With the DrakX installation program, it doesn't matter whether you're a newbie or a GNU/Linux guru. The job of DrakX is to provide you with a smooth installation and an easy transition to Mandriva Linux's latest version.
The first screen offers to run the installation with special options if the standard mode wasn't suited for your hardware. Let the installation start automatically with no options. If something goes wrong, see Section 1.2, “Installation Options”.
When the installer starts, you see a nice graphical interface (see Figure 3.3, “Choosing the Default Language”). On the left are the various installation steps, the current one marked by a highlighted bullet. The installation occurs in two phases: installation, then configuration.
Each step may present various screens. You can surf between those screens through the and buttons. Additionally an button may be available to show more advanced configuration options. Note that most of the latter should only be used by expert users. But there's no harm in looking at them!
If something goes wrong during the first installation attempt, pressing F1 at the welcome screen (see Figure 3.1, “Very First Installation Welcome Screen”) opens a help window (see Figure 3.2, “Available Installation Options”). Here are some useful options to choose from:
vgalo
: If you tried a default
installation and didn't see the graphical interface (see Figure 3.3, “Choosing the Default
Language”), you can try to run the
installation in low resolution mode. This happens with certain
types of video cards. With Mandriva Linux you are given a number
of options to work around problems related to older hardware. To
try the installation in low resolution mode, enter
vgalo
at the prompt.
text
: If your video card is very
old and the graphical installation doesn't work at all, you can
always choose to install in text mode. Since all video cards can
display text, this is the “last resort” kind of
installation. However don't worry: it's unlikely that you will
need this option.
noauto
: In
some rare cases, your PC may appear to freeze or lock
up during the hardware detection phase. If that happens,
adding the word noauto
as a parameter
tells the installation program to bypass hardware
detection. Therefore you will need to manually specify
hardware parameters later in the installation process. You
can add the noauto
parameter to the
previous modes, so depending on your hardware you may have to
specify vgalo noauto
to perform a
low-resolution graphical installation without DrakX
performing a hardware scan.
kernel
options
: Most machines don't
require specific kernel options. Due to bugs in the design
or in the BIOS, there have been a few cases of
motherboards incorrectly reporting the amount of memory
installed. If you need to manually specify the amount of
RAM
installed in your PC, use the
mem=xxxM parameter. For example, to
start the installation in normal mode with a computer
containing 256 MB of memory, your command line
would look like linux
mem=256M