danleff

Good guess, yes. I am a Nurse Administrator for NYS. Hardly a logical occupation for a compter geek, is it?

Let's see if the sys admin sees this. It can be some work, but if it is split up between users and reviewed by someone before faqs are submitted, it could be helpful. We seem to be repeating a lot of information. Not uncommon. I did admin work on a bios site in recent years and it is a lot of work for the sys admin to keep up and adding information. I did not do this myself, but it seems worthwhile. One suggestion is to ask new users to do searches, but many are truely newbies and do not realize that their problems may already reside on the board. Nor, do they always have the knowledge to do searches. I have a number of distros on my systems and it is hard keeping a database of answers and links.

Well said on the install information. What would be nice to have is a faq section for newbies to refer to when considering a distro. Something we could all refer them to for general considerations, install issues and the like, as well as common problems. I'm considering doing this on my own web page.

First, this PC is an older model and the issue is if mandrake 9.2 will run on it. If I am correct, 266 mhz processor? How much RAM is in the system? How large of a hard drive? Did you allow Mandrake to takeover the hard drive (use the entire hard drive) or a partition. I know that these systems have a small hard drive, but the issue is that there is also a small hidden partition that holds some configuration dtaa on it. If this gets wiped, then you may have some issues. Try logging on as user and see if startx works. I hope that this is just a test system and not your main system? If Mandrake will not run, I would suggest a live cd version of a distro. This way, you get to see if it will run off the cd. If it does, then you know that you can do a hard drive install. I also think that Admiral suggests Gentoo as an alternative, but also consider Mepis. The other option is Knoppix, which is based on Debian and may fair better on this older system. I had a laptop like this and Libranet (an older version) ran fairly well.

6 in 1 flash card reader? I remember the sys admin at Puppy Linux spoke about these multi-card readers. The issue is that Linux will only detect the first card port, whatever/whichever that one is. So depending on what the first slot is, then this will probably be the device that is detected. Apparently, single card readers fair much better.

Hey, this forum is for everybody! Not just for us two old foggies.

How about giving a little more information on your system specs? This most likely is a hardware issue, such as a setting for the video card or monitor resolution. In modern distros, you should not have to load startx. Nedding to do so usually means that something is amiss, generally with hardware. What distro are you using? Is this a laptop or desktop? What video card and monitor do you have? Did your video card and other hardware seem to get detected on install? For example, on some distros, install allows you to view the monitor settigs to see if they work. It gives you an example to try of the resolution and such to see if the config. works. Were there any other messages that proceeded the error that you gave that might give us a clue, such as "no usable ...configuration found." And finally, are you logging in as root or user when you tried running startx from console mode? I very common problem with this are the monitor settings. But let's see what you got first.

I thought that you were too old to play these games? Hey, just a note, I was just made a LAN admin. at my job site. This is, or course, a volunteer thing, with no extra pay. Looks like I will be applying some of the knowledge that I have picked up over the years. I bet no one would ever guess what my real job is! Now if I could just get them to switch to a Linux server...

OK, without starting a war, RedHat 9 is the most stable and tested. Of course, always check out if your hardware is supported, before venturing into a distro. This is a common problem, just like any OS. The newer the hardware, the less likely that it is compatible with older distros. This is a common source of confusion. People are frequently suprised that their hardware is not supported. So, if Redhat 9 (as an example - not necessarily accurate) was released in 2001 and your new nForce chipset motherboard was released in 2003 (well do the math). There is always a process of catch-up. In terms of the Linux licensing issue, most distros are GPL, meaning general public license. You can copy and distribute it freely. The exception is if a specific distro has a policy otherwise. For example, Lindows is a distro that you pay for. They do not distribute it freely (except lately as a promotion). You pay a fee for the license as an "insider" user. My disclaimer - read the licensing policy. See what it says. Does it say that it can be distributed freely? Putting it up on a website is another matter. For the free distros, you can burn as many copies that you like. I believe that there may be some restrictions on mirroring sites and distributing the distro on your web site. You may have heard about the SCO lawsuits, They claim to have a copywrite on the original linux code. Well, we will wait and see. There are too many volunteer code programmers that have been out there for many years working on Linux code for the public, I believe, to make this valid. Again, always read the distro's licensing policy. They will always tell you if the distro is GPL and can or can not be distributed freely. I see that malllion got in ahead of me. His comments are right on the money.

OK, I found the radeon drivers, but I have no idea how to install them. Let's see if anyone can assist n this regard. http://mirror.ati.com/support/drivers/li...&submit.y=0 Of course, you need to know what version of X is installed. Try typing in X -version at a command line and see what it returns. It should be a capital "X" and a space between the X and -version. Good find on the Intel drivers, but I believe that they are for an older version of X, so I don't know if they will work.

Bring me up to date, is this a new install of RedHat? When you login as root, you get the Gnome desktop OK? If so, did RedHat format the partition (did you choose to format the partition) when you switched distros, or just overwrite the partition with the RedHat install. This is an important distinction, as you should always choose to format (wipe clean) a partition, not try to overwrite it, uless this was a RedHat upgrade. If RedHat completed the install, the cd should be OK, but the issue may be if you wiped the partition clean (allowed RedHat to format the partiton, not just set the mount point to /) during the install. It sounds like the /home/user directory, probably where the Gnome user files and settings are stored, is messed up. This install is all on one partition, or did you choose multiple partitions during the install (allowed RedHat to make a /, as well as home, var... directories)?

Of course if Windows was preinstalled on the system, such as on a Dell or, in my case, an IBM Thinkpad, the default install is NTFS. My rescue/restore disks do not give an option to use vfat - so don't think about re-installing Windows unless you have a full copy of XP. Then you can elect which filesystem to use. Quote: Can you, from Linux, write files to fat32, and then copy from fat32 to paste into NTFS? I believe no write support really means that, no support. But, that is an interesting question. I'll have to try it and see what happens! I see what your getting at, in Windows you can write from vfat to NTFS.

15-20 gigs should be plenty. I never use more than 20 gigs and have never run out of room. The video. You need to decide which card that you are going to use. Look on the Mandrake site, once you know what the cards are exactly. You can use Windows XP's device manager to see what cards it identifies. Then look at the mandrake site and see if either is supported. If the ATI is supported only then you need to disable the onboard video in the bios. Mandrake gets confused trying to set the settings for two cards. Also make sure that you know what your monitor settings are. What type of monitor fo you have? The best senario is to install Mandrake with only one video card enabled, preferably the one that is listed as supported. Then do the install. Some of the ATI cards have real issues in Mandrake, especially the newest ones, so post what you have or check out the Mandrake site.

And from my experience, it should be PartitionMagic 8, which supports this much better.

have you tied logging in as user and not root? Then do the ctrl-alt-F7.

Take a look at the following; http://linuxquestions.org/questions/history/140191 What do you think?

Yep, the idea is that your burning software will burn the image to the cd, assuring that the iso files are prepared properly as a boot cd. This is the idea of the iso image burned as an image.

When you run defrag, note where the graphical display oulays the files. You will probably see some files still toward the end of the partition, or near the middle. The best solution if you do not have a resize partition utility, is to defrag again and see if the files are moved toward the left of the partition. But note, that defrag is not a resize utility. So, trying the half the partition will fail, as Mandrake will see files still placed too far into the partition to be safe. A much easier way to do this is with a resize partition utility, such as PartitionMagic, to resize the partition. This method will move the files safely and leave unformatted space, whee you can use Mandrake to make the new partitions needed, with the resulted empty space. Of course, you can also make a ext2 partition for the empty space with PartitionMagic and tell mandrake to use that space.

NTFs write support is really still experimental at this time, even in the 2.6 kernel series. Some distros have read support and will recognize NTFS filesystems, as read only. This is being actively worked on. It is much easier to make a vfat partiton and use it as a transfer partition for files that you will need to have available to both Windows and Linux.

I think that we need to take a step back... I assume that you made 2 cd's, one is the ISO file and one is the package that contains the package/extra application (package) files. When you made the ISO file, did you burn the image or just the iso file to the cd? In Nero, you need to choose file ---> burn image, not just burning the file to the cd, as a data file. When you go to the cd that you burned the iso file to, do you see the iso file only, or a bunch of files on the cd (which would be the decompressed/burned install files)? Another commom problem is burning the image at too fast of a speed. If you did choose to burn the image, you need to burn at a slower speed than the writer may be capable of, say 4X or 8X. This usually assures a good image burn, if the download is a good one. If you encountered trouble downloading (the process was interrupted and you tried to resume it) then the iso file could be bad.

Boy, this is not good! Did you uninstall OpenOffice with it's setup utility, or through synaptic? Also, look at the following thread; http://www.linuxcompatible.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1209

This is another example of newer is not always better! What processor do you have on the system? Did you do an upgrade install or fresh install of Mandrake 9.2?

OK, here you go, this should help. Ask any questions if you get confused. http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/getting-started-guide/s1-q-and-a-windows.html

My guess is that it's the nForce board that you have. Yes, get Fedora, it works on my nForce system. The older versions of each distro do not always know how to handle the nForce boards. It does sound like you may not have your system set to boot from the CDROM first in the bios? Is this why you made a floppy install disk? As Dapper Dan suggested, you can purchase the cd's cheap, if you can wait a week. I just bought SUSE-PRO from Linux CD, a 5 cd set for $15.97, shipping included. They have Fedora for $ 5.97; http://www.linuxcd.org/view_distro.php?&...6412ee296f088b6

The next time you start-up to the command line, try pressing ctrl + alt + F7.