Post Installation questions

[bungalowbob 0]

I have finally (after 3 weeks) gotten Mandrake 10.1 community installed and working. First question: how do I increase the size of the type in open office for "file" "edit" "view" "insert" etc? The rest of the program works OK but I need a magnifying glass to read the selections. Second question: with this distro I got 5 cd's, it only used 2 for the install, what are the others for? Third question: do I have to go to "root" in order to shut the machine off? I know about "halt", does it work for user as well? As complicated as this is, it's no wonder Bill Gates is rich!

[blackpage 0]

greetings bungalowbob

 

Last things first: I can still remember my cursing when I first tried to get some Linux-distros up and running a few years back. You are right, the learning curve is sometimes a hard one, but you need to know that you will be rewarded with an OS and free apps that surpass anything that has made Billy "The Squid" Gates rich in both, stability and security. So if you think you're at your wits end, just come here, ask your question, and be sure to get help if it's at all possible

 

OO fonts

Open the "Tools"-menu and go to "Options -> View". There you should see a field labled "Scale" that probably is set to "100%". Blow this up to whatever size you want your GUI fonts to be.

 

If you are interested in the reasons as to why the fonts are displayed so weird: The combination of a monitor's size and the resolution it's running at results in a so called "display dpi"-value (dots-per-inch). Not always is this dpi-value computed and set properly at installation time. You can check what MDK10.1 thought your dpi-value was by taking a look in the system configurator (Mandrake Control Panel) or by peeking into the various files whre this value is stored (e.g. [PATH_TO_KDE_CONF]/kde3/kdm/kdmrc).

 

You might want to check these dpi-settings. Take a ruler, measure the width of the displayed image on the monitor and devide the value of the horizontal resolution you are using with that number. Example: You are using a resolution of 1024x768, the displayed image on the screen is 13.5 inches wide, so the proper dpi value would be "1024 / 13.5 = 75.85" which rounds to "75dpi".

 

Purpose of the remaining MDK CDs

Well, that's simple: Those are stuffed with software-goodies that you can install. Mandrake - as any other distro - comes with an overwhelming number of applications, tools, GUIs and whatnot. You will need those CDs once you want to install some software that you didn't pick during setup. So take good care of the CDs.

 

"halt"-ing the machine

That's of course a security thing, and it's generally a good idea to not let users shut down a machine willy-nilly whenever they want. To make things not too hard for you, you can check the internet about how to set up e.g the "/etc/sudoers"-file. This file stores infos about superuser-priviledges that are granted to certain users. You can also set there if this certain user has to enter the root password for a priviledged command. Put your user-name in there (read up o the "sudoers"-file on the net) and you will be able to stop your machine e.g. by typing "sudo halt".

 

hope this helps