Linux questions

[wildcardmy]

Im in my college on weekdays and return home on weekends.

 

At the college I have an AnthlonXP without internet. At home I have a P3 machine with 1mbps line. I prefer to thinker with the machine at the college as I spend more time there as compared to at home.

 

I am prepared to read, research and learn a lot. In short, I'm prepared to devote most of my time to better understand linux. The only problem is I do not know where to start. An outline from you would be very helpful.

 

Thank you.

[alexander]

Ok, here is how you really begin your journey (you will have to start on the weekend, because you need a broadband connection to download things...)

 

Ok, first you nave to look at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/index.xml

Now depending on where you will be installing linux (and i'd like to hope that you'd run it eventually on both your machines) you would want to open up one or another handbook (probably amd64 or x86 for most of the things you'll deal with) Now, there are detailed instructions on how to setup a Gentoo system, you can download gentoo 2005.0 live cd and install from there, but i recommend fetching all (both the image of portage and system) from the gentoo mirrors. The handbook will go through the entire installation, from a fresh drive to the final boot and some config. Now, if you get stuck, dont panic, because chances are that someone else had the same exact problem you might (not saying that you will have a problem, but it could just be a missunderstanding) be having, in that case if you go to http://www.gentoo.org, and go into forums, you might find an answer, if that doesnt work go to http://www.gentoo-wiki.com and try to find a wiki on what it is you are having problems with, if that doesnt work also try googling for it, and if all fails post on gentoo forums, theres almost 82 000 people there, so one is bound to answer (by the way, unlike some other distros these 82000 include gentoo developers who check in, so if there is something that is just going completely wrong, they will either know the problem, or go right to reproducing and fixing it :o )

 

ok, here is a hint at what you really want to install after you finish the basic system:

you want syslog_ng(added to your runlevel( check out rc-update)), xorg-x11 (your x server), your choice of box gui (blackbox/fluxbox), actually install gnome if you dont want to have to do something quick and not know a way to do it (for the beginning only, as you progress and evolve, you will ditch the bloatiness of big guis and use command line and fluxbox, but on your own time you want to run fluxbox (trust me, its a decently shiny gui)), ok you want alsa (drivers, lib, tools) for sound (dont forget to NOT include advanced linux sound system in your kernel) then you want vixie-cron, cups(for printing), gpdf(pdf viewer), mplayer and xine (for all your video and audio needs), feh (its awesome for picture viewing), gkrellm2 (its a cool graphical app for showing you the system resources, looks nice and is very helpful to monitor your cpu usage), gentoo artwork (wallpaper collection for gentoo, lots of fun stuff, if you want, i have a python script that will change your background every 5 minutes), aterm (not true transparency, but its cool, i'll show you hot to set it up and all), you want firefox, openoffice (package you want is xooffice-ximmian-bin, cuz you dont want it to compile for 10 hours straight do ya?), gimp... i quit here, i dont know what else you'd want on your system, thats where i think my basic needs will be fulfilled, but portage has hundreds of thousands of packages, so anything you need, any program that you see or hear about and many of the ones you've never heard before, are in there and are available in a matter of a command :)

 

ok, so that would be a start, from running your own real system, you will eventually be wanting to maximise performance, so you'd go and redo your system to a stage 1, fully custom, kernel that wouldnt have much built in, and bash, oh i forgot, you want bash-completion, and you need to find out and copy .bashrc to your user and root directories and uncomment the last line to have extended bash completion, telling you tab will become your best friend! your own defined commands in bash will help you out a lot, for example i dont need my nic driver running all the time, so i have an alias that will load my nic driver and bring up ethernet, and another alias to bring it down and unload the driver. You'd want to setup hotplugging, wireless, whatever, and it is all possible. Remember that you need to research to become better at using Linux to its true potential, if you have a decent graphics card on your computer, there is a whole world of 3d desktops(just for shows), 3d desktop switching, there's enligntenment 17(awesome desktop with multilayer scrolling backgrounds and endless possibilities), gaming (there's tonns of games for linux, wine, for not too performy win games (like sims and stuff), and cedega for stuff like HL2 and WW3 and Battlefield 1942.), and well, possibilities are endless...

 

P.S. you want to use Grub as your bootloader of choice, it may be a little harder to setup, but its better, trust me...

[pgrmdave]

okay, so, I tried to install Linux (Beatrix) on my home computer and failed miserably. I have a live cd, and on it, there is an option to install it to the harddrive. I know I want to have both Windows and Linux, so that I can use Linux for internet applications, and Windows for gaming. I reformatted, and partitioned my harddrive into two partitions, each about 20 gigs. I loaded Windows XP Prof. on one, and ran the live cd. When I tried to install linux, however, I end up with an error. I get the following message:

 

Error: Formatting of  failed. Some messages from mkfs.ext3:
Usage: mkfs.ext3 [-c|-t|-lfilename][-b block-size][-f fragment-size]
    [-i bytes-per-inode][-j][-J journal-options][-N number-of-inodes]
    [-m reserved-blocks-percentage][-o creator-os][-g blocks-per-group]
    [-L volume-label][-M last-mounted-directory][-O feature [,...]]
    [-r fs-revision][-R raid_opts][-qvSV] device [blocks-count]

 

So, for a while, I'm left with no internet connection (I don't have the drivers for my wireless card, so I have to connect from school), and half a hard drive with WinXP on it.

[alexander]

well, ok this is what you really want to do, when you partitioned your drive, did you specify what type of partition to create?

but anyways this is what you want to do, 1, download and burn either Knoppix or Gentoo Live, burn it, pop it in and reboot. boot into knoppix/gentoo live (if you are doing knoppix, on boot prompt do knoppix2, so you are dumped into command line instead of KDE) and try to figure out your unpartitioned space using cfdisk, do cfdisk /dev/hda (or b or c depending on the system (or sda if you got sata or scusi drives)). in the window should open a command line gui like thing telling you about all partitions on your drive (should be 2 20 gig ones) (by the way if you are going to follow these instructions, i am telling you how to prep you computer for gentoo install, although just about any linux can go on) ok, so for simplicity we'll do this, click on the nonwin partition and remove it, so you have your free space, then create a 50 meg primary 512m logical, and the rest in the last partition, logical too, take off the boot flag off of the win partition, and slap it on to the 50 meg one. write and exit. now you should know what is waht, so do:

mk2fs (/dev/hda whatever was the 50 meg partition)

mkswap (the 512 partition)

mk2fs -j (the rest patition)

swapon /dev/(whatever swap is)

 

if that works, you can go online and look at gentoo handbook, figure out the networking, then mount all your patitions and you are off on your own linux install (ps you probably want stage 3)

 

if that doesnt help, please post, i'll be interested as to what is up, and be glad to fix it :o