Re: suSE novice

["Alex Hudson" <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

> I came to the meeting today (thanks I enjoyed it).

Great - I went, had a lot of fun, saw some people I've not seen in a while.
Ruediger's talk was a lot of fun, and I felt it had a lot to offer everyone,
no matter what their expertise with Linux. We also had a little debate about
the future of Linux, always good to have the newbies on hand to keep our
minds on current matters & our feet on the floor!!

> Anyroad the thing is I have spent the afternoon installing suSE cebit the
> evaluation version that "Rudy"?? gave away.
> I set it up ok it seemed but as I also have windows, after I had played a
> bit with suSE (sounds rude) <G>
> I rebooted my system.It booted into windows without giving me a choice of
> os.
> What have I done wrong & what can I do to rectify this.

What hasn't happened is that lilo hasn't installed, for whatever reason.
I've not actually touched the SuSE disk given out yet (I don't upgrade that
quickly!!), so I can't say for sure what's happened, but it'll be one of two
things: either lilo hasn't been configured properly yet, or it was installed
to the wrong section of the drive. lilo (LInux LOader) is the piece of
software that gives you the option of which OS to boot, and look hideously
complicated the first time you try it, but really isn't anything to worry
about.

Now, hopefully the SuSE installer hasn't changed, and you answered 'yes'
when it asked you whether or not you wanted to install 'loadlin'?? Loadlin
is yet *another* piece of software; this will load Linux from DOS, and SuSE
usually put it in C:\LOADLIN\, or somewhere similar. There's a batch file
there called 'linux', which you need to start like so:
    linux hda3
The option I've given it is 'hda3'; which is kind of like Linux's main
partition on my system, somewhat similar to C: under DOS. However, it
probably won't be hda3 on your system: depending on how many partitions you
have, and in which order they are, will govern what the number on the end
is. If you have more than one hard drive, the last letter (a in my case) may
also be different. Anyway, all of this is of no use to you..

If you have just one DOS partition, Linux will probably be installed on
hda2. So try 'loadlin hda2'. (If it doesn't work, you can always resort to
trying to work out which number to use by using fdisk, or just by trying
successive numbers until one works ;). This should allow you to boot to your
linux installation.

What to do when you get there? Well, you can choose to do two things. You
can decide that loadlin works well enough for you, and either create a DOS
menu to choose between continuing to boot Windows, or just type loadlin ...
whenever you want to use Linux. Alternatively, you can configure lilo. lilo
can be configured fairly easily from YaST, or YaST2 - you can tell it to
include options to boot to Windows, Linux, or any other OS you have
installed. Then, you'll probably want to install lilo to the 'master boot
record' - this just means, whenever you turn on your machine, you'll get the
lilo: menu which allows you to choose between the different OS options..

Hope this all helps and hasn't confused you too much!!

Alex.

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