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Originally posted by bubaslubas:
I've installed Mandrake 8.1 again on my Wintel machine. This time (since I already knew how to bypass installation issues) the process went smoothly. Note: it recognized my new Pinnacle TV Tuner correctly and automatically ran XawTV. Excellent!
Now the pressure is on I guess, looks like you are giving it a serious try. I don't have a TV tuner but I was actually working on trying to get XawTV working with my USB 3Com Netcam today. I don't know why really, it was just sitting there not being used and I couldn't think of anything better to do.
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I've tried both window managers that come with Mandrake. Gnome is prettier, KDE works best.
Yeah, I think for people familiar with Windows KDE would probably be a little better (although they both are very similar). KDE is really coming along fast and I saw the screen shots for 3.0 and it looks like they are adding a lot more functionality.
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Still having trouble installing my HSP winmodem (I know, Linux doesn't recognize them, but I have some drivers written for it, problem is that there is something wrong in the installation process...by the time i insmod the drivers, Linux says they don't exist. Hope I can solve this in order to get online.)
Ouch, not just a modem, but a Winmodem (making a cross with my fingers). I didn't realize they even had drivers written for them. I just looked at the link you sent me and the installation instructions are pretty straightforward in the "README" file (and pretty common if installing from source code). Were you able to do steps 0 though 8? If you had a problem with any of the steps could you describe the problem you had? Make sure you have the development packages installed (Compiler, Kernel headers etc).
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and also having trouble with Nautilus... Doesn't open tar.gz files (the shell does it, but I hate command lines - used to do programming for MS-DOS, sick of it) and most rpm files need libraries I don't know where to get.
I didn't realize Nautilus wouldn't open tar.gz files but Konqueror (KDE's file manager/web browser) will open it for you (maybe that's why I use KDE). Actually I may not be the best one to consult on the graphical tools. I do almost everything from the command line mostly out of habit and because the command line way never changes. But that doesn't mean most things can't be done graphically. You should be able to load up konqueror even in Gnome, at least I can load Gnome apps from KDE.
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Indeed it is overwhelming for Windows/Mac users (I'm more on the second category), but it promises a lot.
Just wanted to ask a few questions, VoidMain:
I got started in UNIX back when I was a DOS/Win 3.0 user and I remember at first I had the same feelings and kept thinking UNIX seemed much harder. It didn't take a long time before the reverse became true. UNIX was harder because there was so much more to it. Once I got the basics I realized UNIX was much *easier* and more powerful. That's why I hope you don't give up and plug away at it for a little while. I still learn new tricks every day that make my life easier.
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-Does VMWare run programs like Freehand or Photoshop? I've never tried it because i haven't installed it yet.
VMWare will run virtually anything that Windows will run because you actually have to install Windows and the apps run under Windows. VMWare is a "Virtual Machine", not a Virtual Windows. You are basically emulating another computer with it's own processor, hard drive, memory, network card, CD-ROM, etc. You create the VMWare session, and you boot it. The first time you boot it after creating the session you will want your Windows CD in the CD-ROM and do a normal Windows installation just as if you were installing on a fresh computer. It's very slick. I didn't think something like that were possible until the day I downloaded the trial and saw it in action. I have had RedHat 7.2 running as the HOST OS and had a copy of Win2k, Win98, and two copies of Solaris x86 running on the same PC at the same time. All of them thought they were on their own hardware, and they all show up on my network as a different machine. If you put one of them in "Full Screen" mode you would never know that the other OSs are running in the background. Pretty slick. Now this requires a licensed copy of Windows of course. If you want to run win programs without running Windows, you will have to check into "Wine" which in my mind isn't ready for prime time or there is another one that is supposed to work pretty well, can't think of the name of it (Win4Lin?). VMWare would be the best but is the most expensive, and requires a lot of resources (wouldn't recommend it if you don't have at *least* 256MB of RAM).
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I'm thinking of buying the whole Mandrake Pack. Think that might ease up my Linux experience?
I also have SuSE 6.3, RedHat 7.2 and FreeBSD. Any of these are worth a try? I heard wonders from all of them, from people who were obviously biased.
I won't recommend one way or the other to *buy* anything. I personally try to do everything without spending a dime. I would rather only get 2 hours of sleep a night than spend $5. But that's just me. I think it's a good thing that RedHat/Mandrake/SuSE provide nice distributions to tie all the pieces together but *most* of the code that goes into their software is not done by those companies but by the free software and GNU programmers so I would rather download the ISO images and burn them myself. Make sure they keep up their end of the deal of keeping everything freely available. Actually I did buy a copy of RedHat 6.2 boxed set in the store once, why I don't know, had the cash, saw it sitting next to the Win98 box and decided to go for it like it would somehow hurt MS.
Each distro has their issues and I have stuck with RedHat since about 3.0 so it was a familiarity thing from there. It probably doesn't matter which distro you go with. Mandrake is probably best for Desktop users from what I've read. Debian is probably best for Servers. RedHat is probably somewhere in between.
Good luck!!
[ January 08, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
