Re: [tlug] Debian 3.0r1 keyboard timeout and mouse MIA

["Jonathan Q" <jq@example.com>]

On 2/24/2003, "Botond Botyanszki" <9915104t@example.com> wrote:

>I always wanted to give grub a try, but I didn't want to take the risk,
and
>break something that works perfectly for me.

I forgot to mention that in the event that you do something wrong when you
install grub, you're not necessarily dead in the water like you would be
with an unbootable LILO.  Grub has a shell that lets you enter grub
commands, and as long as you have a valid grub mbr, you will have access to
this shell.  With it, you can set your grub root device (in my case, that's
(hd0,0) which corresponds to /dev/hda on my system, and would be /dev/sda
on an all-scsi box) and the path to the kernel image you want to boot, plus
kernel arguments.  So, I could tell it:

root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-bf2.4 root=/dev/hda1 /dev/hdd=ide-scsi
boot

and get my system up even if I had a broken grub config.  People who like
typing can boot this way all time if they feel like it :-)  You can also
use the grub shell to install grub on your system.  Info grub will give you
all the dirty details (the man page is a bit sparse).

Until I switched to Debian, I'd never installed grub on a working LILO
system before, since RH moved to grub as their default boot loader a while
ago.  It wasn't so bad.  The documentation contains plenty of "Danger, Will
Robinson!" but the process is pretty straightforward, and the grub shell is
a nice safety net in case of trouble.  I did the whole thing without a boot
floppy (which they recommend) because I don't have a floppy drive :-)

>You are trying to use two mouse drivers at the same time. Not sure if it's
a
>problem, but the kernel help (for usbmouse) says:

Not sure how that happened, but I'll check it out as soon as I get home, if
I'm still alive (I've been in the office since 7:30 for an early customer
meeting which hasn't actually happened yet).

Thanks!

Jonathan