help: lilo v. grub, mouse driver spastic, what happened?

Greg Rundlett greg at freephile.com
Sun Sep 8 22:46:06 EDT 2002


I recently did a kitchen-sink (everything) install of RH 7.3 on pretty
'standard' PIII 700 MHz hardware, with about 40GB of disk, and 256MB RAM.  I
chose KDE for my default desktop, and setup one user.  I use a Belkin
OmniView SE 2-port switch to go back and forth between my RH box, and
another workstation running WinXP.  Everything had been working fine for
over a week....

I even recall rebooting RH several times as I was trying to get the network
setup right (I'm using a linksys router for DHCP and static IP addressing
while it clones my NIC to the outside world).  I began using KMail, and
browsing the internet, and doing all normal good things.  Remembering how
much fun I used to have with Webmin, I decided to install it (via RPM).
That is when bad things started to happen.

First, my RH system boots into run level 3, when I had it setup to go to run
level 5.  If I do login and startx, it tries to load Gnome, which tends to
crash.  Could this be related to the fact that it is using LILO as a boot
loader when I am almost certain that I was using Grub for a boot loader?

If I use my Belkin switch to go to RH, I lose the mouse (actually, the mouse
goes wild), but I do have keyboard input.  I have no idea whether this is a
side-effect of the real problem, or perhaps a symptom of the real problem.

I rebooted, uninstalled webmin RPM, and not much changed.  It still boots
into runlevel 3 (not 5), and the mouse is not usable by the time I get into
X.  Plus, it seems to have switched my default desktop to Gnome, if I log in
under my user account - even though everything had been setup to use KDE.

So, there is the situation as best as I can describe it.  I think if I can
get it to use Grub instead of LILO, then I'll have the system working right
again.  I guess my question is: How do I get RH to use Grub when it boots?
I've tried the LDP, and my O'Reilly references, but I'm hoping to find
better advice here.


This is what my grub.conf looks like
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,0)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda2
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-3)
 root (hd0,0)
 kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-3 ro root=/dev/hda2
 initrd /initrd-2.4.18-3.img


in /etc/lilo.conf.anaconda, I found this:
prompt
timeout=50
default=linux
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
message=/boot/message
lba32

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-3
        label=linux
        initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.18-3.img
        read-only
        root=/dev/hda2


adTHANKSvance
--

Greg Rundlett
www.FREePHILE.com
978-423-8172
greg at freephile.com
aim: freephile






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