Re: new guy has questions

[Gary <medmanks@earthlink.net>]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 04:41:07PM -0600 or thereabouts, Mike Choatie wrote:
>   Hello All,
>     I would first like to thank Steven Pritchard and Kara for all of the
> help they have given me over the phone.

They are great people who devote a lot of time to other people.. no
doubt about it. 

> 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.

Usually, Mandrake is really good about picking up all the things it
needs to install, and does it... We need to know what type of video card
you are using, and what is your monitor to begin with.  How do you have
your HD set up?  One partition for windows and one for Linux?  If you
card was found on install, but did not boot to a GUI, once you log in on
the command line, type in startx ... 
 
> 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.

Upgrading just through rpms is a bit tough, as there are dependency
issues.  RH has up2date which is like a Debian apt-get and if you use
(as root) up2date -u it will auto upgrade everything, or so they tell
me.... 

> 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.

As you become accustomed, you will find that you use more software, so
if you have the HD space, don't worry, this "ain't winders type of
bloat"

> 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?

I would not suggest a newbie building from scratch, as you might become
frustrated. To me, it would be much easier to install a good, distro, or
a good one for a newbie, i.e. Mandrake and take it for a spin first. 
I would clean your partition that you have set up for Linux, and
reinstall Mandrake from scratch, after telling it to re-partition that
particular partition.  Mandrake has several modes or types of install, a
network, workstation, or custom.  Choose workstation, or custom, so you
can manually adjust your new partition, and set your video, after it
probes for it..  If you have winders on your HD, don't worry about not
being able to get to it if you choose LILO as your boot loader, as it
will write to the MBR. You can always set it back to "normal" i.e. just
winders by putting in your w98 rescue disk and typing in fsck /mbr ...
this will reset your MBR back to windows only.  

Let us know what type of video card you have, etc. as above, so we can
go from there.  First we need to get your GUI up and running, then we
can tackle your sound.  It sounds like it installed a framebuffer
default instead of picking up your exact card. Also, what type of
machine are you installing to, processor, how much memory, etc..
-- 
Best regards,
Gary             


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