new guy has questions

["Mike Choatie" <mchoatie@mcleodusa.net>]

  Hello All,
    I would first like to thank Steven Pritchard and Kara for all of the
help they have given me over the phone. I will be attending the newbie
meeting tommorow night and am excited about it and anxious to meet some
linux users. I really like linux and I like the ideals behind it but am
frustrated about some things and maybe some of you can help. I started off
using Mandrake 7.2 but most of my hardware was not supported at the time and
I gave up. After becoming tired of the same old winbloze and no challenge i
decided once again to give the penguin a try, and have decided this time I'm
not giving up. here are some of my recent problems and my new ideas and
goals that i could personally use some help with:

1) I d/l'ed mandrake 8.0 and i liked it, however, i had no sound, it found
my card but it wouldnt work even after running sndconfig.

2)I d/led Mandrake 8.1 with even bigger problems, no x-windows. My video
card was found during install but not on boot. Mandrake said to run
depmod -a and this failed. I ran XFdrake and installed unlisted card using
FBdev (maybe wrong but thats close to what its called) and i had video and
sound but the display was crummy. So I installed the NVIDIA drivers for that
distro and edited /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 as instructed rebooted the computer,
right back to square one again.

3)I d/l'ed redhat 7.2 (gee I'm glad I have dsl lol), installed it booted, up
and now im freezing up on logouts, reboots and shutdowns with obscure
warning about bad windows. So I upgraded my distro through rpm ( which i had
done every other time hoping for a miracle), manually upgraded the kernel,
and my video drivers. Same problem, gnome or kde didnt matter.

Conclusions drawn:

1) Linux is a fabulous operating system  but the distros are over bloated
with software installed that I would never use in a million years and I'm a
little nervous about adding and removing things during an install that I
have no knowledge of.

2)If I want to use and learn linux and have the kind of system I want I'm
gonna have to forgo the distro idea and build my own system, but with no
unix or programming experience I'm sure this will be difficult but at least
I will have what I want and will actually learn something along the way. I
have a pdf I d/l'ed called Linux From Scatch that gives detailed
instructions on building a linux system from scratch but is based on having
a distro installed already and i would rather just start with a clean set of
partitions and go from there, is this possible?

Thank you for your time and any input to these problems or ideas is greatly
appreciated. I have a desire to learn, use and support open source software
and hope to be well on that path. Any help is greatly appreciated and I look
forward to meeting every one at the meetings.


                                                           Sincerely,
                                                           Mike Choatie
                                                           Assumption Il.


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