Re: CHAT: Debian

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

>En réponse à Tristan <kesuari@...>:
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>>Most certainly...
>>
>>Lilo is installed into the MBR, so it doesn't need a partition. So
>>long
>>as you don't run Windows XP or install Windows *after* Linux, your
>>computer won't care.
>>
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>>
>
>I run Windows ME (which is set for multi-user use, although in the case of
>Millenium it's little more than a little box at the beginning with a list of
>users asking to enter a password. There are no rights and securities at all...).
>
Yup, then it should be right. In WinXP it seems they've added some extra
security things to stop you from using other OSes... it seems that if
you change the MBR without telling it, it decides some files are
corrupted. The way around that is to have lilo installed on other than
the primary MBR (on another partition or on another HD, just about
anything's possible), take an image of that (using bs under Linux; can't
remember the exact command), copy it to the WinXP boot partition and
tell the Windows bootmanager to have that as an option... But that's
irrelevant to you I guess.

>I've seen by looking on the web that lilo could be installing on other
>partitions than the MBR and still work correctly (for instance on a /boot
>partition). I wonder if it can be installed on the primary slave and still
>work... (what I had seen was for a single drive installation using Mandrake)
>
>
Indeed, that's most possible.

>>Or, my computer is set up to boot off the secondary master for
>>complicated reasons... depending on your system, you might do that and
>>have Lilo pass control to the primary master to install Windows.
>>
>Well, it depends whether Windows ME, this strange patchwork of an operational
>system, is more like Windows 98 or Windows XP on that respect...
>
>
In most respects, WinMe is more like Win98 than XP IMLimE. Win2k, I
think, was released between WinMe and WinXP, and it didn't have any
problems with booting in whatever way you wanted... so I'd assume WinMe
would be like 98 in these respects.

>>(When I tried Debian, I found the installation pointlessly hard (I'm
>>used to Slackware, FreeBSD and Gentoo) once I'd managed to get it
>>installed, I found apt wouldn't work... I can't recommend it based on
>>my
>>experience. (I think I was using 2.2.))
>>
>
>Strange... My former boyfriend was (and still is, he may not be my boyfriend
>anymore but he is still alive AFAIK ;)) ) a fervent advocater of Debian (he
>installed it on a zillion computers without ever having problems, but that was
>at the times when a 1Gb hard drive were luxury ;))) . I saw him once installing
>Debian on dual boot on a computer with Windows 98 and it went very smoothly and
>was finished in less than half an hour), and I've got many people on the list
>advocating it too. And now this completely opposite experience... Maybe you
>didn't get a stable version...
>
Well... it was a stable, released version... John said, I think, it was
just a bad version... I wasn't that interested in running Debian at the
time though... Everyone around had just said what a Good Thing(tm) it
was so I gave it a shot when I got my new computer... But I think by
that stage I had already converted from Linux to FreeBSD, so here I am.
(Regardless of OS, though, I reinstall every quarter or so unless I'm
extremely happy with my system or have no time. Among other things, it
gives me a chance to try different things. All this without a backup
device... I'm just asking for trouble... but I haven't come across it
yet...)

Tristan

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