[Indianlc] Re: Technical help

[Diabolic Preacher]

i read this thread and had a really discouraging dose of linux
(installation) woes. going through the experience, I thought maybe
it'd be better to have troubleshooting guide rather than what's lying
around on the web. i'm sure we are aiming to help "women" foss users
at all levels of experience. so a links section to all the step by
step howto's and manuals could help people with 'perfect' machines
that the distros would choose to offer their blessings on. ummm i mean
there are often little hidden clauses of distros which makes the
experience not so nice. think distros optimized for i845 and people
having i810 trying them out, because they have the latest versions but
won't boot properly from the system. if u quit that and try package
installation, for some distros (or atleast for source tarballs) u have
an unending dependency problem.
for months i was trying to get suse 9.3 professional working on my
i810 p3 1 ghz machine. firstly it has problems with setting up the
proper monitor frequencies, so i switched to text mode and halfway
thru 1st cd, the lights go out (well that's not suse's fault :) anyhow
the setup resumes from the remaining cd and a reboot later am left
looking at a blank screen. a few edits in xorg.conf later am finally
in the colorful world of SuSE gui...only to find a li'l bit later that
due to improper installation of cd 1, the users management applet of
yast2 was not existing at all. next time just a small mistake of
making the system reprobe the monitor's freq values made the time
taken to do a full install from 5 CD's just go in waste. after
rebooting (with the reset button) the xorg.conf was shown as untouched
i.e. yast didn't edit it, meaning i'd have to figure out everything
myself. so i left it at that and after the new year passed by i
resolved to try my hand at one of the meant-for-novice-home-user
distros: suse. this time i selected full install sans all the
translations packages. and all went well till it autorebooted to land
me at a grub error --> Error 21 (the webpage describing grub errors
defines this as an "Unknown error"...how convenient. again a cold
reboot later, i selected "rescue system" from the CD's menu. and am
dropped at a login prompt. now i didn't even create accounts yet, so i
made a guess and typed root. so far so good. tried the grub-install
command and got an error /dev/root not found or not a block
device...whosoever asked for /dev/root. next i tried again to start up
the installation and from therein tried the rescue option. it did some
filesystem checking and as per my selection checked the grub
configuration and "nothing was wrong!"... 'intel inside...idiot
outside' ;) so i just went thru the config manually (not really
changing anything since yast got a working config last time). but
still the grub problem persists. going a bit off-topic (but hopefully
not anti-topic) trying to get atleast the windows bootloader made
things worse as setup failed midway with a general protection fault...
   now i want to clearly state that this scenario is not at all
intended to discourage newbies/novices to gnu/linux. nor is it a
nagging complaint with all the itsy bitsy details to bore someone.
rather i am just being vocal (or is it textual?) about all the little
obstacles that make the entire experience of installing linux with
even some of the newbie-oriented distros real damp. am sure when u
read up a installation howto, and the latest h/w s/w compatibility
features that the new distro is loaded with becomes available, u want
to take a shot at installing it, only to find you have incompatible
hardware. if one aggregates these little buggets (nagging bug
snippets), it'll be substantial enough for one article itself.
these troubleshooting faq's could be implemented wiki style. as new
exception cases arrive they can be added quickly.
   am thinkin of giving suse another shot by using LILO instead...let's see.

have a nice day
Diabolic Preacher
As Is