heres some of the things off the top of my head that I have problems with, I hardly ever use windows now so I would realy like to be ably to use linux for everything that i used to use windows for. so here it is, feel free to give links to help, but be specific about what to do in linux, im no guru, Thank you very much for all your time and help.

First off, music is my heart and soul(as much as we have them) and I can never get audiogalaxy(my downloading program, www.audiogalaxy.com) to work, it runs then I get my, prompt back and nothing ever dls, nothing ever works.

I have a HP keyboard, I guess it would be called an HP internet keyborad, anywyas, I want the two volume button to work on KDE, with Kmix. So that I can turn it up and down with thosae buttons if need be. Is that possible( everything possible with linux right? you just have to be a guru.)

I have a Sony digital camera, hooks up via USB, has standard sony memory card, how can I get that to work? So i can get the pictures off my mem stick and onto my hard drive.

I have read the Visor hot to so many times, I can recite it, Ive asked for help many times about htis also, and never can I get my Handspring visor deluxe to sync with linux(or do anything for that matter)

I have the hardest time installing anything, I have a big folder of RPMs and tar.zips just sitting on my HD and about 10% of them will install and work fopr me, hardly ever does a tarball work for me and just a little more often doeas an rpm do whats its supposed to do. I am an idiot or what? installing software is my biggest complaint with linux. There should be somehting out there that works, what is it?

again thank you for your time, heres the specs on my system:
i686 Red Hat 7.2, kernel 2.4.7-10, KDE 2.2-10

I will take a stab at your last complaint. What problems do you have when installing rpm's and tarballs?

RedHat Package Manager (RPM) is usually very good at installing, since it is installing precompiled binaries. A problem that people do have is that it complains about dependencies not being installed. There is no function in RPM yet to automatically detect and then download/install the dependencies, you have to do that. The error message is usually very clear about what else you need to d/l and install.

As far as tarballs (if they have a .tar.gz extension) use the following command to extract them:

tar xzvf filename .tar

It should then unpack the file as a subdirectory of your pwd. At that point, cd into the directory run the following commands:

./configure
make

And then as the root user run the following command:

make install

This should install the program into the correct location.

Let me know if this is anywhere on track with the problems you are having. I am not too familiar with anything else you mentioned, so I apologize.

Hope this helps!

Ryan

About AudioGalaxy for linux:

As far as I remember it was pretty straight forward to get it set up. I don't use it anymore so I can't check how I got it running. But as far as I remember it was pretty straightforward following the instructions in the README file. Just had to make a config file with your account name and password and let it run using that. I remember it writing a nice big log file explaining each step. So you might want to look there to see exactly how far it is getting. I always had some trouble connecting to the servers though since they seem to be overloaded very often.

For the keyboard:

Maybe reading this howto will help you to bind the keys to changing the volume
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Keyboa...ole-HOWTO.html

And for the rest I wouldn't know anything about them.

For HP Inet keyb.

http://www.warpedsystems.sk.ca/article.php?sid=475

For anything else, try

www.google.com

search for the gadget/device model number and Linux, example:

+"HP Internet keyboard" +linux

Most of the time, you'll find something.

With regards to the RPM & tarball installs, like some others have pointed out here, Software Manager will install most rpms for U BUT still have some way to go when it comes to dependency & conflicts resolution. BUT fear NOT for Apt Get has been ported for use in RPM based distros. There are other Apt Get like clones available as well e.g. Rpm-Get & GRAB, the latest versions of these apt get like clones should be available for download off i think what is the equivalent of Mandrake's Cooker i.e. Rawhide in Red Hat. U just need to configure your sources list in the right manner & essentially you will get NEAR Debian like installation of the RPMs & needed dependencies.

E.g. of what this sources.list for a RH 7.2 system may look like>>>
# Freshrpms from http://freshrpms.net/. Sometimes they replace
# RedHat RPMS, you may not want that.
rpm http://ftp.uninett.no/pub/linux/apt redhat/7.2/en/$(ARCH)/redhat os updates-os freshrpms
rpm-src http://ftp.uninett.no/pub/linux/apt redhat/7.2/en/$(ARCH)/redhat os updates-os freshrpms


Be SURE to READ the documentations, ALL of them.

As for the tarballs, well likewise problems can arise in the form of dependent libraries, files e.g. header files. Remember to go through the install logs for more information as to what the prob/s may be. Also sometimes the particular way a distro places certain files & the particularistic nature of certain of these applications u want to install e.g. particular demand for a certain version of the gcc compiler (although admittedly one can disable gcc checking BUT u'll need to know how e.g. --disable-gcc-checking) may result in very problematic installations e.g. installing High Performance Liquid theme & MPlayer on a Mandrake system can be quite a challenge for a newbie.

Learn how to pass options to ./configure part of a source tarball install e.g. --disable-gcc-checking, --prefix=/usr/local, --enable-gui, etc. Hope this helps.

I appreciate all the help everyone, as soon as I get back from work I will let you all know how things are going with it. Thank you - Thomas