Debian Squeeze for My Parents - Config Issues - Pt3

v 0.3

Grub2

Once I'd finished installing Squeeze on my Parent's Computer, I had a dual-boot machine that booted by default into Debian. Initial installation failed to include the Windows XP selection on the bootloader menu, however I wanted it to boot into Windows as the default operating system.

Debian uses the Grub2 bootloader.  Of course, a Windows selection SHOULD appear but didn't.  Instead, the default display had two selection lines, the first being for the normal Debian Squeeze kernel, and the second for a Rescue Mode boot into Debian.  How to organise Grub the way we want it?

The Debian Wiki, of course!  First search the wiki for the bootloader Grub2.  The first challenge we have is to have it recognise the Windows installation.  The clue is in the wiki.  Open a root terminal and:

update-grub

There is now a third line on the Grub menu, pointing to the Windows XP partition.

Next, we are told "To configure grub "v2", you should edit /etc/default/grub, then run update-grub."  Opening this file (as root) shows us the first two uncommented lines as:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5

The first line tells us that the default boot entry is on Line 0 (zero), the top one and that there will be a 5 second delay before the boot continues.  I changed the entries to:

GRUB_DEFAULT=2
GRUB_TIMEOUT=20

I now had the default boot line as line 2 (the third line down) and the default timeout at 20 seconds (to give adequate time to change the selection - don't forget pressing "Enter" will continue the boot process straight away).

update-grub

All fixed!


Tip - Edit file as Root

Open a root terminal window, change to the directory where the file you want to edit is located and:

gedit

gedit opens as root and can edit and save the file as root.

Tip - Open Nautilus File Manager as Root

As above but:

nautilus

and the Gnome file manager starts so you can copy files as root.

Adobe Flash

Whilst there is a package that purports to load Adobe Flash, it didn't work for me.  HowtoForge tells you how to disable the Gnash Flash plugin in "Iceweasel/Firefox", which is a good idea.

To enable flash the manual way, download the tarball for linux from Adobe and extract as root the "libflashplayer.so" file (I think it is called).  Copy it to " /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins " and it will show up nicely in Iceweasel and play Youtube videos for you.

ntfs

Use synaptic to ensure the " ntfs-3g " package is installed.

Assuming Windows is on /dev/hda1, create a directory under either /mnt or /media, say /mnt/windows .

Edit fstab (save the current one as a backup) and add a line such as this on the last line.


/dev/hda1     /mnt/windows     ntfs-3g     defaults

That should do it - you can now read and write to the windows partition.


That's it for the moment, however I still had to configure the router for SSH access - next part.


Later ......