Using Linux

So, after some troubles with my computer (namely, my Ubuntu Feisty partition filling up so much that I couldn’t log in), I needed to wipe everything and start fresh.

Fresh like Mint.

I decided to check out Linux Mint after a recommendation. What sold me on it was a screenshot showing that it only had one taskbar/menubar. There was no top and bottom bar business like Ubuntu has that wastes valuable screen real estate.

The process wasn’t painless, though. Apparently a new version of some part of the OS decides not to distinguish between IDE and SATA drives anymore when naming devices. My primary IDE drive became /dev/sdd and so it was listed after my e-SATA and SATA drives when it came time to install GRUB.

Since I have a Windows partition on the same IDE drive as the Linux partition, this caused all kinds of problems and I couldn’t boot into any OS.

After trying a few things I stumbled across a forum posting that made something a bit more clear. I needed to change the numbering for GRUB back to (hd0,2) instead of (hd3,2) in the menu.lst file without changing the device reference from /dev/sdd3 to /dev/hdd3. I was able to boot into the LiveCD and edit that file that was on the drive.

I restarted from there and it actually worked. It only took a few extra hours and some frustration over one little part. The rest of the installation was very easy and straightforward.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Distributions, Installation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.