Help Required: Linux for n00b's!!!

[Seeruk]

1. Anyone know a good site with a sort of in a nutshell guide to linux? I can find a zillion highly detailed tech and configuration sites... but before I get onto them I need a broader overview of things like the kernel and root accounts etc.

2. I installed SUSE 9.2 last night on a dual boot and all was quite good except it hasnt set anything up in the boot partition? The only way I can boot into SUSE is by having the DVD in and choosing to boot from hard disk? I have WinXP on disk 1 and then Suse on a second hard disk.

3. Finally - I tried to install the ATI drivers for my X800XT and now it cant load kde(?). The most pertinent thing I could see in the log was something about "$DISPLAY is not set"

Cheers for all assistance in advance.... it's fun being a n00b again

 

[Seeruk]

And another question that has arisen...

Anyone know of a way to get the Belkin Pre-N PCI (though its really a PCMIA card in a PCI bracket!) Wireless NIC running? There are no drivers from Belkin (nor any in the pipeline its seems :/). It seems like there may be some sort of generic drivers for 801b/g cards that could get it going but I can't find details of them anywhere?

 

[Nothinman]

1. Anyone know a good site with a sort of in a nutshell guide to linux? I can find a zillion highly detailed tech and configuration sites... but before I get onto them I need a broader overview of things like the kernel and root accounts etc.

I don't know of any sites like that off the top of my head, usually I'm looking for the answer to a specific question these days. Maybe drag will come by and type you out a few pages of intro =)

2. I installed SUSE 9.2 last night on a dual boot and all was quite good except it hasnt set anything up in the boot partition? The only way I can boot into SUSE is by having the DVD in and choosing to boot from hard disk? I have WinXP on disk 1 and then Suse on a second hard disk.

Chances are your NT system drive is NTFS anyway, so Linux can't modify the NT bootloader. There are howtos around that detail how to add Linux to that or you could have gone the other route and install the Linux bootloader into your MBR and have it present the menu of which OS to boot.

3. Finally - I tried to install the ATI drivers for my X800XT and now it cant load kde(?). The most pertinent thing I could see in the log was something about "$DISPLAY is not set"

After the display manager fails a few times, I assume it'll stop restarting itself after ~5 tries, hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 and login as root. Take a look in /var/log/xorg.log (not sure what X.org calls it's log file) or /var/log/XFree86.0.log.

Anyone know of a way to get the Belkin Pre-N PCI (though its really a PCMIA card in a PCI bracket!) Wireless NIC running? There are no drivers from Belkin (nor any in the pipeline its seems :/). It seems like there may be some sort of generic drivers for 801b/g cards that could get it going but I can't find details of them anywhere?

Without the chipset the card uses it's impossible to know if it will work or not. A lot of manufactureres will even vary the chipset within the same model making it even harder to figure out what you need to use to get the thing working. If you can't find the chipset I wouldn't get my hopes up about that card. You might be able to use ndiswrapper to use the Windows drivers on Linux, but that's a hack and I wouldn't expect it to work forever. Personally I would return the thing and get one from a manufacturer that actually supports Linux.

 

[Seeruk]

Hey thanks for the reply and I know I'm a little slow to get back.

In the end I thought screw-it... 16 hours of mucking about and no further with the display drivers. Seeing as how gaming is pretty important to me in my switch to linux... I did a lot of digging and found that Ubuntu was pretty widely reccomended for the gaming side so whacked that on instead.

Gotta say Ubuntu seems much better, not as bloated for a start (fits on a CD whereas the SUSE dist is 3.5gb) and just seems to have the important stuff (not sure where the hell the other 3gb comes from in SUSE!). I have got cedega on and am currently fiddling with that to use on the gaming front, I love Synaptic, so far I like Ubuntu.

So far I have been pretty succeessful - had the ATI drivers installed in 10 minutes flat, Audigy 2ZS is working, Gnome is a much cleaner GUI, but of course (as I am beginning to realise is the norm ) a whole different set of problems have arisen.

I have left the WLAN out for now and am using the mobo's wired NIC for internet, but internet browsing is soooooooooooo slow. I have edited the resolv.conf to use a couple of public DNS servers instead of my router as suggested, have disabled IPV6 in FF along with some other tweaks, but still there are like 30 second delays accessing a site while it looks the domain up.

There are other issues but this is the prime one right now as it's making my search for solutions for the other problems very time consuming and frustrating!!!

Any ideas?

 

[bersl2]

Originally posted by: Seeruk
Hey thanks for the reply and I know I'm a little slow to get back.

In the end I thought screw-it... 16 hours of mucking about and no further with the display drivers. Seeing as how gaming is pretty important to me in my switch to linux... I did a lot of digging and found that Ubuntu was pretty widely reccomended for the gaming side so whacked that on instead.

Gotta say Ubuntu seems much better, not as bloated for a start (fits on a CD whereas the SUSE dist is 3.5gb) and just seems to have the important stuff (not sure where the hell the other 3gb comes from in SUSE!). I have got cedega on and am currently fiddling with that to use on the gaming front, I love Synaptic, so far I like Ubuntu.

So far I have been pretty succeessful - had the ATI drivers installed in 10 minutes flat, Audigy 2ZS is working, Gnome is a much cleaner GUI, but of course (as I am beginning to realise is the norm ) a whole different set of problems have arisen.

I have left the WLAN out for now and am using the mobo's wired NIC for internet, but internet browsing is soooooooooooo slow. I have edited the resolv.conf to use a couple of public DNS servers instead of my router as suggested, have disabled IPV6 in FF along with some other tweaks, but still there are like 30 second delays accessing a site while it looks the domain up.

There are other issues but this is the prime one right now as it's making my search for solutions for the other problems very time consuming and frustrating!!!

Any ideas?

Ping or traceroute those nameservers and some sites. Just make sure that it's not them.

 

[Seeruk]

I already had a look at traceroute and its just the resolving xxx.yyyyyyy.com thats the delay... once resolved its super fast.

One thing that I have done that has brought the delay down to maybe 10-15 seconds is added loopback 127.0.0.1 as the 1st lookup thus using myself as a dns cache.

Looking through dmesg I noted it complains in there that my router isnt ipv6... tbh I just dont want ipv6!!! Saw somewhere you can disable it in the kernel so will give that a try later today

At least its keeping me entertained whilst waiting for BF2 this weekend \o/