On Thu, 19 Oct 1995, Jan Leonhard Camenisch wrote: > > yesterday I had to use the boot and root disks (installation disks) > to fix a configurations problem. Ok. I used option 0 of the expert-mode > to get a shell. But I missed the 'ls' command there. Why isn't it available > anymore? I'd appreciate to have it again.... > > You have the mount command, so assuming you are trying to fix an existing installation, you can mount your existing filesystem and use the commands on it. You just need to set up your path. If you use Debian's interface for mounting, the root directory of the mounted filesystem will show up under /root, so ls would be /root/bin/ls. Perhaps there is also an ls command on the installation disks. Does anyone know.
As a side note, I also had to use the installation disks to fix a problem. When I installed X, the configuration asked me if I wanted to add xdm to the startup files. So if figured I would risk it and give it a try. Well I guess I chose the wrong kind of mouse, and when xdm started, the screen just started flickering, and the machine was unusable. The boot disk that I made didn't help because it also ran xdm when I started the machine. I guess I could have passed a command line option through lilo to change the init level say, to single user mode, but since I couldn't access the documentation on the system, I wasn't sure how to do this so I had to use the installation disks to fix it manually. If I was a beginner, I would be up a creek. Perhaps changing the init level would also help Jan. Perhaps by default, lilo should have a short set of instructions that tell the user how to change the init level to fix such problems, instead of just the plain LILO: prompt by itself. Something similar to the message given during boot of the installation disks. Just a suggestion. Tony.
