hdinstall problem

[ofb]

okay, i'm new to linux but not to computers so we've got the proverbial dangerous little knowledge here.

tried two iso's and various hdinstall howto's and still no success.

knoppix gets the second drive all to itself, win sits on the first. i do a stock install with lilo. i boot from the boot disk it writes. [i guess lilo is on the second drive hence i cannot boot w/o boot disk? but that's a minor mystery that can be cleared up later. this box won't be knx's final home.]

knx loads and i end up in a cli, without kde firing up as it does from the cd or when the cd is simply copied to a drive.

login as root and try startx. x tries and then fails, scrolling off the screen with troubles. startkde puts me in a repeating failure loop till i ctrl-alt-del and go back to the work i'm neglecting.

suggestions? am i simply trying the wrong command? shouldn't the boot disk take me straight into kde?

the test box is a mere pentium 1, but it's happy enough running knx from the cd. second drive is 3gig properly partitioned with cfdisk into about 2900mb hdc1 and 280mb hdc5 as type82. each install attempt has gotten a fresh partitioning so there won't be anything left on the drive to interfere. have made something over six attempts so i'm pretty comfortable with the process.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Did you run knx-hdinstall from the root shell? This should set everything up fine in an uncompressed version of KNOPPIX so you need about 2.2 GB of disk space but less RAM.

[ofb]

Did you run knx-hdinstall from the root shell?

yes. the most recent method i've used is david mcnab's at http://www.freenet.org.nz/misc/knoppix-install.html

--

question: should the boot disk take me into kde, or into a login cli like it does?

perhaps half my trouble is installing to hdc instead of hda. perhaps david's method works fine for people running just knx, or knx as hda.

what i'm wondering is perhaps everything is actually fine, but that a default hdinstall to hdc like i've done a requires further configuration of lilo, since i cannot boot knx except with the floppy.

in which case it may follow that startx and startkde fail after i login because some paths are not correct.

[Tech2k]

Hi,
Try "whereis kde" to get the path.If you told it to use the graphical loggin when running the knx-hdinstall script it should go right to kde.I have installed many many times and mine does anyway.I just installed agian last night and said "no" to the graphical login so now I start x with this command "startx -e fluxbox" give that a try.

"whereis kde" yields "/usr/include/kde"

the startx command, all variations, get the same scrolled screen of trouble, the relevant portions of which may be,

"XIO: fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed0 with 0 events remaining."

"Fatal server error: no screens found"

startkde yields a loop that scrolls off the screen with a repeating,

"kpersonalizer: cannnot connect to X server"

confounding me further is that during boot, the info scrolling past on the way to the login prompt looks good, including "Starting K Desktop Manager: done"

--

i'm afraid i don't recall a yes/no option for graphical login during install. i expect i'd select yes, or default on that one. will keep an eye for it on next try.

since i've done several installs with the same result, i'd like to get the above cleared up a bit before i repeat the process.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Did you change /etc/inittab? Make run level 5 and reboot, see how that goes.

Did you change /etc/inittab? Make run level 5 and reboot, see how that goes.

tell me what that means and where and how to type it in, and i'll be delighted to. :)

sorry, linux is new to me. hence i decided to try knoppix for my overdue conversion. i'm afraid i'll have to ask for patience and idiot instructions around the cli.

[Tech2k]

If it worked ok from the cd did you have to hit F2 and use a "cheatcode" if so it sounds like it didnt carry over after the hdd install (common problem) can you get to a text console and try xf86cfg.

If it worked ok from the cd did you have to hit F2 and use a "cheatcode" if so it sounds like it didnt carry over after the hdd install (common problem) can you get to a text console and try xf86cfg.

yes it works fine from the cd, and when the cd is copied straight to hdd instead of hdinstall. don't need to f2.

xf86cfg gave me an xwindows gui. i had a look around, and since i don't have detailed info for that monitor, i made no changes and quit, to return to a full screen of text which included this gem which goes roughly,

warning: cannot allocate colormap entry for "rgb:f/f/8"
warning: cannot convert arguments to display list function "foreground"
warning: cannot convert string "foregroung rgb:8/8/4;lines 1,-1,-1,-1,-1,1;foreground rgb:f/f/c;lines -1,0,0,0,0,-1" to type xawdisplaylist
warning: cannot convert string "xlogo64?foreground=gray90&background=gray92" to type pixmap
warning: cannot convert string "gradient:verticl?dimension=3&start=gray85&end=gra y95" to type pixmap
warning: cannot allocate colormap entry for "rgb:a/5/5"
x connection to :8.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown)


tried startx again. same problems.

tried reboot. same problems.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, it sounds like your booting off the HD in to console mode (no X, no KDE), right?

If so, open a text editor like joe and edit /etc/inittab and change the line that says

#Default runlevel ...
id:3:initdefault:

to

#Default runlevel ...
id:4:initdefault:

so you boot into X.

Good Luck!