On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 10:27:54AM -0000, Bob Dove wrote:

upgrading the outlaws?) Currently, because Photoshop CS demanded it W2K (which is absolutely with no exceptions they flakiest O/S I've used - and I started with CP/M! Fond memory says W3.11 was the best.

Weird, my experience was that Win2k was by far the best OS Microsoft every released. It had all the benefits of plug & pray (but matured so it actually worked) and none of the teletubby add-ons of Windows XP and had the welcome addition of a security model.

it named F: I wonder how long before I have to repeat the exercise? Now come the question; with multiple hard drives installed, can Linux install and boot from a second hard drive D:? Having windoze and Linux in separate partitions on the same hard drive made me give up on Linux.

In answer to your question, Linux can boot quite happily off a 2nd Hard disk (or 3rd or 4th etc.) as long as it can find the bootloader. Your description of the other problems (it confused me a bit) sounds like you have a hardware problem or that the Bios setup is perhaps somehow wrong. I'd perhaps stop taking the machine to PC World (or whichever store you are taking it too) and try a local independant shop to get it sorted as it shouldn't take very long for someone who knows what they are doing to sort it out. (or bring the machine to an Alug kitmeet)

Reading these mails - your comments re operating/installing Linux is absolutely frightening. A 'simple' installation CD that injects Linux onto a hard drive and which comes up with a desktop 'just like windoze' (or Mac O/S) is all 99% of PC owners want. We don't want to know about command lines - just icons on the desktop just like the original Digital Research GUI that all other O/S desktops have copied!

Installing Linux isn't difficult tbh, and doesn't /really/ involve any command lines. What tends to make installing Linux "difficult" is the prescence of Windows on the computer already.... and of course have you ever tried installing Windows onto a computer which has Linux already installed without Windows killing Linux? The only bit that people get trouble is with the partitioning of disks, and of course the Windows disk partitioner isn't any better than any command line Linux tool (like cfdisk) to be entirely fair it is far far worse! To install Ubuntu you can just point it at a computer and say "use the entire disk" (same with Debian Sarge iirc) and you get a few other questions (like, which country are you in, what is your keyboard layout etc.) and it installs in far less time than Windows will (without the added "fun" of downloading all your Windows drivers+updates+software you essentially need). Thanks Adam -- jabberid = quinophex@jabber.earth.li AFFS || http://www.affs.org.uk/ || Not a filesystem

On Wednesday 09 November 2005 10:27, Bob Dove wrote:

Hi Folks,

Installation CDs and pre-installed O/S plus recovery disks.

I have always installed from a full O/S disk. My daughter and several of the outlaws have bought systems with pre-installed O/S and recovery disks (Tiny and Acer). Initially, these boxes had Win95. Recovery on these machines was in fact a reformat and copying of a 'mirror' image and not a full version. I upgraded my sys to Win 98 and eventually 98SE (do you think I'd admit to upgrading the outlaws?) Currently, because Photoshop CS demanded it W2K (which is absolutely with no exceptions they flakiest O/S I've used - and I started with CP/M! Fond memory says W3.11 was the best.

Well I remember the downturn that was windows 95 also. I worked with Win3.11/NetWare networks and I can honestly say that (whilst 3.11 problems could be a *real* nightmare) 95 struck me as them introducing a CD full of nasty problems then scrabbling to turn it into a viable software product for years afterwards. Preferred dos myself, but hey. To me, Microsoft were once a half decent outfit, whatever people might say. That's part of why I now use a superior environment for work and play.

I now have two towers and two USB externals. The 'twin towers' each have two HDD. The reason for this is that initially a refusal to boot up and even acknowledge the presence of emergency repair disk in floppy drive or the installation CD in CD drive caused my local guru to pronounce the HDD dead. I bought and fitted new drive, reinstalled every thing and fitted (after setting jumpers) 'dead' drive as slave in the hopes of being able to recover data including a large number of scanned images. Lo and behold, the 'dead' drive was seen and all the data was there and could be accessed. So verily the dead drive was resurrected! The next time the 'C:' drive 'died' on me, it was another trip to PC World for another HDD and again installing and loading O/S. This time 'dead' drive went into one of those new fangled (at the time) external USB drive boxes where it remains. As I said - two boxes and now six HDDs later have lead me to believe that it is software (namely windoze) that is at fault, not the hardware! Possibly a viral infection could have caused it but who knows? Next failure will see a smaller drive installed as 'C:' as it will in fact only contain O/S and those programs that won't install anywhere else but C: Why smaller? It takes an age to scan for Virii or defrag big drives! Incidentally, the latest reformatting because windoze wouldn't boot resurrected a dormant Linux partition which the system labelled C: and windoze took itself off into a second partition it named F: I wonder how long before I have to repeat the exercise? Now come the question; with multiple hard drives installed, can Linux install and boot from a second hard drive D:?

Certainly, most modern installers will help you out by allowing you to choose where to put / and swap.

Having windoze and Linux in separate partitions on the same hard drive made me give up on Linux.

It's like this - if you want to partition your drive up amongst different operating systems, then once you're comfortable with partitioning it's easy. It kind of works the same whichever OSes you're installing together, it's not just a linux thing :) If you are interested in getting more comfy with partitioning, in my experience the best way to teach people about partitioning is to give them VirtualPC (Although less so recently) or an equivalent, one or more OS installation disks, hammer home the difference between a virtual hdd and their real hdd and leave them to it. They soon come back ready to partition stuff and understanding how not to wipe everything off the disk!

Reading these mails - your comments re operating/installing Linux is absolutely frightening.

To be honest, there's been a lot of guff posted around here lately about that if you ask me. Pretty much any major distribution is now a piece of pie to install. Debian Woody can't be taken as a fair example of a current Linux installation, if you're into "end user installations" it's probably more representative of 5 years ago than anything else.

A 'simple' installation CD that injects Linux onto a hard drive and which comes up with a desktop 'just like windoze' (or Mac O/S) is all 99% of PC owners want.

Then fear not, all you have to do is target your requirements at this specific area. The Mandrakes, Ubuntus and SuSEs of this world all provide varying degrees of this. There will (hopefully) never be a single, homogenous standard of usability in the GNU/Linux world, because everyone wants different things, so some distros will not be putting 100% focus on, say, usability. This is ideal, because everyone can get what they want, and the different motivating factors (Militantly Free Software, commercial Usability, etc.) produce different types of advances that can benefit us all.

We don't want to know about command lines - just icons on the desktop just like the original Digital Research GUI that all other O/S desktops have copied!

I think, and this is just me, that in order to really get an advantage from upgrading to a GNU/Linux, you're going to be best not shying away from the console anyway. There really is nothing inherently bad or unusable about consoles. As an aside, there's *got* to be some way to remove the fear of the console for the average user. Whether it's consoles in funky anti-aliased truetype fonts with images/music/css theming/whatever in a gnome/kde app, or even turing-type rubber-fork "find me the mp3s I saved in july last year" type stuff, if we could just crack this heinous culture that's built up against using fast, expressive, intuitive typed commands, then people would REALLY be moving to linux. Whether that's 1. Important or 2. Ever going to happen or even 3. a Good Thing, is another matter, I suppose :) Thank you for reading my largely subjective opinions, -- Ten