Linux on my i9300 Step2

Check out your boot.ini and make sure it's good. WHen you moved/removed the Dell partitions you may have screwed up the boot.ini file. Let me clarify. When you changed the partitions it nolonger matches what boot.ini is looking for. Also check this.http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...t-hal+dll.html might shed some light on the subject for you.

well.you have to set up GRUB to boot win

In order for him to get the hall.dll error grub has already handed off to windows. I doubt that grub is to blame.

Just for the future, what I have done to save myself some pain in getting dual boot to work is this:

1) (Given that WinXP is already installed,) Install Linux on the available partition and put Grub on that partition (NOT on the MBR of the drive).

2) Use the dd command to create a tiny image of the boot sector of the Linux partition (where Grub resides).

3)Take the image, copy it over to the root of the Windows partition, and add an entry in Windows' boot.ini to reference that image.

Essentially what this does is that you boot the machine off the Windows partition as usual, but before Windows boots, it gives you the standard NT boot selection. If you select the reference to the tiny Linux boot partition image, it basically tells the NT boot selector to go off to the Linux partition and try to boot it - it finds Grub and launches it! The only disadvantage to this technique is that if you mess up the Windows partition, you won't be able to boot Linux either.

Search the Gentoo forum for the details of this technique.

Mikhail

Thats true, but over time, you will collect quite a few entries in Grub for various kernels (if you keep them that is - its a generally good practice to keep previous kernels until you are certain the latest one works as it should), so having a "Windows or Linux" selection and then a "Which kernel?" list is quite convenient. Oh, and Windows has a nasty habbit of overwriting the MBR if you reinstall or repair it - that will wipe Grub clean, so its kind of cleaner to have that little boot image.

Here's a link to Mikhail is talking about. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=10588 I used to do this as well until recently. I'll soon go back to it as well. I have some issues to work out with grub and two physical drives.

Thanks for the link, Bill.

Oh yeah, that trick doesn't work with two drives. Well, it really shouldn't - if you have Windows on one drive and Linux on the other, just boot off the Linux drive and add an entry for Windows in Grub.

Mikhail

That's just it it was working perfectly until I moved to a pure udev system. I'll start a new thread on that though.

Sorry for the offtopic discussion...

Really? My transition to udev was quite smooth. Have you tried recreating the image? Reinstalling Grub (and recreating the image)?

Ubuntu, Knoppix, and Windows

My recent install of Ubuntu Linux on my Dell Inspiron 9300 was, in comparison, relatively pain-free. Knowing that there was the "restore partition" helped. Here were my rough steps:

* Defragged the Windows partition
* Booted a Knoppix boot CD
* Ran "qtparted" (poor-man's partition magic for Linux). I blew away the restore partition, and shrunk the Windows partition by about 10GB. I then created a 100mbyte /boot partition as sda3 (old habit), created an extended partition as sda4, sda5 in extended as a 512Mbyte swap file (I have a gig of RAM, and am slightly disliking my decision due to having to shut down some applications in order to hibernate), and the remainder one big /. I installed twice, and both Reiserfs and ext3 are fine choices.
* Ran the Ubuntu installer, and told it what partitions to use.
* Told it to install Grub to the MBR.
* Configured my wireless network. This was a snap, except Ubuntu always detected my neighbor's WAP ahead of mine which was right next to me (theirs is on channel 6, which cards generally check first). I even use WEP with MAC-address filtering, and no worries there.
* Sat back while it installed

Then, of course, is the fun "weeks of tweaking" I get with any new Windows or Linux system: installing all the apps I like to use, adjusting my fonts so things are perfect for the way I like to work, etc. It usually takes me about two months to fully "break in" a new system to where everything's where I expect it to be

Anyway, I have to admit that I knew exactly what I was doing. Here are the major take-aways of Ubuntu Hoary on the i9300:
* SD card slot doesn't appear to work. I don't even see events on card insertion.
* Have to do some serious hacking to make the front-panel buttons work well. Even then, the only ones I have working are the mute and volume controls, which required some event-monitoring of X-Windows and 3 small scripts which make DCOP calls to kmix. Very obnoxious.
* Scroll areas on the sides of the touchpad don't work. I never use them anyway.
* Machine locks with a blinking cursor on resumption from suspend. For the moment, I have the lid-close switch mapped to "hibernate" rather than "suspend" (the ACPI BIOS doesn't appear to recognize "standby", though Fn-Esc says "Standby" on the keyboard), and with the swsusp extensions included by default in ubuntu, hibernating works just about perfectly, with one exception...
* Wi-Fi doesn't like to come back from hibernation. I haven't fully investigated this yet.

Nice plusses:
* The stock NVIDIA drivers work almost perfectly. The only problem was with fonts, because they changed the default font resolution with the latest driver release. I had to set "Option "NoEDID"" in my xorg.conf to get 96dpi fonts rather than the 132dpi scaling the driver detected. I like my text small But anyway, they really smoked in UT2003 and Neverwinter Nights, which are the only two games I've evaluated under Linux so far.
* Sound works out of the gate. No tweaking except with the goofy DCOP scripts I'm working on to make the front-panel buttons work to mute and raise/lower the volume. The Master volume control adjusts the two front speakers, while the "Mono" volume control adjusts the subwoofer.
* Speedstep works great. Battery life seems superior to Windows.
* DVD playback, as always due to the MPAA's licensing crap, was an interesting hassle. I haven't fully worked out the issues with mplayer, but Ogle and Totem, after following the instructions on Ubuntu's web site to use CSS decryption, work perfectly.
* Every USB port works.
* Firewire works with no tweaking. I burned a CD to my Firewire burner. I have not yet tried my M-Audio Firewire Audiophile under Linux, but I intend to do so next week when I'm going to start getting Ardour running.
* PC card slot works fine with a spare modem, wifi adapter, and network adapter I had laying around.


Anyway, as a desktop replacement, used like a desktop replacement, the i9300 is a fine Linux platform. Eventually, I plan to publish a full "how-to" on getting all the miscellaneous peripherals working with Linux on the i9300, but it sure seems as if most things work out of the gate.

Before you start all over Linux is still there, just the boot loader is gone. Look at FCs documentation on how to reinstall just the boot loader.

Well, to be honest, I haven't tried it. I think I'm going to call Dell today and order the media, along with a Bluetooth module and the S-video adapter that gives you S-Video, composite out, and SPDIF out.

I suspect, however, that the whole system restore-thing doesn't have a chance in hell of working, because that was the partition I blew away to make room for my Linux system From what I understand, though, getting my system back to 'pristine' state is as easy as calling Dell and telling them I deleted my system restore partition and need media to get it back.

The problem I have with their default partitioning scheme is that it takes up 3 out of 4 primary partitions. That means I could slide stuff over using Partition Magic, but still that puts all my Linux partitions into the Extended partition. I've had problems booting that way in the past, though I think Grub is "extended-aware", so it may not be a problem any more.

I've been using Linux for nearly a decade now, so I'm used to the problems I USED to have, and try to avoid reproducing them

Re: "extended-aware" Grub, I have been running Gentoo off an extended partition and Grub has no problems whatsoever.

As for the Dell restore partition, why in the world would you want to keep it? That is such a waste of space! It's like making a ghost of a partition and keeping it on the same drive! I don't think it is a mandatory thing in terms of eligibility for Dell support.

The truly bizarre thing is that Dell ALSO sucks up another gigabyte of your disk space in c:\dell\mediaexe with a restore-disk creation utility. So all told, I lost about 5 GB of my 55.9Gbyte (yeah, a "60 GB" drive isn't 60 GB, it's just 55.9 Gbytes, or somewhere near 60 billion bytes) to their restore stuff.

I just got off chat with Dell, and they're sending me an XP install disc and driver/application discs so that I can restore 'cleanly' if I want to. Good stuff.

And my Ubuntu foray has been fun, but I miss the power of Gentoo. Think I may end up going back, and who knows, on a 1.7GHz Pentium-M, it might actually compile in a reasonable amount of time!