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Well, I got my £800 paper weight up and running, my round ATA cables are a little messed up and were stopping the motherboard from detecting the 2 cd drives and 1 hdd drive.
Anyway, I was happy to throw the Debian 3.0 installation cd into my drive and watch it boot...anyway, this happened before, everything seemed to be installed or mounted...I re-booted and enetered my username and password, it accepted it, rana few lines and halted...

What can I do?
Also, when I boot it again, it says the hdd wasn't cleanly mounted and it takes a few mins to scan it.

If anyone can help i'll be ore than happy to give you a hug.

Turbonutter wrote:
> grub rox,

indeed it does...

grub rox, fool.

nice one :p
ag, go to: http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/index.php?PAGE=6#3986
I havn't checked but thats where I got my first version from, cost me £1.50 for P&P, I then bought a Linux Magazon and got Debian 3.0 with it, i'd be happy to send you a copy when my PC is running :D although you'd probably be bored with the idea of Linux by the time I got that going..*sigh*

Oooh, unexpected geek 'joke' at the end of my post there.

Flame war!

I threw myself in at the deep end, almost drowned, then started doggy paddling. Then when I upgraded, I though 'bagger this, I'll use a lilo'.

Well it depends how determined you are, but Debian is what it's like. Best you get used to it from the off.

Being thrown into the deep end is the only way to swim.

There are plenty of places you can get Debian, or any other distro, on CD. People sell it on ebay for instance, and it will probably cost about a fiver for all seven binary CDs and the source DVD.

As for my advice being appalling, I disagree. Debian is great but it is not for beginners. If you're going to use it as a first timer then you really need to be walked through the whole process - and if it's your modem, or GUI that's the problem then doing that remotely is a real pain.

IMHO it's better to get a Linux box up and running using Mandrake, Redhat or whatever - and then learn about the OS by using it. Practice with the shell. Install a few programs from source. Fiddle with config files. Install the nvidia drivers. Then once you're confident enough you can change distro if that's what you want.

Taking the "I'm hardcore" route just makes it more likely that you'll give up and boot back into Windows.

ok so where can I get Debian from? ive just looked on debian.com, but is there anywhere i can get a cd from, rather than download it?

No it's appalling advice. I used Mandrake first and it VERY NEARLY put me off Linux altogether. Only Luke and Debian managed to attarct me towards it again, and I ended up using it as a main OS for nearly a year!

However now it routes packets round my network and serves files, although all my other computers I get that don't have screwed IDE busses will be Debian. One Windows box is enough, heh.

class advice and taken in, i've got Mandrake somewhere...i'll give it a go when i've found out if my hdd will store it...