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I recently reorganised my HDD to avoid having to use initramfs . |
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Having done so, I still have some spare space on the HDD, |
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which seemed a good place to have a couple of other distros installed |
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in case I want to use Flash (my Gentoo is 64-bit) or show Linux to friends. |
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Fedora 17 (Xfce) installs easily enough from a USB stick |
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(my recently renewed mobo doesn't seem to be able to boot from CD), |
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but I ran into a couple of bizarre problems |
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whose solution mb of help to others in other situations. |
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I use Lilo -- it's simple if you're not continually changing the set-up -- |
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& copied Fedora's kernel image + system map + initramfs |
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from the partition where it's installed ( /dev/sda6 ) to /boot . |
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Then I ran into 3 successive problems. |
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(1) Lilo refused to run, as the Fedora system map file was 'read only'. |
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As root, I tried to 'chmod 644 System...' & was told again it was 'RO'. |
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The only way I could alter its permissions was to boot System Rescue |
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& run 'chmod' there, which worked. This is bizarre. |
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(2) Lilo refused again, saying there was some limit of "31". |
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This was solved by emerging the testing version of Lilo. |
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(3) Lilo then succeeded, but Fedora had a kernel panic, |
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not being able to find the root partition. |
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It is using Dracut -- which I've studiously avoided with Gentoo -- |
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& that doesn't recognise the traditional 'root=/dev/sda6'. |
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You have to use 'blkid /dev/sda6' to get a lengthy UUID for the device, |
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then replace the 'root=' line in lilo.conf with 'append="root=UUID=<blah>"'. |
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After all that, Fedora booted properly into the Xfce desktop. |
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BTW anyone doing this needs to avoid letting Fedora overwrite the MBR |
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-- it asks you & it's easy to forget -- & also not to let it set the time : |
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otherwise, you'll have problems when back home in Gentoo. |
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I also downloaded Mageia 2.0 , but there's a bug in its set-up |
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-- it keeps finding USB devices, the same one over & over -- , |
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so I've given up on it. Hopefully eventually, they'll get things together : |
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I used Mandrake 2000-3 , before I moved to Gentoo. |
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HTH a few others. |
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-- |
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========================,,============================================ |
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SUPPORT ___________//___, Philip Webb |
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ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Cities Centre, University of Toronto |
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TRANSIT `-O----------O---' purslowatchassdotutorontodotca |
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