I multi-boot XP and 4 linux distros. I have 4 - 10GB partitions that I install distros to and one large /home partition. I was going to replace the distro on /dev/sda6 with opensuse 11.2. I got to the partition page and chose to edit. Then I chose my swap partition and chose to format it. Next I chose /dev/sda6 and chose to format it. I then tried to choose the mount point as /. That was not one of the choices. The choices were /var, /user, etc but no plain / for root. Not wanting to possibly mess up my system I aborted. I have looked at the installation documentation that I found before and after I tried the install but didn’t find anything that addressed my question.
Can someone enlighten me or point me in the right direction?
Yes, when I start with the / it offers one of the other options like ‘/var’. I can delete that part and just have the / left. I was unsure if that would work or not.
Didn’t want to delete the partition if I didn’t have to. Might cause problems with the other OS’s.
This was the answer. There was already a partition specified as /. I will proceed with the install. Thanks to everyone for pointing out what I should have noticed. I will mark this thread as solved.
Looked but didn’t find a way to mark thread as solved.
It continues to astound me the stuff you can miss in the installer. I’ve come literally a click away from deleting everything from my system on a ridiculous number of occasions.
Will look at it some more soon. The MBR and boot thing was not that simple to me. Luckily I knew to use my Mepis cd to repair the MBR back to what I had before the install. Then I was going to copy the entries from the Suse menu.lst over to the one that Mepis is using. When I looked at the menu.lst in Suse it was blank. Then I realized that I had set the /home folder to ext4 and it should have been ext3 because all of the other home folders were ext3. So I had to re-install and did. Still the Suse menu.lst was blank. I looked at the menu.lst.old and there it was. So I copied that and booted back into Mepis and edited the menu.lst there.
I do wonder about two things in OpenSuse 11.2:
Why does it default to the command line login?
It seems that everything I tried to do required the root password.
Spoke too early in previous post. After I copied the menu.lst entry from OpenSuse to the Mepis menu.lst I get a kernel panic. It reads:
Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS:Unable to mount root fs on unknown block (0,0)
Here is what I put into the Mepis menu.lst:
title openSUSE 11.2
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-MAXTOR_STM3250310AS_5RY0FGRB-part5 resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-MAXTOR_STM3250310AS_5RY0FGRB-part2 splash=silent quiet showopts vga=0x31a
initrd /boot/initrd
Should I edit the kernel line and change everything after root=dev/ on the two lines between kernel and initrd and make it /dev/sda5?
If I re-install then should I enable MBR and enable /boot?
I had rather keep my menu.lst where it is - on Mepis. Help me understand why the menu.lst in OpenSuse is blank and why if I copy a section from the OpenSuse menu.lst.old and paste it into my current menu.lst that it doesn’t work.
I don’t mind re-installing but after reading some about chainloading I still don’t understand it.
Maybe I don’t understand how grub, mbr, and /boot are supposed to be set up.
Basically, all chainloading does it lets you boot with the Mepis grub and when you choose SUSE, it just pushes you into the SUSE grub and that version of grub takes over. This way, any changes in the SUSE grub have no effect on the Mepis grub.
Thanks, Wilson_Phillips. That is a whole lot better than what I read. A lot of the explanations on how to do things that I find on the internet are geek explanations that only another geek could understand. Not calling you a geek.
I am not having any luck finding what to edit so that my OpenSuse 11.2 will boot right to the gui rather than the command line. Can someone point me in the right direction?
In my search and reading about run levels and init I have found a line in /etc/inittab that says: id:2:initdefault:. According to init
The /etc/inittab File
Each entry in inittab is a single line with 4 fields separated by colons (lines that begin with a # are comment lines):
id:runlevel:action:process
Suppose we have the entry
fb:235:wait:/sbin/myscript
in inittab. The field explanations are:
id: A unique 1 or 2 character identifier which init uses internally. You can use any id you want, as long as you make sure each line has a unique id. The id for our sample entry is fb.
runlevel: Which runlevel this entry applies to. If you want this entry to be run for multiple runlevels, simply list them all. Thus our sample entry will be run whenever we enter runlevels 2, 3 or 5.
action: Tells init what to do with the entry. Some actions are: initdefault: init interprets this as the default run level
wait: init starts the process and waits until that process exits
once: init starts this process once when the runlevel is entered.
respawn: The process will be restarted by init whenever it terminates
. There are many more actions, and you can see what each does by looking at man inittab.
process: The name of the process init has to start (not necessary if the action is initdefault).
The processes to run for each runlevel are specified in /etc/inittab. If you look at /etc/inittab, you’ll see one of the first lines (all lines starting with # are comments):
id:3:initdefault:
which means that when you boot the computer up, you automatically go into runlevel 3. If you want to automatically go into the X GUI when you turn the compture on, change the 3 to a 5. Note that this IS the runlevel upon booting. If you change this value to 0 or 6, you will not be able to boot the computer without a rescue disk. Be careful when changing this line.
It looks like to me that if I change the 2 to a 5 in the ‘id:2:initdefault:’ line then I would boot to the gui.
Can someone with more expertise than myself tell me whether or not this is correct?
At the end of the article it says “Instead of changing the runlevel using init, you could also change it using /sbin/telinit which is simply a symbolic link to init. I have no idea why telinit exists.”
Telinit is a link and is therefore not a text document. How do you edit a link to another file?
A link is just a file that points to another file. All things in Unix are files. You can edit it but you are actually editing the file the link points to.
This allows you to do things like if you have 2 versions of an app installed but have other programs or scripts that refer to that program rather then change all the scripts to point to the version you want you can simply have a symbolic link to point to the current version you wish to use currently.
