Dapper Dan

I'm going to see if I can figure out how to scale down Morphix-lite to fit on my stick. What a great rescue distro! It saved me last night!

That's great news! Whatever works! Google is your best Linux friend! Whatever problem you have, you can almost always count on finding someone else who encountered and found an answer to the same problem. Yes, Morphix runs entirely from cd. After what I went through last night I would reccommend everyone have a copy on hand, if just as a resue cd. We run Morphix-Gnome 4.1 on my wife's laptop too and love it! Although you have Mdk 9.2 working, you don't have to download all the RH 8 cd's just the first three. You can get them here...

I personally love RH 9 and use it on my home machine. It is a really good and capable distro, plus you can add apt-get rpm which makes adding and configuring packages almost effortless. If putting RH on a laptop though, you might want to drop back to RH 8 as I understand 8 is better when configuring laptop wireless. There is little difference between 8 and 9 otherwise so I would go with 8 for the added configure abilities. You can also have apt-get rpm with 8 as well. Hate that for you about Windows! I really do think a download and trial of Morphix could save you a lot of time..

Neus, I'm afraid I wouldn't be the one who could tell you as I had a lot of trouble with Mdk 9.2 which is the sole reason I switched to Red Hat 9. Mdk 9.0 was a great release, but 9.1 and 9.2 gave me all kinds of problems that started with it giving me the same trouble it seems to be giving you. I couldn't get it to find a screen and had to run xf86config for the first time in my life, and still had problems after that. In the end, I decided it wasn't worth it. I know others here like Mdk 9.1 and 9.2 so I will defer to them to help you there.. Morphix is a really great distro! Just tonight it saved my ass as a rescue cd because I screwed around with my /boot/grub/grub.conf file! I dropped the Morphix cd into the beverage tray, mounted hda5 and fixed it in a matter of minutes! I had nothing else because my RH 9 install cd 1, which I could have used for rescue, got hosed somehow. Had it not been for that Morphix cd, I probably would be contemplating a re-install right about now... :x

Hmm, could be a problem with the firewall. Did you have one setup on install? Just to see, try going in the Mandrake Control Center and disable the firewall and try again. If you're still getting the same problem, then there are other issues here that I may have no knowledge of..

Try Morphix or Knoppix. Both are cd based distros that will allow you to test them on your laptop before committing to HD. If they find and configure your hardware satisfactorily, then use the built in installers to install to HD. More here...

When you say "often cannot connect" does that mean you sometimes are able to connect? Are you using high speed internet or 56k?

I would recommend RedHat 9 or Mandrake 9. Both are easy to install, (unless you run into hardware issues particular to your machine) and both come standard with "Gimp" an excellent imaging editing program, "XMMS" a solid and easy to use MP3 player, though you WILL have to install the XMMS-MP3 plugin, and either "Mozilla" or "Galeon" equally capable web browsers. You also can keep in touch with him via "Ximian-Evolution" or "KMail", 2 really good e-mail programs.

Are you using Mozilla?

Flonix makes a version of their distro specifically for usb stick but so far, I can only find the ISO in French and not English. Seems there should also be a way to boot usb from LILO or Grub...

If you know the name of the app, there should be a corosponding "start file" in /usr/bin that will start the application. Find that, and the name it goes by, then at a command prompt, type it in exactly as it is listed in /usr/bin press enter, and it should start.

I read about this awhile back. There are very strong opinions for an against having a swap space when you have a lot of ram depending of course on what apps you are running. I made install with just /boot, / and /home with no swap space and the increase in speed was, in my opinion, significant.

If you're not in X, but have a command prompt, become root and try typing: xdm [enter] or kdm [enter] And then sign in username and password. Until you get gdm figured out, those might at least get you into your desktop environment.

Quote: ..but if you really want to disable it the best way is probably the comment out the swap line in /etc/fstab. That'll prevent the system from mounting and activating it at boot time. I'll give that a try, thanks!

danleff, that's exactly what I'm working on! Mine is loaded with bbc rescue. How much of a hassel is it going to be to have one fire up at boot? None of my box's bios will boot usb although I understand some bios(s) have updates that will make it where you can. Got any pages I could look at on this? Have you been successfull? Thanks!

This brings up an interesting question I've not yet found an answer for. I am convinced (through experience) that if you have at least 512 ram, you don't really need a swap space. I discovered that with that much ram, your machine is quicker when forcing memory through the ram instead of a swap space. The last Linux install I did, I didn't create a swap space, and everything ran like lightening. Recently, I had to do a new install, and I created a swap space because one of my games needed it for an install, and everything is a little slower. Now that the game (Trespasser) is installed, is there an easy way to turn the swap space off so I can once again take advantage of my 512 ram?

If you're in a situation like we are, where you have no choice but to use certain windows programs, Win4Lin was a great solution for us. At my radio station, we only use Win4Lin for QuickbooksPro 2000 as we have not found a satisfactory Linux equivalent out there. Win4Lin will run most other Windows programs except games since there is no direct X support. Other than that, our office uses all Linux applications, Abiword, Gnumeric, Galeon, Evolution etc. and these apps rarely if ever crash. Theophile is right that Linux is not for everyone. If you want to run all Windows apps, then you should probably stick with Windows. There are certain games that work as well, if not better than under Windows, with Winex3. Half-Life runs almost perfectly under Winex, and Trespasser runs better under Winex in software than it does under Windows. I regularly play Team Fortress, and get far better pings playing as a Linux client than I ever got under Windows on the same box. For a fairly complete list of which games work how well under Winex, check out this list at Transgaming.com.

My mistake, sorry..

Try a different Linux browser and see if you still get the same error. Use Galeon or konqueror or Mozilla firebird.

nebulus, you seem to be taking offense at what binman wrote. Why? As a newbie, brjoon1021 may likely still be just a Windows user and would need to know how to do md5sum in Windows. Also, as a newbie, I doubt he would be familiar with Cygwin or UnxUtils. I had the impression that biman was just trying to be helpful like you were...

sodeysay, this may be of interest...

try this first: open a terminal and type: top and press enter see which processes are running, and which seem to be hogging resources. You can then go into Mandrake Control Center and turn those services off if you are sure you don't need them.

Mandrake 9.2 comes with a really good and easy to understand disk partitioner. It has worked well for me many times, and it will work on resizing NTFS. You should create a / partition, a swap partition, and I highly reccommend making a /home partition. Use EXT3 file system. Give it a try, I think it will work well for you, but PLEASE make sure you back up your valuable XP files to cdr or something before attempting any resizing or partitioning.

Are you dual booting? use Partition magic in Windows to do it.

Quote: I've tried the instructions there and I've still had no luck. I'm probably doing something very simple wrong. I just can't see what it is though. I had one of these I couldn't get working with the free "drivers" either, and I didn't like the idea of having to pay for the full drivers for it anyway. If you can't get it working to your satisfaction, I would suggest an external modem. I know some of you are going to think I work for Actiontec since I'm always suggesting their products. I know other companies make good 56k stuff that will work with Linux, but I know first hand most Actiontec modems do. The Actiontec v92 "call waiting" modem works flawlessly right out of the box.