Hey folks. 1st of all, I want to make it clear, even though I know DOS, windows, program very well (Pascal, C/C++, ASM, 3d, OS dev), I don't know much about unix and linux, so please excuse me when I say something silly about *x. OK, Today I got Linux... Having never worked with it, I ordered Linux for Windows aka Mandrake 7.2 claiming to be easy to install and harmless to currently installed windows. Well, the latter is true. The former, however, is not. After the installation LILO couldn't properly print russian characters stupidly assuming the fonts with cyrillic letters are already present in BIOS. Update of currently installed linux failed for no reason with some error: "the list is empty", pressing OK doesn't do much and finally returns to the same error dialog window with "the list is empty" thing.... Then I reinstalled linux with English language and finally got LILO messages readable. After that neither "linux" nor "failsafe" options in LILO didn't bring me up linux. The computer hangs up completely after the message about amount of memory allocated for cache/hash/whatever (several lines below things like kernel version, amount of memory, computer speed and calibration of delay loop). There is no any response to keyboard, there is no access to any disks. It definetely hangs up. :( And I can't do anything about that. The 3-step-like installation, advertised on the box, is false (well, perhaps it may work on somebody else's computer but not mine for sure). I guess now I understand the meaning of the dialog: - Why writing own OS? - Don't like windows, failed to install Linux. :( Here's description of my computer: - eMachines 566-i2 eTower, Celeron566, 160MB RAM, 7.5GB HDD, intel 3D AGP for video/gfx (as far as I remember it's i810 chipset, memory controller/whatever and vide/gfx curcuitry are both in the single chip). The complete description of the computer is here: http://e4me.com/infocentral/product_etower566i2.html Is there any posibility to install this damn thing w/o changing the computer, without changing the OS? I mean, it's very frustrating to pay some bucks and receive nothing in exchange, so if it's possible I'd like to know how to fix the problem and use this particular linux on this particular computer. Thanks Alexei A. Frounze alexfru [AT] chat [DOT] ru http://alexfru.chat.ru http://members.xoom.com/alexfru/ http://welcome.to/pmode/
