Hi,

In the documentation it says:
'Create and format (if you don't already have one) a partition to boot fromiso.'

Now I now on a hard drive there must be at least one primary partition. When I use GParted do I have to choose Primary or Extended?

Do I have to choose Primary because I will install an oparating system on it?
And can that be done on a hard drive where there is all ready a primary partition?

Thanks,

Piedie

What is your reason for booting fromiso? You may not need to for an install.

eriefisher

eriefisher wrote:What is your reason for booting fromiso? You may not need to for an install.

eriefisher

Well, honoustly, I just follow what is described. Is there another way to install AntiX? Could and would you clearly describe for me what to do?

Piedie

First we need to know if this will be a dual boot and if so with what? If it's stand alone then just use the live cd installer. Gparted is on the disc to help you create partitions and the installer will ask you about grub. So, what is your desired set up? How big is your drives etc.

eriefisher

eriefisher wrote:First we need to know if this will be a dual boot and if so with what? If it's stand alone then just use the live cd installer. Gparted is on the disc to help you create partitions and the installer will ask you about grub. So, what is your desired set up? How big is your drives etc.

eriefisher

Hi ErieFisher,

I'm glad you want to help. Now I will try to tell what I have right now.
I have two hard drives.
One the first, hda which is 10 GB, I have a primary partition of 4,83 GB. On this I have first installed SliTaz (= a mini Linux distro). It created installed Grub I think. Afterwards I installed Puppy linux (a mini also) and it gave met the choice to install it coexistent to SliTaz and I did so. I added the predifined lines in menu.lst file of Grub to give me a choice of which to start up. And it worked.
The rest of hda is not allocated yet.
Then I installed Ubuntu on the second hard, hdb, drive and it found the Grub entries. But I think it made a new Grub on the hdb. I think this because the menu.lst on hda is still the same. I do not need Ubuntu now, so it can be deleted. All files on hdb may be deleted.

I would like to install AntiX on hda. I do not care at this moment whether it is on the hda1 or a new hda2. I would like to keep SliTaz and Puppy for the moment if could be.

If you need more info let me know.

Thanks,

Piedie

Since you want to keep the other two OS's on hda lets get rid of Ubuntu. Boot the live cd. Once you are at the desktop right click for the menu and select Admin/tools>>Mepis Admin>>Install. Type"root" for a password. Check the agree to terms box and then click next. 1a-select disc, select the disc you want to use, in your case sdb. 1b-gparted-Use this if you want to change the partition scheme. If not, choose"custom install on existing partitions" if you want to reuse the Ubuntu partitions. Click next. 2a-Select your partitions. You may already have a swap because of the other OS's so just select it. Use ext3 for a file system then click next. Follow through with your info until the end.

As for grub, I'm not entirely sure it will see the other two OS's but it doesn't matter right now. You can put grub on the mbr of sda to boot all the OS"s or put it in the /root of sdb and edit your existing grub to reflect Antix. Either way you should have a bootable system and be able to edit grub to boot what will not. Good luck.

eriefisher

eriefisher wrote:Since you want to keep the other two OS's on hda lets get rid of Ubuntu. etc. etc.

eriefisher

Well, that seems easier then the method described on the antix site. Before you're answer I deleted Ubuntu and probably its Grub modifications. When starting up Grub came up with a Error 15, whatever that is.
So I installed SliTaz again. Now the entries for Puppy were gone and I think the files too. Well all right. AntiX installs Grub again. Does not add its entries to an existing menu.lst As I do not know the entries for SliTaz I will have to do it all over. AntiX is live now on hda2. I know SliTaz is also overwriting the Grub settings.
Untill now: Thanks for your help.

Piedie

Edit: AntiX made a new Grub entry on hda2 with the SliTaz entry in it.

You will need mount sda and grab the menu items from the siltz menu. I believe the path should be../mnt/sda1/boot/grub/menu.lst. or there abouts.

Copy the menu items for each OS and add them to the working /boot/grub/menu.lst. They should show up on next boot.

eriefisher

Piedie wrote: Edit: AntiX made a new Grub entry on hda2 with the SliTaz entry in it.

I was surprised when you first said that it didn't work, because antiX is very good at both picking up other installations & OS's, and also at re-installing grub whenever the mbr gets overwritten by a new OS install. __{{emoticon}}__

If you ever need to put grub back again, then just right click, get the menu up, then select"Control-Admin" (It may be in settings, depends how your menu's setup) and then select"System Administration". It'll ask for a root password, then you can run the Grub repair tool. It works everytime, and can be a life saver when grub gets flattened by other installs. LOL!

DJiNN wrote:

Piedie wrote: Edit: AntiX made a new Grub entry on hda2 with the SliTaz entry in it.

I was surprised when you first said that it didn't work, because antiX is very good at both picking up other installations & OS's, and also at re-installing grub whenever the mbr gets overwritten by a new OS install. __{{emoticon}}__

If you ever need to put grub back again, then just right click, get the menu up, then select"Control-Admin" (It may be in settings, depends how your menu's setup) and then select"System Administration". It'll ask for a root password, then you can run the Grub repair tool. It works everytime, and can be a life saver when grub gets flattened by other installs. LOL!

Well I edited my earlier post after I found out it was on hda2. Of course questions keep coming up, so here are three of them:
1. I have hda1 and hda2 as primary partition. Was that necessary or could I have hda2 as an extended partition and have one menu.list in hda1. Now it uses the one in hda2 but I really do not understand why.
2. Could I have used the same 'home' directory for both OS's?
3. I want to alter my screen resolution and put it in the startup. Where can I do that?

Thanks again,

Piedie

1-Primary or extended, it only matters when you need more that four partitions. If so the last one should be extended so more partitions can be created inside of it.

1b-The only menu.lst that gets used is the one that grub in the mbr uses. It's probably in hda1.

2-I don't recommend sharing /home for different OS's only because they will use different config files and may get confused. I usually create a small /home for each OS or leave it in /root and create a /data partition that mount in /home/me so it can be accessed from any OS.

3-Add xres=1600x1200(or whatever it is) to your /boot/grub/menu.lst where the line with the rest of the boot codes are
ie:title MEPIS at sda5, newest kernel kernel
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz.old root=/dev/sda5 nomce quiet splash vga=791 resume=/dev/sda6 xres=1600x1200
boot

eriefisher

Piedie wrote: 1. I have hda1 and hda2 as primary partition. Was that necessary or could I have hda2 as an extended partition and have one menu.list in hda1. Now it uses the one in hda2 but I really do not understand why.

I could explain this one, but it would take me ages (& it's past my bedtime) plus i really think you'll be better off reading
========= SCRAPER REMOVED AN EMBEDDED LINK HERE ===========
url was:"http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub.html"
linktext was:"this"
====================================
to get a good understanding of Grub & how it works. __{{emoticon}}__

How to set up your partitions? That's pretty much down to....

1: How much drive space you have available
2: How many distros you wish to install at one time
3: What size you'd like to make each partition.

To give you an example, the machine i'm on at the moment (an old P3 1gig box) has a 30gb Hard drive that i've partitioned as follows.

root@P3iX:/home/djinn# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 30.0 GB, 30020272128 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3649 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8f800000

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 510 4096574+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 511 638 1028160 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 639 1282 5172930 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 1283 3649 19012927+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1283 2054 6201058+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 2055 2855 6434001 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 2856 3649 6377773+ 83 Linux

Each partition is about 4-5 gig in size, with the exception of sda7 which is purely a"data" drive and will never carry any OS install. That's about 6 gig.

sda1 has Tiny Me on, sda2 is the swap file (you only need 1 swap file for however many distros you'll be installing). sda3 at the moment is sidux, sda4 is the extended partition (container) that holds the logical partitions, sda5 (logical) is running Arch Linux and sda 6 is my antiX install. sda7 (as mentioned previously) is my data drive, and i use it to store anything i want to keep (Backups, config files, bitmaps, icons... etc etc).

I change my distros a LOT, but antiX ALWAYS stays on sda6 ( because i like it a Lot and because regardless of what other OS's i try, i know i can always get into antiX to put things right should anything go wrong). __{{emoticon}}__

So, grub will always boot from the mbr (because that's where it usually gets written to by the grub installer when you install an OS) .... BUT, the menu.lst that it refers to will always be the antiX one on sda6. If install another OS at some point (Say Ubuntu on sda5) chances are it will automatically install grub (the menu.lst that it refers to) on sda5. So obviously when this happens, i run the grub repair tool from the antiX live CD, which re-installs the grub where i choose to put it.... ie: back on sda6.

But that's just how i do it, and it's by no means the definitive way (if indeed there is such a thing!) __{{emoticon}}__ So feel free to partition your hard drive according to your own needs &/or desires. Oh, and i don't use a seperate /home partition for any installs on this machine, mainly because there's not really any need, and i change the distros so often it's really not worth it. Plus it's a lot of hassle remembering which /home partitions belong to which /root etc . __{{emoticon}}__

Does that make sense? I hope so.

. Could I have used the same 'home' directory for both OS's?

You could, but that would involve a lot more work. There are some good tutorials on the net about that. One way that i've been thinking of doing (although i haven't tried it yet) is to have ONE partition that's home to all of my distros, and then just use a slightly different username for login. I'm not sure if it'll work, but i can't see why not.

So, you'd have say 3 different OS's for example, and OS1 would have the username Bob, OS2 would have Bill, and OS3 would have Barry. (The 3 B's!) __{{emoticon}}__ So all the relevant files that normally reside in /home, would be safe & sound in their own respectively named folder, and shouldn't cause any problems.

Hmmm, i'm going to try that soon just to make sure it actually does work as i think it should. (Makes mental note to self!) LOL!!

3. I want to alter my screen resolution and put it in the startup. Where can I do that?

When Linux boots, the screen (size, resolution etc) takes it's relevant info from a file called xorg.conf which is located in /etc/X11/ You have to be root to edit it though. I think it would probably be a wise move for you to explain a bit more in depth about what you're trying to do with regards to your screen res (ie: what size is it now and what size would you like it to be etc) and maybe post the contents of your xorg.conf file here so that whoever answers may be better able to give you the correct answer.
By the way, have you tried changing the display size from the fluxbox menu? Right click on the desktop, then"Settings - Display" and that should give you a choice of resolutions. I've found that it works pretty well, and will usually only allow you to select a res that your monitor/card is capable of.

eriefisher wrote: 3-Add xres=1600x1200(or whatever it is) to your /boot/grub/menu.lst where the line with the rest of the boot codes are
ie:title MEPIS at sda5, newest kernel kernel
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz.old root=/dev/sda5 nomce quiet splash vga=791 resume=/dev/sda6 xres=1600x1200
boot
eriefisher

I didn't know you could do that (But it makes sense). __{{emoticon}}__ Great answers by the way..... you said in a handful of lines more than i said in dozens of lines! LOL!!

DJiNN wrote:

eriefisher wrote: 3-Add xres=1600x1200(or whatever it is) to your /boot/grub/menu.lst where the line with the rest of the boot codes are
ie:title MEPIS at sda5, newest kernel kernel
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz.old root=/dev/sda5 nomce quiet splash vga=791 resume=/dev/sda6 xres=1600x1200
boot
eriefisher

I didn't know you could do that (But it makes sense). __{{emoticon}}__ Great answers by the way..... you said in a handful of lines more than i said in dozens of lines! LOL!!

He should still edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf for the correct resolution. My suggestion should work with the live disc and I believe the install.

eriefisher

Hi,

I, finally, managed to edit the menu.lst with vi Very Happy Very Happy
Now there is to change the xorg.conf. I opened the file but it did not make me clear where to enter the resolution. I want it to be 1024x768. Now here is my xorg.conf for the part of monitor and screen:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Section"Monitor"
Identifier"Monitor0"
VendorName"unknown"
ModelName"unknown"
Option"DPMS""true"
HorizSync 30-75
VertRefresh 55-70

EndSection

Section"Monitor"
Identifier"Monitor1"
VendorName"unknown"
ModelName"unknown"
Option"DPMS""true"
HorizSync 30-75
VertRefresh 55-70
EndSection

Section"Monitor"
Identifier"ATIMonitor"
VendorName"unknown"
ModelName"unknown"
Option"DPMS""true"
HorizSync 30-75
VertRefresh 55-70
EndSection

Section"Device"
Identifier"Card0"
Driver"nv"
BoardName"unknown"

Screen 0
#Option"UseDisplayDevice""dfp"
#Option"MonitorLayout""crt,crt"
#BusID"PCI:1:0:0"
#Option"sw_cursor" # needed for some ati cards
#Option"hw_cursor"
#Option"NoAccel"
#Option"ShowCache"
#Option"ShadowFB"
#Option"UseFBDev"
#Option"Rotate"
Option"UseInternalAGPGART""no"

# savage special options, use with care
#Option"NoUseBios"
#Option"BusType""PCI"
Option"DmaMode""None"

# nvidia special options, use with care
Option"CursorShadow""1"
Option"CursorShadowAlpha""63"
Option"CursorShadowYOffset""2"
Option"CursorShadowXOffset""4"
Option"FlatPanelProperties""Scaling = native"
Option"NoLogo""true"
Option"UseEDID""true"
Option"AddARGBGLXVisuals""true"
Option"RenderAccel""true"
#Option"AllowGLXWithComposite""true"
EndSection

Section"Device"
Identifier"Card1"
Driver"nv"
BoardName"unknown"

Screen 1
#Option"MonitorLayout""crt,crt"
#BusID"PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section"Screen"
Identifier"Screen0"
Device"Card0"
Monitor"Monitor0"
DefaultColorDepth 16

SubSection"Display"
Depth 8
Modes"1280x960"
EndSubSection
SubSection"Display"
Depth 15
Modes"1280x960"
EndSubSection
SubSection"Display"
Depth 16
Modes"1280x960"
EndSubSection
SubSection"Display"
Depth 24
Modes"1280x960"
EndSubSection
SubSection"Display"
Depth 32
Modes"1280x960"
EndSubSection

# Only the official NVIDIA driver supports twinview
# these setting are an example
Option"TwinView""false"
Option"SecondMonitorVendorName""unknown"
Option"SecondMonitorModelName""unknown"
Option"SecondMonitorHorizSync""30-75"
Option"SecondMonitorVertRefresh""55-70"
#Option"MetaModes""1024x768, 1024x768"
Option"TwinViewOrientation""RightOf"
Option"ConnectedMonitor""dfp,dfp"
EndSection

Section"Screen"
Identifier"Screen1"
Device"Card1"
Monitor"Monitor1"
DefaultColorDepth 16

SubSection"Display"
Depth 8
Modes"1280x960"
EndSubSection
SubSection"Display"
Depth 15
Modes"1280x960"
EndSubSection
SubSection"Display"
Depth 16
Modes"1280x960"
EndSubSection
SubSection"Display"
Depth 24
Modes"1280x960"
EndSubSection
SubSection"Display"
Depth 32
Modes"1280x960"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section"Screen"
Identifier"ATIScreen"
Device"Card0"
Monitor"ATIMonitor"
DefaultColorDepth 24

SubSection"Display"
Depth 24
Modes"1280x960"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section"DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

Section"Extensions"
Option"Composite""Enable"
EndSection
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Is it just changing all the 1280x960 to 1024x768

thanks,

Piedie