Installing Debian on Seperate HDD

[LWA]

Guys and Gals,
I currently have two 40Gb Maxtor drives, Windows XP Professional installed on the primary one and I would like to install Debian (using the net install iso) on the other one. My question is will I need to use something like arconis operating system selector to choose which operating system to boot? I am aware of the Grub OS selector that debian uses but will that work across two hard drives?

Also I use a USB BT Voyager 1010 to connect to the t'internet will this be compatible with Debain?

Thanks for all that offer help and advice,
Leon

[Spud1]

Grub should work fine, as long as its a recent built of debian, if its on the 2.4 or 2.6 kernel then it should be able to boot XPs ntfs partitions easily enough

[LWA]

Any idea about the BT Voyager? Directhex can you help?

[LWA]

Update: I have installed debian net install to the spare hard drive (by using a crossover cable between my laptop and main computer), grub did indeed detect windows xp on my other hard drive.

However when I reboot I get the list of operating systems then Debain is choosen by default. Loads of text gubbins appears on the page then after a minute or so the screen goes blank and nothing happens.

Any ideas?

[directhex]

debian is the default, you can change that by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst

it seems odd that the screen should go dead. are you sure http://www.bash.org/?329959 doesn't apply?

[LWA]

I don't get a chance to do apt-get etc it goes blank before then, it's more like my monitor (samsung 171p) does not have a signal rather than going blank.

Monitor/graphics card not compatible? By the way my system is overclocked no idea if that will make a difference

[directhex]

so it's an X problem? can you change terminal, with ctrl-alt-f1?

[LWA]

It gets passed the setting system time stage, it detects my cd drives and sound card then the monitor goes into cannot find display mode.

I tried ctrl-alt-f1 when the monitor was blank, the hard drive light came on but the monitor did not find a signal.

Should I be doing that at the grub choose operating system stage?

[LWA]

I've just tried installing it again and it still does the exact same thing. Arghhhh oh well doesn't look like me and linux mix well together

Edit: I reinstalled for the third time, this time typing "linux26" at the installation screen. and it worked! weird...

[directhex]

woo, yay for 2.6 kernels

[LWA]

Right directhex I have followed your guide through (very good by the way).

Just have a couple of questions:

1)Can I install themes using apt-get?
2)What is the best places to get drivers for my BT Voyager 1010?
3)Any recommendations for other useful things to install?

Thanks very much.

[directhex]

1) themes? depend what you want themes for. gtk2 themes (gnome apps), for example, can be installed with apt-get install gtk2-engines*. "apt-cache search foo bar" is your friend

2) download a driver from http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/news.html and edit the source as per http://linuxdrivers.foundries.source...ts.pl?sid=7303 - not massively easy, ethernet adsl would be better

3) games! doom3 was just released!

[LWA]

Sorry about this directhex, I have just came across another problem. In your guide you talk about getting some compiling tools, the source code and header. I have apt-get the compiling tools for my kernel (2.6.8-1-k7) however the source file it creates is .tar.bz2 extension not .tar.gz like in your guide. How do I extract it?

Thanks again.

[directhex]

ah, this was a change in debian policy just after my guide came out. mostly because bz2 was about 7mb smaller, which is a significant bandwidth saving over many users.

bzip2 uses "j" as its modifier instead of "z" for gzip - so "tar jxvf kernel-source-2.6.8.tar.bz2"

[LWA]

ah, this was a change in debian policy just after my guide came out. mostly because bz2 was about 7mb smaller, which is a significant bandwidth saving over many users.

bzip2 uses "j" as its modifier instead of "z" for gzip - so "tar jxvf kernel-source-2.6.8.tar.bz2"

Thanks directhex (again) now I have installed gtk2-engines how do I run it? (I know I'm stupid!)

Also how do I update firefox to it's latest version?

Thanks you're a star!

Edit I have updated Firefox, still no idea how to use gtk2-engines!

[directhex]

gtk2 engines define the "widgets" used in gnome applications - scrollbars, tickboxes, buttons, etc. you can set them in gnome somewhere in the gnome control center, in xfce4 (my window manager of choice) you set them with the user interface button in the settings screen.

for the outsude of windows, the decor, try the gnome-themes and gnome-themes-extras packages if you use gnome.

i don't know kde equivalents off the top of my head, unfortunately