HD Install Preperation
For normal use we recommend raiserfs or ext3. Raiserfs is the default file system for Joatha and is well maintained.
Before installation please remove all usb-sticks, cameras, etc . Installation to USB Devices requires additional steps. You can edit the installer file: ~/.Joathaconf, and thereby use a different filesystem or spread your installation over different partitions.For example a seperate /home.
It is highly recommended that you have a separate data partition. The benefits in terms of disaster recovery, stability of your data are unmeasurable.
Therefore your $HOME becomes a place where basic application configurations are kept. or to put it another way, a container for applications to store their settings.
On PC's with less than 512 mb ram you must have a swap-partition. The size should not be less than 128 mb (cfdisk-output should not be trusted either as it calculates with a 10-base), more than 1 GB swap is seldom reasonable.
Please see: Partitioning your HD
ALWAYS BACK-UP YOUR DATA including your bookmarks and emails!
Installation to the hard drive is much more comfortable and lots faster than running a system off CD.
First of all, you need to set your boot order in the Bios to CD-ROM. With most computers you can get to the Bios-setup by pressing [del] key while booting (with some BIOS-Versions you can simply choose the boot device while booting, with AMI-BIOS, e.g., with F11 or F8).
Joatha should boot up now in most cases. If that's not the case, you can use Boot-options, (called cheatcodes) which can be issued in the boot manager. Using boot parameters (e.g. for screen resolution or language selection like lang=ar or lang=en ) can save lots of time with the post-install configuration. Please see Cheatcodes and VGA Resolutions
So, now that you are running the live-cd you can verify if all your hardware is fully recognized. The network Internet connection can be comfortably set up from the Joatha menu. For WIFI/WLAN please read this
The Joatha-Installer
1. The Installer is started from the Kmenu> Advanced Settings>Joatha installer, or via the konsole using:
sudo knxinstaller
2. After reading (and understanding) the warning text we move on to choosing a partition.
Now choose where the installation is supposed to go to and we establish the mount points. Partitions for which we establish no mount point are mounted by the installer Here you have to select the root partition ("/") for your Joatha installation. It is at this moment you can also choose to create a data partition.
Have you backed up your data?
If you haven't partitioned your harddrive yet, click the start-part-manager button, Kmenu> Systen > Gparted or have a look at Partitioning your HD and Partitioning your HD using Gparted You may also start them from the konsole/terminal
su gparted
or
su cfdisk
3. As a boot manager Joatha uses GRUB, therfore install Grub to MBR! If you make a different choice here, you should know what you are doing. Grub recognizes other installed OS's (e.g. Windows) and adds them to the boot menu.
4. On we go with user, his/her password and the root-password (remember those!). Please don't choose too easily-guessed passwords. Whomever wants to add other users can do so after installation with the KDE-Tool kuser
5. Now choose the name of the Installation (you can name it anything you wish, provided that the 'Hostname: The hostname should consist of letters (and numbers) only and it must not begin with a number'.
6. This query is the last chance to check the adjustments you made. Read through it again carefully! The whole process takes, depending on your system, from 5 -60 min. (with special bootoptions it can be even faster).
The other menu-items are for experienced linux-users, who want to write their special changes to the config-file (~/.Joathaconf) or have a special partitioning scheme on their hard drive that would be rejected by the automatic check of the installer.
If the progress bar hangs in one place for a while, don't abort, just give it some time.
Reboot. Take the CD out of the tray. Finished! Now reboot to your new HD Install.
First Bootup
After booting up for the first time you will discover that Joatha has forgotten its network-configuration. So you have to reconfigure your network (Wlan, Modem, ISDN,...). So you must reactivate it as explained in the Internet and Networking section.
A console tip when hard disk installed If you need root rights to accomplish any task, open a terminal and enter:
sux