a) in grub might very well be ad4s3a in FreeBSD.


Generally, you might want to read this. It's basically TFM for most FreeBSD-related RFTMs. :D

edit: I'll be heading for bed now, but just ask here if there is anything. I'll check on this thread tomorrow.
(Ah, the joys of living 6+ timezones away. It's 02:18 here.)
 
Thanks for all the help.... I think I'm gonna put FreeBSD soon, so w00t. I'll probably have more questions. LoL.


 
snapshot1.jpg


here's what i did! how's she look?
 
I had to adjust it just a little. For some reason, it's showing that i have used space on my partitions. Hmmm.

1.5 swap, 7linux install, 7open for bsd, 96 for my home directory.
 
Dammit! I'm still getting "Geometry Errors"

I don't know what the fuck the damn geometry is. Ughh.....

keep rockin' and foldin'
 
Did you dump zeros over the first bit of the disk? 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=8k count=8' and that'll clear the partition table. qtparted should be able to make the partitions then... or just use fdisk.
 
OK, i was able to make partitons. I also got FreeBSD installed. So, that's all good. One thing that happened was that when FreeBSD partioned its slice or whatever, it told me i had incorrect geometry. I proceeded anyway, and all was well. I can boot into freebsd. Now i just need to get apache and ftp working.
 
That keeps happening to me, too. I think it's just an artifact of the translation for disks over a certain size. (IOW: Not a real problem.)

As for apache, "cd /usr/ports/www/apache13" and "make install clean" ought to be enough to install it. See the handbook for details.

For a simple ftp server you can use "/usr/libexec/ftpd -D -4", which will give access to local users that are not root. (If you add an user, you can use that username/passwd to log in.) See man ftpd. The handbook page uses a slightly different method.
You might want to install a different ftp server; there is a number of them in /usr/ports/ftp .
 
Ok. Got it. But I was hoping to get X working, as I really am in a bit too deep to run all this from command prompt. I can only memorize so many commands... then poof. I do plan on getting better aquainted with them, but maybe not right this second. I'm gonna put on my second os, Slackware. I decided against Gentoo for the moment. I learned enough from the BSD install that I think I can get Slack working. I just need some kind of freaking GUI!!!
 
GUI shouldn't be too hard, either.

Before you do anything else, I'd suggest getting portupgrade. It's a useful tool for installing/upgrading things. It's in /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade . (The usual "make install clean" to compile and install.)

That done, you can try "portinstall -P xorg" to try and download a package for X.org. If it doesn't find one, it'll compile it.
When you have it, try configuring it with "xorgcfg". It's kind of unintuitive, but worth a try.
You want to write the config file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf ; let the xkb file end up wherever it wants to put it.

If you now have a functioning X, you'll want a window manager. twm comes with X, but I'd get something nicer. Try icewm and fluxbox.
To install them, use "portinstall -P icewm" (or fluxbox, etc.)
In order to use one after installing it, make a file called ".xinitrc" in your home directory. In it, put just one line: "exec icewm" (or fluxbox). When you type startx, it'll read this file to see what to start.

Oh, and one particularity of how tcsh works: When you've added a new program, and want to use it, it'll give you "Command not found" until you do a "rehash". It keeps a list of all known programs, and you have to manually refresh it.

edit:
I'm meddling with FreeBSD/alpha, and at the moment I get some weirdness if I do "portinstall -P xorg" here. While I don't think it's likely to do the same in the x86 version, it's not impossible either. So if you get a lot of things like
pkg_add: can't open dependency file '/var/db/pkg/libXft-2.1.6/+REQUIRED_BY'!
dependency registration is incomplete"
Try this: "pkg_delete -x xorg; portinstall xorg". It'll ignore any packages and just compile it. This takes quite some time, but X makes for some really hypnotic scrolling text while it's going. :D
 
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