Linux - Page 2

[QUOTE BY= jvanherk] (aside: vivelecanada runs quite happily on linux) Before doing anything like dual-booting, which I only recommend to someone with a good amount of technical knowledge, ... [/QUOTE] Jesse, I'm curious to know why you recommend not doing a dual-boot installation. There certainly may be good reasons for not doing so, I don't know and wouldn't challenge your knowledge or experience for a moment, but I did it with Red Hat 7.3 on the same hard drive that W98SE was on without knowing any better and didn't have any difficulty at all. Are your concerns about partitioning?

Well I can't even run KNOPPIX from a CD, so I'm not even going to try to install Linux

<a href="http://www-306.ibm.com/e-business/doc/content/lp/prodigy.html">Linux commercials:</a>

Kevin, I've tried the linux thing twice and run windows now. The reasons? -I had a winmodem driver issue with the first version of linux I installed a few years back (on a *REALLY* old computer, using Redhat 6.0 dual-boot with win98) -Since then, I ran Redhat 7.3 and Redhat 8.0 systems (both dual-boots along with XP). The instant messenger services were pretty much useless to me. Also, the damn thing can't run any windows-based games (ie: any games). And lastly, the leearning curve is fairly steep on linux. Instead of double-clicking to install, you need to compile programs for your own system. Maybe there's an easy way to do this, but my command-prompt method was annoying and a huge hassle. But don't let me lead you to believe that I think it's inferior. Even through my poor experiences I can see that this system has great power and control. It just hasn't developed a level of convenience that rivals windows (yet, to the best of my knowledge). Oh, and the main reason I'm not using linux right now is because my school comes out with new technologies for online courses, etc and instead of trying to keep up with expanding technology, I simply follow the instructions.

What would you ppl say is a good newb distribution? I heard Suse and Mandrake are easy and powerful, and good for newbs.

Man, how did I forget about Mandrake?? Kevin, I highly recommend Mandrake as one to go with if you take another shot at linux. Its hardware detection is pretty much the best out there. My top recommendations would be Mandrake and Knoppix(without the hard drive install), then SuSe and Red Hat.

They are all mostly the same. Mandrake has the advantage of being a community funded project and not American. SuSE is now owned by Novell.

If you're worried about Americans, try FreeBSD - but it's not for the faint of heart. Theo De Raad is a Calgarian (unless you don't like the west too). I hear the NSA has a top notch secure version too.

Funny cause I ended up with Mandrake. The guy who was willing to install Linux for me, ended up installing Mandrake instead of redhat.

Only one strange thing happens though. Although it work perfectly fine at his house once it was installed, he was able to work with Linux on my computer at his place. Now I'm at home and its doing the same thing Knoppix did when I tried to run it on my computer.

Its not displaying properly on my monitor at all. Its like its duplicating itself many times over across the screen. I can see the desktop is there, I can see my cursor also. But its almost impossible to do anything the way its displaying. I'm on windows XP for now until I can figure out what's up.

Why would it work fine at his place and not here? Does it matter that he uses some kind of network set up at his place for all his computers? I wouldn't think so, but thought I would ask. All I know is that it worked perfectly fine over at his place.

Oh and it does have some issues with NVIDIA video card. But it says it MAY not work with these video cards. I assume that if it worked o.k at his place, then my video card can't be the issue here.

Kevin

Actually It looks like it says here on this website that Mandrake 10 which I have, should work with NVIDIA. <a href="http://http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/10/">http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/10/</a> Could it have to do with my screen resolution settings or something in Mandrake? If that's the case I will probably have to run it on another monitor cause its too hard to work with Mandrake with the way its displaying on my desktop.

At your friend's house, you used a different monitor, right? Not all monitors are created equal, and it sounds like that is the difference...

i been researchin and Audigy2 sound cards are not supported wonderin if there was a way to get it.

Jesse,

Are you suggesting a new monitor would solve the problem?

Or maybe doing some changes to my monitor settings may help. I read though where someone else had this problem had to change the settings every time they went from windows to mandrake. It wouldn't save the settings. So I guess I may just need to get a new monitor.

Kevin

technically all you have to do is figure out what settings your monitor can deal with. What you're seeing is a problem with the horizontal and/or vertical refresh rates. When you installed linux, it saved the settings for whatever monitor you were using at the time. If that wasn't yours, and yours has somewhat different capabilities, then it'll be messed up.

Track down your monitor manual and find the technical specs on it. (alternately, email me what model/brand it is). Find the "Horizontal sync range" and the "vertical sync range", these should be something like 30-70 and 50-120. Let me know what these are, and email me the contents of /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.