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by Tim Parker
Now that you’ve installed Linux and configured LILO to boot your system the way you want it to, everything should be working just fine. Unfortunately, computer operating systems have a way of not working properly, despite your doing everything you should. This chapter deals with a couple of issues: checking out your system to make sure it is installed and working properly, and using the package installation tools to add new software to your system. We wrap up the chapter with a look at using multiple CD-ROM drives on your system.
If you worked through the last two chapters, you have installed Linux (most likely from a CD-ROM) and LILO. Your system should reboot into Linux (or give you the option of booting Linux, depending on how you set your system up) when you do a cold restart (power off, then back on). If it doesn’t, the most likely cause of problems is LILO.
The usual culprit is that the Master Boot Record or the boot partition did not have the Linux boot instructions written to them. The LILO chapter explains how to correct this problem.
Your system will often boot into Linux properly, but some of your devices won’t be working properly. It is very rare for hard drives, floppies, and CD-ROMs not to be recognized because these are all detected and configured during the installation process. However, sound cards, network cards, external SCSI devices, and peripherals such as printers and scanners are sometimes not found after a system reboot. This is most often a configuration problem in which the kernel does not know how to communicate with the device properly.
What happens if you’ve installed Linux, used LILO (or maybe forgot), and rebooted the machine? Either you booted into another operating system on the disk or got the dreaded “No OS” message from the machine’s BIOS. Do you have to start all over again? Luckily, no. If you have the boot and root disks you created when you first installed Linux, you’re safe.
Boot the system off the install (boot) disk. The system gives you the familiar boot: prompt. The way to tell the Linux boot disk to load off the hard disk where your installed kernel is, instead of off the disks and start again, is to specify the location of the kernel. This is usually done with the partition name, such as /dev/hda1 for the first partition on the disk. The command to boot from this partition would be typed at the boot prompt like this:
boot ro root=/dev/hda1
This tells LILO to find the kernel to boot from on that partition. You should use the proper partition name, of course, and a Linux kernel must be there to read.
After you have booted the system from floppy, run LILO to set up the boot sequence the way you want it.
If you have devices that are not recognized properly after booting, you should check the boot messages your system generates. You can see all the messages by typing the command dmesg at the shell prompt. If a device is not recognized properly, you will see one or more lines in the dmesg output about that device. For example, if your network card is not properly detected you may see messages like this:
loading device ‘eth0’… ne.c:v1.10 9/23/94 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov) NE*000 ethercard probe at 0x300: 00 00 6e 24 1e 3e eth0: NE2000 not found at 0x300 eth0 not loaded
As was mentioned, this error almost always occurs because you provided the wrong configuration information. In the case of the network card above, the IO address on the card was 330H not 300H. Running the setup utility again lets you change these parameters.
Whether your system had Windows or DOS on before Linux, or maybe just has Linux now, in the future you may want to modify the layout of the disk drivers to allow other operating systems to be loaded. If you want to modify your partitions’ sizes, there are several commercial products (such as PartitionMagic from PowerQuest Corporation) that can do the job, but there’s also a tool we’ve looked at in earlier chapters that works just fine under DOS and Windows—FIPS. FIPS lets you size existing partitions without requiring a full backup-reformat-restore operation.
You’ve already seen how to run FIPS from the DOS or Windows prompt. Prior to running FIPS, you should defragment your file system using one of the utilities included with DOS or Windows for that task, and then run FIPS to create new partitions or remove existing ones.
If you’ve installed Linux, you’re not out of luck: You can boot off a floppy disk and use the Linux CD-ROM to run FIPS, or copy FIPS to your boot floppy when in Linux. You can use this technique to convert an all-Linux disk to a shared Linux-Windows disk. You should not run FIPS from the Linux directory, even under an emulator software package such as Wabi because the results are not predictable.
So your Linux system is up and running, but you want more software? There are several sources of additional software you can load on your system, including CD-ROMs, WWW pages, and FTP sites. You can also purchase software from vendors. In some cases, software includes an installation utility that needs to be run to install the package properly. Commercial software is usually like this, as you will see in Part VIII of this book when we look at some commercial applications.
For other applications, especially those that come in the disk sets that most CD-ROM versions of Linux include, you must use a package tool such as installpkg, pkgtool, or pkgadd. The name of the tool differs considerably, depending on your version and release of Linux, so you should check the documentation that came with your system for the exact name and actions necessary to add software. As an example of the process, we can look at two different tools. The first is RPM (Red Hat Package Manager), and the second is installpkg (which is available with many versions of Linux).
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