Dual boot problem 27

aspects for layers don't ramifications. tasks,

Thank you for that clear buttessment. I had begun to get an impression along those lines. There seem to be two large groups among Linux users: (1) The programmers and IT people who like the command line, and (2) the hobbyists who regard command line users as a somewhat heroic group possessed of special esoteric knowledge. The former group are unlikely to care whether Linux is easy for new people to use, and the latter group have a vested interest in keeping Linux difficult to use.

That's unfortunate from my own personal point of view because I would like to see Linux displace Windows. But that seems highly unlikely to me now. Expecting people to use command line from the first is like requiring Windows XP users to learn DOS before they can type letters and write email, or like making furniture that requires woodworker's skills for final buttembly: It eliminates 99% of the potential user base.

I have to confess that I'm a devout "pointy clicker". To me the command line is just a primitive version of a GUI button, and if I need to do something more than a few times I'd just as soon write a small GUI utility with a nice, easy button to do the job....so that I don't have to keep lifting my other hand up to the keyboard and using arcane, textual incantations that tax my memory. :) But I'll keep your advice in mind and not buttume that a KDE GUI utility is always necessarily adequate to the task.

tool.

The drop counter? I don't understand what that means. Do you mean that I'm not telling you enough relevant information? I'm afraid I wasn't being very methodical. I was just fiddling with both Suse and Mandrake for a couple of days, trying to get them set up well enough to use. I couldn't get either one to install Lilo to the boot parbreastion, while both had no trouble installing to the MBR.

With Mandrake I was using the KDE control center program. ("Configure your Computer") It has a section for installing a boot loader that's basically the same as the installation version. One can choose between Lilo and Grub, choose the location to install the boot loader, etc. When I selected to install Lilo to hda10 it ended with "Failed to install....". If I selected to install it to hda0 it worked, but then, of course, once I reinstalled Boobreast the Linux parbreastion was no longer bootable.

I finally got it to work by adding the two lines to Lilo.conf:

root=-dev-hda10 lba32

...and running Lilo from the command line. Then, when I opened the control center GUI tool it showed that the command line approach had worked: hda10 was showing as the boot location. (In all my earlier attempts, when I re-opened the GUI tool, the dropdown listbox for parbreastion selection had always reset itself to hda0.) Mandrake then booted fine through Boobreast. So, in other words, up until the point that I solved the problem by running Lilo from the command line, I had not done anything with Lilo.conf or command line. I had only repeatedly tried the GUI tool.

There was no command line in that case. I had tried both Grub and Lilo through the KDE control center. They both just failed to install if I selected hda10 instead of hda0. Grub failed without displaying any message saying so. Frankly, though, I didn't try very much with Grub. Since I'm more familiar with Lilo, and since it works fine, I prefer to stick with that.