The Mageia Installer

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 Mageia's latest version.

[Tip] Tip

DrakX will work best if all of your hardware is connected to your computer and powered on during the installation. Printers, modems, scanners and joysticks are just a few examples of peripherals which DrakX can automatically detect and configure as Mageia is being installed.

The first screen you see offers to run the installation with special options if the standard mode was not suited for your hardware. So to begin with, let the installation start automatically with no options. If something goes wrong, see the section called “Installation Options”.

The Installation Process

When the installer starts, you will see a nice graphical interface (see Figure 3, “Choosing the Default Language”). On the left will be the various installation steps. The installation will occur in two phases: installation, then configuration. The list on the left displays all the steps. The current step is marked by a highlighted bullet.

Each step may present various screens. Surfing between those screens is made possible through the Next and Previous buttons. Additionally an Advanced 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!

[Tip] Tip

The Help button will display explanations concerning the current installation step.

Installation Options

If something goes wrong during the first installation attempt, pressing F1 at the welcome screen (see Figure 1, “Very First Installation Welcome Screen”) will open a help window (see Figure 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, “Choosing the Default Language”), you can try to run the installation in low resolution mode. This happens with certain types of video cards. With Mageia you are given a number of options to work around problems related to older hardware. To try the installation in low resolution mode, type 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 will tell the installation program to bypass hardware detection. With that option DrakX won't scan for hardware. Therefore you will need to manually specify hardware parameters later in the installation process. The noauto parameter can be added 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