Install notes - XFCE Community Edition BETA 008 (Daryna)

[breaker]

Hello all,

First, I want to say I have used Ubuntu in the past, but for a desktop, I feel Linux mint is outstanding!
(BTW, I have Windows XP x64 installed on my primary HDD.)

I wanted to share my install experience with my particular hardware configuration.

I had some interesting problems to solve to run the live CD and booting post-install. I'm not very good with GNU/Linux, so it was a fun challenge.

The XFCE live CD kept sending my monitor "out of range" when it started X and using vesa and/or noapic, and various VGA settings didn't change that. The same thing happens when I try to use the Gparted Live CD (Gentoo GNU/LInux) but I am able to set X Windows to use vesa @ 1024x768 using its "Forcevideo" script. Anyway the Daryna Mint XFCE live CD kept cycling back to the shell then trying to restart X while I kept hitting Shift+Alt+Backspace to try to kill X, and I was quick trying to type ps ax and then "kill -9 gdm", and such. Later, I realized I should have rebooted, and edited the grub entry to use "single ro" (recovery) and remove quiet and nosplash. My monitor is an Asus 20.1" widescreen and my video card is an ATI Radeon x1950pro.

So once I got to a shell using the live CD, I just used envy -t and it worked great. I could have edited the xorg.conf at this point but I had read using envy -t was viable. I didn't choose the reboot option in Envy because this is a Live CD. I just picked the restart X option and bingo, I was in. I played around for a bit then I went ahead and ran the Mint Install. I picked my 4th hard drive to dedicate to Mint and sliced it up into a bunch of partitions using Gparted and gave it mount points for /boot, /, /home, /opt, /usr, /var, and the swap (160G HDD).

This 4th HDD was designated as sdd, so /boot was sdd1 and / (root) was sdd2. However, after I installed from the Live CD and rebooted, first grub reported that it couldn't find "/etc/grub/message.mint" then after the text grub menu, grub tried to load Linux, but it couldn't find it and I was then in "busybox". So I rebooted into the live cd again and discovered now my Mint HDD was actually HDD 3 and therefore sdc! So, I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst and added an entry that pointed to sdc2 for / (root). After that I rebooted and tried it out. I used the new entry to boot into Mint. It all seemed fine, until...

Next day, I started the computer and my new sdc2 entry didn't work. So I tried the first grub entry (sdd2) and then it worked! At this point I was confused, so I read up some more on the net. I thought maybe I had to specify the UUID of the drive in grub, but that wasn't it. Then after another cold boot Mint /boot was back on sdc2. Hmmm, this doesn't happen using Windows.

I was thinking about my motherboard (an intel P35 based Gigabyte) and I thought about how it has two different SATA2 controller ICs. The Intel ICH9R controls 6 ports, and the Gigabyte controls 2 others. Sure enough I remembered I had put my primary drive on one of the Gigabyte ports and the other 3 HDDs on the ICH9R ports. So I switched the primary HDD (sda in Linux) to an open ICH9R port and started up the computer. After that it couldn't find a MBR at all of course, the HDD order was changed (because I didn't bother swapping the cables around to make my primary HDD connected to port "0" of the ICH9R ports). I took a quick trip into the BIOS where I was able to change the boot order of the drives. After that at the grub menu I was able to use my entry for sdc2=/(root). Once in Mint I ran update-grub and my new menu.lst automagic entry was correct. I tested with some more reboots and cold boots and it now seems fine. It now stays at sdc2 and doesn't sometimes "decide" that Mint is on sdd2. Perhaps this is an acpi thing, I don't know.

However, update-grub couldn't find /etc/grub/message.mint, so it commented that line out. So, for whatever reason, the first stage of grub can't find /dev/sdc2, grub stage 1.5 has to do that. I tried copying message.mint to /boot and adding an entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst to point to it, but that didn't work. Oh well, no big deal. At least now the Linux kernel doesn't see my HDDs in a different order each cold boot.

After that I had to fix printing to my HP LaserJet 1020, and lack of sound in another user account than my primary account.

FIrefox works great mostly, I like how it does Flash out of the box. At first while I had it running with other things It would hang a lot, but that hasn't happened lately. I will probably install Opera also.

UPDATE: Firefox does like to freeze. Most of the time it is while on YouTube and trying to click a link or close Firefox. But YouTube works ok for a little while.

Anyway, keep up the great work Mint, and XFCE CE teams!


-breaker

[Husse]

message.mint is the nice grub splash and not necessary for grub to work
If you use a separate boot partition you need to copy it to that partition and change the path in menu.lst to reflect the new location
This has been described several times in this forum and in the release notes of most editions but the XFCE beta
This is taken from the notes for the KDE edition

if you use a separate partition for /boot you will not get a graphical boot. To fix this, copy /etc/grub/message.mint to /boot/grub/, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and change gfxboot=/grub/message.mint

[breaker]

I did exactly that, but it still didn't work. I promise.