[Alien]

Originally Posted by xpod

It can be a little confusing at first,especially after plain old C's & D's eh.

"... and the winner of this year's Understatement of the Year award goes to... XPOD!"

Originally Posted by xpod

The grub bootloader will always offer to install the grub to the mbr of the first drive(hd0?) unless you tell it otherwise.

I was thinking it would be better to put it on the same drive as I have the OS, as that's the newest & biggest 1, & the least likely to be removed for any reason any time soon.

Originally Posted by xpod

If you have Windows on the drive then you would obviously need to repair the MBR if you ever decided to remove *buntu again.
It's easy enough to do with your recovery console or a 98 bootdisk even.

Or a Partition Manager bootable CD.

Originally Posted by xpod

Just going with those defaults for Grub to the MBR is fine though imho.

I think I'll try telling it to put it on hd2, as like I said, I'd prefer it on the same drive as the OS.

Originally Posted by xpod

This confusion(i'm getting confused myself here just thinking about drives) is one of the reasons why i always suggest a nice unallocated partition and letting the installer use the "largest continuous free space".Especially when it's possibly the first time/s installing.
Manual partitioning & creating the extra partitions is all well & good.... once you get your head round the various terms etc.

What can I say? I guess I'm just used to having my computer setup the way I want it, rather than some arbitrary decision made by the software I'm installing, that's why I always choose the custom install option when it's available with Windows software.

Originally Posted by xpod

Gparted can be slow & even problemtic from the Ubuntu cd at times but i always use the Gparted live cd for any manual partitioning jobs.
I've never had problems with Gparted on it's own cd although i have with the one on the Ubuntu cd itself.

The version on the Kubuntu CD wouldn't even complete loading, just started scanning for devices then crashed, every time.

Originally Posted by xpod

You could get a few *buntus on that thing eh,all of them in fact,plus the other top 99 distros over on distrowatch probably

If it were empty to begin with, perhaps.

Originally Posted by xpod

Normal sudo commands will not ask for a password in the live environment but trying to be root will of course.
Not sure why you would want to become root in a live cd though...unless you mabey doing some rescue work of some sort

Blame Cobby, he's the 1 that told me I needed to do that command as root.

Originally Posted by xpod

I've had to throw an Ubuntu cd in just to be sure but theres definetely no device.map...or even a grub directory itself come to that.

Well, as I said above, I'll try telling it to put it on hd2 next time I try, which won't be until at least tonight, or maybe tomorrow.

Originally Posted by xpod

All this kinda stuff can be soooo off-putting for the potential new user though eh, which is why i always suggest the more straightforward methods for the first time installers.

True. The problem is, there's no need for it to be this awkward, it's not like GUI design is difficult [as in actually figuring out how to lay things out, etc; not including the coding of the GUI in that statement]. Sometimes I wonder if some linux programmers feel that their software has to be awkward to use & unintuitive, or else they'd be "selling out" or something.

Originally Posted by xpod

Once people(not meaning you in particular alien) start getting bogged down in the potential complexities of manual partitioning for the very first time it's so easy to end up losing the plot.......especially if they lose Windows along the way.Worse when they aint backed up too of course

I think [hope] I understand partitioning enough, even under Linux, not to risk FUBARing my XP installs, but I do take your point. The Kubuntu installer told me it failed when trying to format the first partition of the 3 [/] as ext3, so I rebooted into XP, created & formatted 3 partitions [ext3, swap, & ext3] in Partition Manager, then rebooted with the Kubuntu CD. This time when I get to the parititoning bit I simply assigned the partitions to what I want them to be & carry on. Then it tells me that the partition designated as / isn't set to be formatted [even though it's a cleanly formatted partition], & that I must set it to be formatted, except it wouldn't let me. I tried clicking in the formatting checkbox to set it to be formatted but it wouldn't change state. At that point I gave up with Kubuntu & decided to try Ubuntu [well, it was that & the fact that I'd had Kubuntu's KDE toolbar crash on me for no apparent reason!].

Originally Posted by Cobbydaler

As it happens, I've just downloaded Marauding Marmoset 7.3333 & had a play with the liveCD...

Originally Posted by Cobbydaler

I may try installing the KDE version to see how everything works...

See my experiences with Kubuntu above. It may behave differently for you, but it made me less inclined to go with KDE, which is a shame, as I much prefer the look of KDE to Gnome.

Originally Posted by xpod

To hell with the device.map......whats the best way to clean Tetley off a keyboard??

Bounty kitchen roll is fairly good. Slide it edge-wise down between the keys to get any liquid that's gone beyond the key tops.