New Debian Install - HELP!

Kerry Hoath kerry at gotss.net
Sat Oct 11 04:50:56 EDT 2008


Basically the reason grub won't do what you want right now is because you 
are not used to it.
Lilo hard codes the boot locations of the kernel and initial ram disk into a 
block list which breaks every time you rebuild an initrd or recompile or 
move the kernel.
Grub can read file systems, and you can fix it when the boot loader 
scrambles unlike lilo which just goes
lililililililililili


You can put lilo on and move to grub once you know how to make it go beep, 
how to make it spit its output through a serial port etc if you so choose.

you probably wanted the options
speakup_synth=xxxxx debconf/priority=low
so it would ask you which boot loader to install; alternatively set the 
priority to low on the main menu.
Regards, Kerry.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Holmes" <steve at holmesgrown.com>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008 4:42 PM
Subject: Re: New Debian Install - HELP!


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: RIPEMD160

Yeah, I got past that now.  I did it by pressing down arrow once
followed by tab and then typed speakup.synth=spkout.  That part
worked.  I am having a hang-up right now as grub is the default loader
and after the install finished, I was forced to reboot.  First of all,
I don't know how to interract with grub and over-ride kernel
parameters; but worse yet, my machine at the moment won't boot into
anything!!!.  I have an existing windows partition on the first disk
and am I'm installing linux on the second disk.  Apparently, grub did
not configure this properly.  It's like windows is trying to boot
strait away and grub never comes up at all.  I'm now sitting here
waiting to errase the entire linux partition so I can start over with
Debian and maybe I can get the thing to skip grub and install lilo
instead.  I know lilo from my Slackware days and I know it is capable
of booting on one drive and dual booting for both windows and linux.
Plus I can make lilo talk at the beginning.  Grub looks to o
convoluted to me as a first impression.





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