Frustrated noob linux user... I NEED HELP WITH MY ONBOARD NIC

[Spyro]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I agree with you, Tbirdkid, I've had nothing but problems trying to set up Mandrake 9.1 on my PC for the past 5 days and this is supposed to be one of the most user friendly distros!

And I'm sure when you got your first PC and proceeded to install Windows everything worked without a hassle?

Mandrake has become a formidable beast to install during the last couple of releases. I had a horrible time trying to manually setup nic, video, and audio with mandrake, none of which had been successfully detected and auto-configured. It really is a hardware thing though, I've found that Mandrake works best on hardware that is pretty generic. Other than that, I wish you luck trying to setup your hardware using mandrake's hardware tools, most of which offer very little help in debugging a process. I spent four days trying to get mandrake installed on my systems and in the end I just gave up and installed debian, which worked just fine.

There are a few primary problems with mandrake. The initial setup is quite buggy and will usually get something wrong 3 out of five times. Mandrake's wizards aren't really working all that well in 9.1 and tend to cause more harm then good when you're messing around, while trying to get something to work. It's time-consuming to figure out someway of circumventing the wizards without breaking something. Finally, despite the fact that Mandrake has an extremely active USENET group, somethings are so screwed up that nobody can help you but yourself and google.

At a certain point I was wondering if Mandrake had some kind of experimental interface with the inner spirit of the computer that was allowing my PCs to take horrible vengeance on me for every keyboard I spilled water in, every hard drive I crashed, every pci card I cracked, and every handheld/casio databank that I've fried/washed/crushed/imploded. :/

 

[Mist]

Without distracting from Tbirdkids original thread, I must say that Mandrake installs without any problems whatsoever for me, in less than 30 minutes too.

The problem for me is what happens once I try to use it!!

I've cleaned out the partition and reinstalled it at least 9 times since Thursday and I can honestly without exaggeration say that Windows has never ever given me this much of a problem since I got my first PC when Windows 98 came out all those years ago.

Michael.

 

[Spyro]

I've cleaned out the partition and reinstalled it at least 9 times since Thursday and I can honestly without exaggeration say that Windows has never ever given me this much of a problem since I got my first PC when Windows 98 came out all those years ago.

Then try other distros , drake 9.1 is really a low one for mandrake as the installer and the post-install setup can be painful unless you have an "ideal" linux system. If you're having problems with Mandrake try Debian, Red Hat, Suse, Slackware, Gentoo, Peanut Linux, Knoppix, Lycoris, etc, etc, etc. In other words, don't get stuck, evolve. If you could be more descriptive about your problems then me and any of the other kind penguin lovers that frequent this area will be glad to assist.

 

[Mist]

Well, thanks for that. I tried Knoppix direct from the CD but I got the same problems.

I also subscribed to a Mandrake Usenet group today for help, but they were so snooty that I've already unsubscribed!!

What I'll do, if you and others don't mind, is I'll start a new topic tomorrow and I'll describe the problems that I'm having, that way we're not detracting from Tbirdkids thread.

Thanks for the offer, I appreciate this.

Michael.

 

[SpeedFreak03]

I recently switched (actually about 2 weeks ago) from Windows 2000 Pro to Mandrake Linux 9.1. I was lucky that all my hardware worked (even though I swapped a few little parts from another system to ensure compatibility ie network card, etc). It was quite a pain to set everything up, as I am also a complete n00b. It took me a weekend to do. But now that it is set up, and I found ways to do EVERYTHING i did in windows in linux! It is faster, more stable, and best off all free (except i donated lol). Right now, im installing Debian on my other box.

 

[Spyro]

Originally posted by: Mist
Well, thanks for that. I tried Knoppix direct from the CD but I got the same problems.

I also subscribed to a Mandrake Usenet group today for help, but they were so snooty that I've already unsubscribed!!

What I'll do, if you and others don't mind, is I'll start a new topic tomorrow and I'll describe the problems that I'm having, that way we're not detracting from Tbirdkids thread.

Thanks for the offer, I appreciate this.

Michael.

You're welcome Always glad to help, althoug I may not post in your until later. (Possibly a busy schedule tommorrow.)

Originally posted by: SpeedFreak03
I recently switched (actually about 2 weeks ago) from Windows 2000 Pro to Mandrake Linux 9.1. I was lucky that all my hardware worked (even though I swapped a few little parts from another system to ensure compatibility ie network card, etc). It was quite a pain to set everything up, as I am also a complete n00b. It took me a weekend to do. But now that it is set up, and I found ways to do EVERYTHING i did in windows in linux! It is faster, more stable, and best off all free (except i donated lol). Right now, im installing Debian on my other box.

Hey that's cool Mandrake can be a click, click, click type of install on some systems though. My main system didn't have any problems with mandrake at all and everything was up and running in 30 minutes, with no config whatsoever. (I got homesick again and switched it back to debian though).

 

[aluehrs]

I had problems booting off of my knoppix cd, so when it started I got to the help screen, then started it expert and was able to load it fine, otherwise it didn't work so you may wan't to try it, detected everything and works good, a great way to get used to linux without dual booting or getting a second hard drive.

 

[drag]

Linux sure can be frustrating at times, however I think it's worth it.

Don't forget that everyone else here went thru the exact same proccess of trial and error. If your frustrated, just take a break on it. It'll come to you eventually.

However, patching a kernel is kinda difficult since you don't know what to expect.

The nforce board is a pretty crappy board for linux, I made the mistake of buying a nforce2 board and I had a real pain trying to work with it, NVIDIA may provide drivers, but it's not the easiest thing in the world.

Here if you go to nvidia's website they have a driver specificaly for on board nic in nforce boards, goto their download page for drivers, and here is the documentation for it. Download it from windows and copy it to your linux partition in linux. Then install the RPM, or use the tarball (tar.gz) to install a custom module if you have a different or custom kernel installed.

read the documentation for the install, if you miss some step it may not work correctly. Read It!

A module is a bit of kernel code that can be loaded and unloaded from system's memory. It's Linux's version of a driver, you can control this using the lsmod, rmmod, insmode, modprobe commands.

Just relax, this stuff is suppose to be kinda fun. It's all about learning. It's not Mandrakes fault that it so hard, it's nvidia's. They made the liscencing for their drivers so that it is ILLEGAL for Mandrake to use them to allow people to simply get the drivers off of the install CD.

When people tell to run a command, open up a virtual terminal window and do it from the command line. Also a easy way to get to the command line is from hitting ctrl+alt and one of the F1 thru F6 buttons at the same time.

You can learn more about commands from using the "man" command. Man is for manual, so to see the manual for lsmod type in "man lsmod", this goes for most other commands to, you can even go "man man" for the manual for the man command.

The dmesg command is to display what sort of information that the kernel knows about your computer. Learn more about it from "man dmesg".

Now if you noticed that their is a lot of information in the man files that you won't understand, don't worry neither do anybody else, lots of it is just too specific for general use, but lots of times it gives you important clues to understanding commands and also has references to other commands that you may need to know in order to accomplish a specific task.

Unfortunatly you have to crawl before you can walk.

Go onto www.google.com (do a search for "linux newbie") and do lots of searches, the more you know about the problem the easier it will be to find the solution. If you have trouble with specific hardware, visit the manufactures website first and see if they support Linux at all, lots of times they will have at least links to places that work with linux hardware.

Also I like to goto The linux documentation project they have plenty of information about lots of stuff. Detailled howtos from how to set up a kernel, to how to develope custom drivers or what ever.

If you have a problem at this stage of the game, chances are so have a lot of people. Sometimes people get rude because they are tired from expaning themselves over and over again about the same things. Sometimes they are just jerks, so don't let it bother you.