Installation Advice 2

[dace]

Hi all-

Well, I dual-booted my laptop with WinXP and Debian (Knoppix installed to harddive), and everything seemed fine, except for the fact that it doesn't support power management for my laptop. So, I want to switch to another distribution. I have Mandrake 10 and RedHat.

So, my questions: which of the two will support power management (my laptop is a Compaq Presario 2100, if that makes a difference), and if both, which would be recommended? The most I've ever done is basically play Frozen Bubble, so I don't know much about it- I'm installing it to learn.

My second major question: how do I remove the Debian installation and replace it with another distribution? I'm using the Debian bootloader, so could this mess up my MBR if I'm not careful?

Thanks for the help!

 

[Leland123]

Hi dace,

I'm running RH 9.0 and Fedora Core 2. If you fresh install one of these, it will find your ext2/3 and swap partition and overwrite them with the new version of linux, complete with a fresh /boot/grub/grub.conf file. Be sure an have a floppy disk formated before running the install, so you can make an emergency boot disk. Then, if your grub boot loader doesn't work, you can boot from your linux boot disk to access your linux system and fix /boot/grub/grub.conf.

I'm pretty sure RH 9.0 or Fedora Core 2 will support your laptop with power management. Fedora Core 2 has apmd daemon which can be run as a service. Apmd is used for monitoring battery status and logging it via syslog(8). It can also be used for shutting down the machine when the battery is low.

Regards,

LelandJ

Leland F. Jackson, CPA
Software - Master (TM)

http://www.smvfp.com

Nothing Runs Like the Fox

 

[stevexff]

dace

Have a look at bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla for bug #115980 before you start, if you are going to Fedora 2. I got into a world of trouble after hosing down the partition table on my wife's PC...

Suggest you back up the MBR and partition tables first, unless you want to be sleeping on the sofa

 

[Leland123]

Hi dace,

There should be nothing to fear about installing Fedora Core 2 if you take a few precautions.

First, be sure you have an emergency linux boot disk. This can be created during the install of Fedora Core 2, or after Fedora Core 2 has been installed. The emergency boot disk contain a light version of your kernel. The kernel resides in memory and cannot be swapped out to disk. When you boot the emergency disk, the linux kernel is loaded into memory and your linux partition is mounted, so you can edit your grub configuration file in /boot/grub.

After making corrections to your /boot/grub/grub.conf file, you can then start the grub shell with the grub command. The following command from the grub shell will write your grub configuration to your hard disk MBR:

grub-install install_device

Your install_device would be the hard disk, per your /var/log/messages file, that your system uses to read your MBR during boot.

Here is a link to the relevant page of the grub manual:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Invoking-grub-install.html

Maybe this will help.

Regards,

LelandJ


Leland F. Jackson, CPA
Software - Master (TM)

http://www.smvfp.com

Nothing Runs Like the Fox

 

[dace]

Thanks Leland and Steve, I'll give the above a try and post back how it goes.