DrakX is Mandrake Linux's installation program. Its ease of use has been enhanced with a new graphical user interface, and a new installation scheme which separates installation and system configuration. With DrakX, it doesn't matter whether you're a new user to Mandrake Linux or an old pro – DrakX's job is to give you a smooth installation and an easy transition into Mandrake Linux.
DrakX will work best if all of your hardware is connected to the computer and powered up during the installation. Printers, modems, scanners and joysticks are just a few examples of peripherals that DrakX will automatically detect and configure for you as Mandrake Linux is being installed.
When you begin, the first screen that comes up will present some information and give you installation options. (Figure 3.1). Doing nothing will simply begin the installation in normal or “linux” mode. The next few paragraphs will go over some options and parameters that you can pass to the install program if you run into problems.
Pressing F1 will open a help screen (Figure 3.2). Here are some useful options to choose from:
vgalo: if you tried a default installation and did not see the graphical interface as shown below in Figure 3.3, you can try to run the installation in low resolution mode. This happens with certain types of graphics cards, so with Mandrake Linux we give you a number of options to work around problems with older hardware. To try the installation in low resolution mode, type vgalo at the prompt.
text: if your video card is very old and graphical installation does not work at all, you can always choose the text mode installation. Because all video cards can display text, this is the “ installation of last resort”. Don't worry though – it's not likely that you'll need to use the text install.
noauto: in some rare cases, your PC may appear to freeze or lock-up during the hardware detection phase. If that happens, then adding the word noauto as a parameter will tell the install program to bypass hardware detection. Because DrakX will not scan for hardware, you will need to manually specify hardware parameters later in the installation. The noauto parameter can be added to the previous modes, so you may end up specifying:
boot: vgalo noauto |
to perform a low resolution graphical install without DrakX performing a hardware scan.
kernel options: Kernel options usually aren't required for most machines. There are a few cases of motherboards incorrectly reporting the amount of memory installed due to bugs in the design or in the BIOS. If you need to manually specify the amount of DRAM installed in your PC, use the mem= xxxM parameter. For example, to start the installation in normal mode with a computer having 256 MB of memory, your command line would look like this:
boot: linux mem=256M |
Now that we've gone over what might go wrong, let's move on to the actual installation process. When the installer starts, you'll see a nice graphical interface (Figure 3.3). On the left will be the various installation steps. You can notice installation will occur in two distinct main steps: installation, then configuration. The list on the left shows all the steps. The current step is marked with an highlighted bullet.
Each step may present various screens. Navigation between those screens is made through the and buttons. Additionally an button may be available to show more advanced options.