If you have any tips or troublshooting FAQs that you would like to share with the world e-mail me at jpisini@hotmail.com

Tips and Troubleshooting

You've installed Windows and lilos gone and Linux wont boot now what?

Grab a copy of tomsrtbt and boot your system from it.

Log in as root and mount your root partition on /mnt like this, 'mount -t ext2 /dev/hdax /mnt'

( where x is the number of your root partition )

Now type '/sbin/lilo -r /mnt/etc'

This will rewrite your boot sector using the lilo.conf file from your hard drive and not the floppy

Your hard drive crashed and you didn't backup ( shame on you )

You will need 2 hard drives the bad one and a known good one, at least as large as the bad one.

Put the new good drive in your sytem and boot from tomsrtbt and login as root

( this assumes the bad drive is hda and you've put the new one in as hdc )

Create a filesystem on the new drive with fdisk and mk2fs make it ext2

At the command line type 'dd conv=noerror if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdc1'

When this is done you want to check your data

If the old drive was a Linux system run 'e2fsk -y /dev/hdc1

If the old drive was a Windows system place it in a Windows machine and run scandisk and defrag on it

I just setup apt4rpm on both my desktop and laptop running Suse 7.3 and I must say I am impressed. I haven't used Debian in a while but every function that I could remember worked flawlessly. I did notice a few caveats that I would like to share with everyone.

Both installs where identical even though both machines have different software. I downloaded 5 packages from http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net these where apt4rpm-0.1.3-1.i386.rpm, XML-Simple-1.06-1.i386.rpm, libapt-0.3.19CVS-20011212.i386.rpm, and netselect-0.2-1.i386.rpm . I placed them in a directory by themselves and su'd to root and typed rpm -Uvh *.rpm. Rpm complained about a dependency problem it with XML-Simple requiring perl-XML-parser so I installed it with rpm -Uvh --nodeps *.rpm as a post I saw on google said I could use apt-get to install the program afterwards.

After the install you have to edit /etc/apt/sources.list using one of the examples found at ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/SuSE/7.3-i386/examples/ comment out the Debian lines first or you will probably hose your system although I didn't try it. I then typed apt-get update and then I tried apt-get install perl-XML-parser this brought about an error message on both machines saying there was a problem and I needed to type apt-get -f install to fix it I did and it download perl-XML-parser and several other files it needed so I ran an apt-get upgrade and it updated my system flawlessly. One thing to note the rpm's on the ftp site are compiled differently they work the same but apt-get sees them as new packages even if they are not. Your first download will be quite large 508mb on my laptop and 581mb on my desktop. Once this initial download is complete downloads are just updated or new packages so be prepared to wait the first time.

I wholeheartedly recommend this to everyone Suse now has everything it is a great distro and I don't see any need to try any others for a long time.