Dapper Dan

Have you looked in /mnt ? I can't imagine Mandrake not mounting your drives already. You shouldn't have to be doing this manually. Open nautilus or konqueror, hit the up arror until it won't go anywhere else, then look for a file called "mnt." (Without the quotes, of course.)

Windows wants to be in the first part of your hard drive. If I were in your position, I'd download a copy of Knoppix, a live Linux OS that runs entirely from the cd, set your bios to boot cd before HD, and use Knoppix to mount and salvage your valuable XP files. Knoppix has a very intuitive and easy to use cd burner to burn those files with called K3B. Knoppix/K3B shouldn't have any trouble finding your CD burner. Once you've completed the salvage operation, I'd nuke and pave the hard drive, install XP, install Partition Magic. Do a thorough defrag on XP, then use PM to reduce your XP partition, and create an empty space on the last part of your HD for RH9. In that empty space, create a /boot partition. around 100 MB or so, a / partition, a swap partition 3 times the size of your RAM, and a /home partition. Format /boot, /, and /home with EXT3 file system. When this is completed, it should be a simple matter to install RH9 to those partitions. Be sure to chose to manually partition hard drive, and just asign your Linux partitions accordingly. You will not have to actually do any partitioning. RH will install Grub as the default boot loader which will allow you to navigate between XP and RH9 with ease. I hope this helps...

Not trying to be critical of you personally matrix3000k, but I personally don't approve of running pirated, or otherwise illegally obtained copies of games. If on the other hand, you purchase a legitimate copy of the game, you'll likely have less trouble getting it installed and playable. I have used cd cracks before, but ONLY in such instances where I've already purchased a Windows game or software that will not work under Linux without it. "Blue" Shift and "Gunman Chronicles" come to mind. Both would install, but kept begging for the cd even though it was in the tray and running. A crack enabled me to play these games I had already purchased. Why not go ahead and get a legitimate copy so you'll run into less difficulty?

I don't use a swap and my machine runs like greased lightening! (Don't try this unless you have at least 512 RAM! )

/boot = 100 MB /root = 10 GB /home = 10 GB

Hey, take a look at this...

This may be a dumb question, but are you trying to install straight from winex 3.3 or have you tried installing it with Point2Play? I didn't much like Point2Play, (mainly because I thought it was unnecessary) until I found out you had to use it to install Steam to play HL online mods like Counter Strike and Team Fortress. Steam would not install correctly without it. If you haven't done so, Install the latest Point2Play and see if that makes a difference. I have a hunch it might.

Hi intertim and welcome! The problem you're having is not unusual. We in the Linux community have to deal with the fact that most hardware manufacturers don't give a flying rip if their hardware works with another OS or not. Since 95% of computer users use Windows, they make their hardware work for Windows and that's it. If you have hardware that works with Linux, it's because somewhere, someone (or some folks) took the time to find a way to make that hardware work with Linux, and, to top it all off, they usually don't even get paid for it. So if you have hardware that is hard to configure with Linux, its really the manufacturers unwillingness to make modules for us, and that is one of the sacrifices we make in order to run a superior operating system. The good news is, hardware manufacturers are paying a lot more attention to us than they used to, and I believe the situation will continue to improve with time. I hope this helps ease your frustration. We've all felt it too at some point. You'll get it sorted out though...

Hi matrix3000k, and welcome! Are you unmounting the cd from the command line? Which desktop environment are you using? Gnome? Kde? other? If from the command line, try: eject /mnt/cdrom [enter] rather than unmounting it, then put the other cd in. If that doesn't work either, and you have the drive space, you could try copying the contents of all the cds into one folder and install from that. I would also recommend upgrading from Winex3.3 to the newest Cedega.

Hi envelope and welcome! Please believe I'm not trying to get down on you because I'm not. But what I'm getting from reading your post is that you want Linux to do everything you want, and in a Windows way, yet you don't seem to be willing to invest the time necessary to make it happen. It's kind of like saying you want to be a airplane pilot, but you don't want to invest the time necessary to learn how to be one. Having said that, Linux is a very versatile OS, and can be almost anything you want it to be. It is highly customizable, and extremely robust and reliable. You can have many, if not most of the things you want on your "wish list." With most distros, it's a simple matter of installing what you want, and/or uninstalling programs you don't need after installation. If you are willing to put in at least some time into learning Linux, I would recommend going with Mepis. It has a very intuitive interface, and has great hardware support, although you should research if your hardware is going to work with it, or take a "try it and see" approach. Mepis also gives you full access to the Debian repositories making available thousands of packages and applications that are installed with "apt-get," a very easy to use package manager. Linux can open up a world of versatility and freedom to you in what you're looking to do, but in order to get there, it will require you to have at least as much knowledge about it, as you obviously already do about Windows.

Be thankful that your modem works at all! Tell us what it is and maybe we can tweak it. To set up sound, look in your Mandrake Control center. There is a utility there to configure it. As root you can run: XFdrake [enter] To configure your video card, monitor and resolutions.

On that Xircom card, I had a look at one on Froogle, and I've had that same card working with 56k under Core one. You only have to configure a dialer like kppp. The only issue I had with it is that you have to snap it out, then back in when you go back on line as Fedora had to "find" it again. I'd be willing to bet you're good to go with the Xircom. We can get this sorted. Tell me exactly where you are with all of this right now. The more detail you give, the better we can help.

Ditto what danleff said. Anytime I install any distro onto a box short on RAM, I automatically go into text mode, if the distros default is to install with a pretty GUI. It took me a while to figure this out, after several issues such as those you mention.

If you have 512 RAM, you probably won't even need a swap. Before trying to do any reconfiguring, you may want to try disabling your swap space and see if you're OK. Chances are you'll actually notice an improvement in performance and speed as you are forcing everything through RAM. To unmount your swap, just go into the Mandrake Control Center, and choose "Mount Points." Then unmount your swap. Don't worry. The next time you reboot your swap will get re-mounted. If you are satisfied not using the swap, it's a simple matter to disable it.

Be aware though that fat32 can be a very unstable file system. Ext2, ext3, and rieserfs are far superior for reliability and robustness. I once made the mistake of keeping a half years programming logs in a partition formatted with fat32. When I tried transferring the files via ftp, they disappeared into thin air. I still haven't gotten over that one! A friend of mine was keeping several hundred Mp3s on a fat32 partition and lost them in the same way. If you are going to try Linux, use one of the above mentioned file systems for peace of mine if nothing else. As far as browsers go, Firefox is very good. Just curious, why would you not want to use Mozilla? It's very good, only uses more resources than Firefox and is not as fast.

On the Xircom, have a look at this... http://support.intel.com/support/network/xc/adapter/cbe/sb/CS-003258-prd853.htm I'm coming up empty on the Borland and the Bansia, though it seems to me that being an external modem, the bansia should work. Does it not?

If Fedora, there is a desktop switcher tool that you can use. Find it in your menu. Is it defaulting to another DE even though you have chosen KDE? [Edited by Dapper Dan on 2004-10-06 17:40:10]

Hi mjstoneo3 and welcome! According to this, you should be good to go as it uses the prism2 chipset. Did the install not find and configure your card? Are you using an 802.11g router that is supposed to be backward compatible to 802.11b? Did you run the network configurator yet? If not, open a terminal and "become root user" by going: su [enter] It will ask for you password. Enter it and press enter. Then go: system-config-network [enter] And use this utility to configure your card. Are you using encryption? turn it off from your router until you get the card configured. See if any of this helps, then check back and let us know where you are, (or aren't) I know you feel like a duck out of water right now, but as soon as you learn Linux, you'll increasingly feel like a duck out of water when using Windows...

Don't delete that swap partition, unless you are certain you won't be needing it. All you have to do is comment it out in /etc/fstab. I would keep it as it won't hurt anything to have it around, To edit your /etc/fstab, become root: su [enter] then: gedit /etc/fstab [enter] where you see the line pertaining to the swap, just put a "#" in front of it. Here's mine to give you an idea... Code: /dev/hda5 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1/dev/hda1 /boot ext3 user,acl 0 0/dev/hda7 /home reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2# /dev/hda6 swap swap pri=42 0 0devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0proc /proc proc defaults 0 0usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs noauto 0 0sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0/dev/cdrecorder /media/cdrecorder subfs fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0/dev/dvd /media/dvd subfs fs=cdfss,ro,procuid,nosuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0/dev/fd0 /media/floppy subfs fs=floppyfss,procuid,nodev,nosuid,sync 0 0/dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2 ext3 user,acl 1 2/dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3 ext3 user,acl 1 2

I presume XP is on hda1? You should use PM 8 to shrink up your Windows partition to whatever you think is right, AFTER you defrag XP. Then create a / partition, (10 gig is a gracious plenty), a swap, (2 gig should be plenty), and a /home partition, (again, 10 gig should be plenty.) Since you have the gigs, use as much as you want! PM will just have you create partitions with file systems which you can always reformat with Suse. The main thing is to get those partitions made with PM. Take note of how the partition table is laid out under PM, and which is hda1, hda2, hda5, hda6 and whatever. Then when you get to the Suse 9.1 install, be very patient, and really look over the partitioner as it is at first confusing. If you've never done this before, make certain you back up ALL your valuable Windows files! Really look over the Suse partion utility really good before commiting to anything, and make certain you have everything right. Suse is a little tough for new users, but is a really good and well rounded distro once it's up and running. Read the documentation on the Suse website about the partitioning utility, and be very familiar with it first. Good Luck!

Have you installed it and let kudzu find it? If not, you may want to try that as Fedora 2 may already have the "driver" for it built in. Then it would just be a case of running: system-config-network [enter] to configure it. If not, you can pick up the driver here... http://support.dlink.com/faq/view.asp?prod_id=357 I'm not sure by which "name" this module would go under, but I think you'd have to do as root after it is installed: /sbin/modprobe nameofmodule [enter] To load it up.

Dumdideldum you're on the right track. I just installed Suse Professional 9.1 and have learned much! I was having a problem running nautilus or konqueror as root, and had a dickens of a time trying to find out why I couldn't do this like with every other distro I've used. Turns out, for security reasons, Suse doesn't like to pass some permission to users who simply "su", but prefers one to actually become root as you mention. This was also true for the dispaly of each of the above mentioned programs. To truly run as root in Suse, you have to go: sux -l root [enter] Then you can run those programs as root with ease.

OK, it makes sense now. It appears that you have done everything right as far as burning the ISOs go. As far as I know, you cannot install Linux to an NTFS formatted partition. What program did you use to do this formatting? If Partition Magic, we can use it to our advantage. You should format the partition you are installing Linux to as ext3. We can do this with a partitioning utility, like partition magic, or you can do it with the RedHat partitioning utility. You have 2 hard drives each with 60 gig? Or one 120 drive with two partitions? If one, with two 60 gig partitions and 512 ram, I would just install a root partition, a swap and a home partition. Then after you're up and running, I'd disable the swap, (easy to do), since you really don't need it. Not having one will let your ram really go to work for you which will make your box faster. I have 512 ram too and don't use a swap. Do you have a Windows partitioning program or will we need to do it with the one on the RH cd?

taeuler, thanks for letting us know! Have you also checked out Dosbox? I had a number of Dos games working with it at one time...

DanJo welcome! You're just the kind of person that we like to help! First, when you say it asks for the RH install disk, does that mean you made a boot floppy to get the process started with? If booting from the CDs, is it possible you mislabled the disks and might have put disk 2 or 3 in instead of disk 1? Which burning program did you use? At what speed did you burn it? Did you check the file size of the ISOs using md5sum check? If you don't know the answer to some of these, just say so and I'll explain further...