Hola!

Well I stumbled across your interesting distro from a /. article, and have been intrigued ever since. I recently bought a new computer, 2.0 Ghz Athlon, 1 gig RAM, 120 gig HD, an ATI Radeon9600, and a NEC DVD-R.

Now, I installed Windows XP (which will be my main OS) first, and followed some instructions on www.aboutdebian.com to try and get this thing running in dual boot. Basically you start the install, partition the drives (of which I could only partition 2 spots for linux, a root drive and a swap disk). You then return to windows, setup the install under NTloader and reboot to complete the install on the drives allocated.

I have several problems:

a.) my usb mouse does not work. This makes it very difficult to use the front end as you can imagine. Does anyone know how I can get an IBM USB mouse to work? I've tried several ports, and it has told me that it is "blocked" on usb 1, port 1... Which I don't understand . Any ideas??

b.) when I start the front end, the knoppmyth screen comes up, but nothing else starts. Did I do anything wrong? Obviously this is tied into the dual boot, though I'm wondering if I can do it this way in order to get around my dual booting issue.

c.) Has anyone actually gotten dual boot to work? Currently I use the CD to boot to linux by selecting "Load front end". I'd be interested in hearing how people managed to get this working. I've done searching, and for the most part people ignore those of us trying to dual boot, and no one has posted a solution. HELP!

d.) Do I "need" multiple partitions? I remember back when I dabbled in linux that it wasn't necessary, it just made things easier to control what happened in your system. Can I have one large partition for root, or do I need to follow the setup as listed in the install instructions?


I appreciate any help you can give me!

Thanks,

Chris Madson

_________________
--------------------
RaGINaR

"Got Moo?"

BUMP.

_________________
--------------------
RaGINaR

"Got Moo?"

well I really don't know and unfortunately I'm afraid most of the people with a good bit of experience with mythtv and knoppmyth on this list just have never tried to dual boot, because we are using it as a settop box to just work as a multimedia center and have no use for xp on the box.

Thanks for the help, any ideas on the other problems such as USB mouse support?

_________________
--------------------
RaGINaR

"Got Moo?"

I can't imagine that this is THAT far out. I have a TV out on my normal video card, so I can boot XP and see it on the screen if I desire (and play Windows games or whatever). I'm awaiting the arrival of my PVR350 by FedEx in the next few days and would like to dual boot since I already have XP installed.

My (ancient) experiences with Linux have been that it is a configuration nightmare and it sometimes takes weeks to get working right (but then again most of my Linux experience is from 5 to 8 years ago--pleeease don't make me recompile the kernel to get sound working). I'd love to have the option of going into XP so that I can get some "instant gratification" in between banging my head against the wall (leaving bloody streaks) while trying to get Linux working smoothly.

I noticed that KnoppMyth was getting ready to happily reformat my entire primary HDD before I aborted. Any way around this?

I've got utilities such as PartitionMagic, Boot Magic, etc. and could do weird little tricks such as hiding my XP partition, installing KnoppMyth and then installing Boot Magic to select partitions if this kind of thing would help (and if KnoppMyth would be nice enough to ignore hidden partitions and not go on a destructo trip).

Any ways around/suggestions would be appreciated by me, also!

I'd also love to store my MPEG2 files on my second HDD. Formatted so that both Linux and XP could access them. Is this feasible or possible? If so, which filesystem? FAT32 or NTFS?

I guess I've rambled enough for now. Help is very, very appreciated.