Really, I think a good tutorial is all that's really needed. If you look 
at Gentoo's install walkthrough, you can build your complete system from 
scratch without knowing much of anything. Granted, to someone who's never 
used a prompt without C: at the start will have trouble conceptually (at 
least I did...) with the root filesystem.

The only trouble a newb would have with Gentoo is configuring the kernel, 
I think. But the steps to set up grub are straightforward, and they even 
show you how to add a vga=... (or other) switch to options in your menu.


On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 03:03:52PM -0600, Gerald Skerbitz wrote:
> And the installer (RH in my case) DOES install grub, but when your
> installation doesn't come up the first time and needs some option on the
> kernel line (how do you _add_ vga=ask in grub and then boot?), the ability
> to do that should be either obvious when you're doing it, or documented
> otherwise.
> With grub (whose interface I now can manipulate -- albeit painfully) it's
> neither.
> 
> Try this (pay attention to the space before hitting <tab>):
> grub> root (hd0, <tab>
> Error 1: Filename must be either an absolute pathname or blocklist
> 
> vs.
> grub> root (hd0,<tab>
> Possible partitions are:
>    Partition num: 0,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xde
>    Partition num: 1,  Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
> etc...
> 
> grub> help boot
> boot: boot
>     Boot the OS/chain-loader which has been loaded.
> 
> grub> help load
> 
> Let's see. The "setup" command actually does an install. The "kernel"
> command does a load.
> 
> It's taken me a long time to find this out, and it's not nice.
> 
> I don't say that you shouldn't use grub.  I just say you should not
> recommend it to newbies.
> 
> 
> --
> Gerry Skerbitz
> gsker at tcfreenet.org
> 
> 
> On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Matthew S. Hallacy wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 12:41:50PM -0600, Gerald Skerbitz wrote:
> > > I've heard the recommendation of grub many times on this list and it's
> > > inspired me several times to try to install it but I've been
> > > unsuccessful.
> >
> > This is exactly why your distributions installer should do it for you.
> > --
> > Matthew S. Hallacy                            FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified
> > http://www.poptix.net                           GPG public key 0x01938203
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> > http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
> >
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list

-- 
 ______________________________________________________________
|o     John Hoffoss                              Page 1/1     o|
|o [personal] hoff0438 at umn.edu          [mobile] 612.867.1432 o|
|o [personal] john at hoffoss.com            [home] 651.646.0987 o|
|o [work] hoffossj at facm.umn.edu           [work] 612.626.7628 o|
|o [other] john at minn.tc                                       o|
|o [GnuPG] BBAA 0FBA 94B6 A7D9 6C44  0C6E 6D81 F3C2 B254 20F4 o|
|o                                               _   _   _   _o|
|o                      _   _   _   _   _   _   / `-' `-' `-' `.
|o _   _   _   _   _   / `-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-'
`-' `-' `-' `-' `-' `-'

_______________________________________________
TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list