Originally posted by: zipper1
There is a site for Linux wheel mouse help.
Download times out says unavailable try again later.
I will...thanks for help
I'll try Debain
what?s the secret to installing downloaded rpm's and tar's? Does the procedure differ from distro to distro?
Thanks again for help
For a first time distro it depends on the personality of the user. If you want a computer just to use a computer and would like it to become as usefull as soon as possible and learn at your lesure, then I think Fedora is a good choice. Mandrake is good, but it lacks a good package manager (or at least support for a good package manager), also Suse is in the same boat.
Slackware is good for people that want to take a hands on approach and learn as much as quickly as possible. It has a basic package manager, and has some basic tools but lacks much of the functionality of a full blown package manager.
In the past one of the major things that sucked with most linux distros was how difficult for new people to learn how to install programs and get the OS configured to how they want.
Rpm's stand for redhat package management files. These are pre-compiled versions of programs that can be easily installed on your OS. They are commonly used by Distros who share a common ancestoral heratige with Redhat. Common ones are Suse, Mandrake, Redhat, and now Fedora (which is now the public version of Redhat OS that is created with the help of redhat engineers). Also a popular one for spanish (and portugese?) speaking areas like in South America is Conectiva. On top of that there dozens of distros created for specific schools, countries, and purposes.
These Redhat based ones are generally what is recommended for first time users. You use rpm tools and commands to install and manage the programs.
Then you have Gentoo, Debian, Slackware.
Slackware is the oldest distro still around. It's based on a no-frills approach, were it gives you the tools and the programs most usefull for most people and then just leave everything else out. It forgos many of the modern features of a distro for the sake of simplicity. It's going to be the most Unix-like Linux distro you can find, and has some oddball characteristics like BSD-style init (start-up) scripts, were most distros use varations of system-v style. (BSD was the BSD Unix OS which was a academic OS famous for it's open attitude and creation of the TCP/IP protocol and it's role in ArpaNet and the foundation of the internet, and System-V was the last major AT&T-based Unix Unix. It forms the basis for most modern commercial Unix operating systems, like HP-UX, AIX, and SCO openunix). Slackware uses tgz file format for packages, which is slightly confusing at first because it's the same filename used by tarballs (tar.gz or .tgz). Tarballs are the common format for most everything, it's Linux's equivalent to zip files.
Debian is another classical OS. It's best features is the Apt package manager and it's high quality package developement (and unfortunatly long turn around times for stable OSes.). With Apt you can update your OS, and install programs easily and quickly. You pick a program, do "apt-get install progname", and Apt finds it, downloads it, installs it, and sets up a basic configuration with it. Very nice. Debian is starting to get more popular, especially with seasoned Linux users.
Gentoo is a newer one that is based on high amounts of costomization based around portage. Portage is like apt that it is a package manager, the major difference is that instead of downloading programs you download the program's source code and compile it on the fly. THe upside is that you get only the features you want + Gentoo is always going to have the newest and the best features of any OS. The downside is that it takes forever to install anything if it takes freaking forever, plus with using newest of everything you get less reliability from using untested configurations.
Apt realy is cool. It makes installing and administrating a machine much simplier. Fedora is good because it combines the ease of use from the compilicated setups + the ability to install programs and their dependances easily. It does this by using one of 2 package managers, Apt (that has been ported to use rpm's instead of Debian's deb files) and Yum.
Source code is generally found in tarballs. These are files that have been created by using the tar command then compressed using gzip. You can uncompress them with the command "tar zxfv filename.tar.gz". They also use the .tgz ending for compliance with MS 8.3 filename restrictions. A variation of these is files compressed with bzip2. You can uncompress these with the command "tar jxfv filename.tar.bz2". Bzip2 has higher compression ratio, but takes much longer to run the compression. Gui apps included with the Gnome and KDE desktop managers have graphical tools to deal with these programs.
The standard way to build and install a program from source code is to untar it, cd into the new directory. And do this:
./configure
make
su #used to become superuser/administrator/root to have rights to install stuff outside your own home directory.
make install
However that's not a hard and fast rule. It's up to each programmer to set it up how they like and you have to read the README and Install files or other documentation to figure out the correct method. Generally programs installed this way go into the /usr/local/ directories, while programs installed thru official package managers and from packages end up in /usr/ and /usr/share. Also /opt is something you may see some times, especially in Gentoo and Redhat-descendant distros, lots of times Java stuff gets installed there as well as gnome and KDE apps.
Also to get your mouse working goto your /etc/X11/XF86Config or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (check your /var/log/XFree86.log files for the specific one if your unsure) and find the part of the file that controls the mouse behavior and change it to look similar to this:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2" #<--- important line for you
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" #<---- important line (adds detection for the number 4 and 5 buttons which are your scroll up and down.
EndSection
Lines marked #<--- important are ones to mess with, leave the other ones alone.
If you have more then one mouse configuration find the serverlayout setup and it will tell you:
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Default Screen"
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
InputDevice "Configured Mouse" #<----- mouse config used
EndSection
For the mouse: Option "Protocol" try "auto". Other drivers are "ImPS/2" for the optical mouse, and "PS/2" for regular mouse.
Other mouse protocols to try can include:
Auto, Microsoft, MouseSystems, MMSeries, Logitech, Mouse-
Man, MMHitTab, GlidePoint, IntelliMouse, ThinkingMouse,
AceCad, PS/2, ImPS/2, ExplorerPS/2, ThinkingMousePS/2,
MouseManPlusPS/2, GlidePointPS/2, NetMousePS/2,
NetScrollPS/2, BusMouse, SysMouse, WSMouse, USB, Xqueue.
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