This is my second venture into the world of linux, my first one didn't go very well because I had windows installed on raid and I couldn't get dual booting to work but now I've ditched raid and got dual booting I'm good to go.

Question 1

how do I go about mounting my other drives in SuSE? The drives show up in my computer but when I click on them it says
I figure I have to edit one of them to mount the drives but am unsure of which one to edit or what to put in. When I search for the files they are read only so do I have to su to get into them?

Question 2

I installed a couple of games but seem to be unable to play them, I receive this error message when I try
I'm sure my graphics card is ok (geforce 6800GT) so how would I go about enabling 3d support for my card? I believe this has to do with the drivers but when I tried to upgrade the driver from the nvidia site it made my screen all grey and I couldn't do anything. Is there a simple foolproof method of installing the driver?

Question 3

SuSE 9.3 comes with firefox 1.03 but in I want to upgrade it to 1.04, I downloaded firefox-1.0.4.installer.tar.gz now what do I do with it? I'm not sure how you install software from archives I've just used rpm before. Is there a "standard" area for installed programs to be put (like program files in windows)?

Question 4

I have another machine in the house running XP, how simple is it to get the two machines networked together? I gather from what I have read I need to use SAMBA, is this correct and how simple would you say it is to do?

Question 5

When I finally get my other drives mounted is it possible to copy the instll cd's to it and get SuSE to look in those directories when adding or removing things?

Sorry for all the questions but any help is much appreciated.

#1 /etc/fstab is where you set up your mountpoints it should have set these up for you when you installed suse try yast to set up your drives. (yast -> system -> partition set up) /etc/mtab lists mounted filesystems don't edit this file.

post you /etc/fstab file maybe I can help you sort it out

#2 nvivia has its own linux driver on the nvidia site it has a .run file extention get this file goto a virtual console (ctl+alt+f2) log in as root.
change to runlevel 3:
init 3

Run the installer:
sh NVIDIA-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.run

(not the actual file name you must be in the directory where you saved it and use the filename of the file you downloaded) edit your XF86Config or xorg.conf file ( I think suse uses xf86 by default) find the section that refers to your card and change the driver from "nv" to "nvidia" (the "nv" driver comes with suse but only works for 2d)

#3 a .tar.gz file is most likely a slackware package you could probably install it but just get a rpm for suse 9.3 of www.rpmseek.com(search for rpm and deb packages) or http://packman.links2linux.com(all suse stuff)

#4 if you want to share files with windows then samba is what you want to use but m$ tries very hard to make there products work only with eachother so you might have some problems (I prefer nfs but AFAIK it windows doesn't support it.) if you just want to share internet it shouldn't be any trouble.

#5 yes just copy each cd to a seperate directory then add them all in yast (yast -> change instalation source) and disable the cd source.

thanks for the help

#1

here's the contents of my fstab fileI have two drives I want to mount they are hdc1 (called Backup) and hdd2 (called Files) both us NTFS, I know linux in general has problems writing to NTFS but I just want to be able to access the files on the drives.

#2

for the driver I download thisit from here http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_d..._1.0-7174.html and save it to /home/alex/downloads then I (CTRL+ALT+F2) and login in as root and type init 3 then cd into the downloads directory and type sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-7174-pkg1.run then do I edit the xorg.conf flie while still logged in as root?

I searched for the xorg.conf file and had a look through it and found this so I just change the driver to "nvidia" and then reboot or how do I get back into the graphical interface from the console if I dont reboot?

#3

I had a look on the rpmseek.com site but the newest firefox they had is the one I have, is it really that much of a bother getting the .tar.gz to work? because I really want to download some extensions for firefox but it wont let me unless I update

#1 I don't have any ntfs drives but assuming that you have access to your c drive under linux add these to your fstab:

/dev/hdc1 /windows/Backup ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0
/dev/hdd2 /windows/Files ntfs ro,users,gid=users,umask=0002,nls=utf8 0 0

then you must make the 2 directories for the mountpoint:

mkdir /windows/Backup
mkdir /windows/Files

You want root to own these and users to be able to read them so make these as root then:

chmod 644 /windows/Backup
chmod 644 /windows/Files

You can use any directory names as long as they match your fstab. you can mount it with something like:

mount /dev/hdc1

#2 you must be root to edit this file you can go back to runlevel 5 like this:

init 5

after you edit this file you should reboot

#3 even if you get it installed and put the files in the right place it wont update your package DB and this will cause any package that depends on firefox to not install unless you force them and that can cause more problems. I found that konqueror was better integrated into kde so I uninstalled firefox.

In most distros installing from a tar.gz file shouldn't be a problem, though for some reason I think I read somewhere that Suse might not have the tools for installing tarbells, but give this a shot anyway.

Open a terminal in the directory where the file is stored and type:

gzip -d firefox-1.0.4.installer.tar.gz

And yes, Johnson brings up a good point about issues with the databases, etc.

and then type:

tar -xvf firefox-1.0.4.installer.tar

After the files are unzipped, you should be able to type:

./configure
make
make install

and install the package. If you get the files unzipped and the install doesn't work correctly, look for a read me file with more detailed instructions of how to install it.

Actually, the Firefox tarball doesn't have source code in it, so the configure, make, make install process won't work. You can find the installation instructions here

thanks for the replies,

through my own searches of the web I also came those installation instructions.

this ran the installer and I installed into /home/alex/programs/firefox is this a good place or is there some place like program files in windows where installed programs should go?

After I installed it (I cant believe I'm going to write this) I couldn't figure out how to run the program

That seems like a fairly suitable place as long as your the only user who wants to use Firefox. If not, well, you'll get a whole load of different opinions about where to install. I've got it in /usr/firefox, and no doubt many people would disagree with this choice

As to how to run it: /home/alex/programs/firefox/firefox

You can type that in a console, or add a desktop shortcut to it.

Cheers for the help, I managed to get 1.0.3 removed and am now using 1.0.4 with extensions

just so I don't have to ask again, it's roughly the same procedure for any other .tar.gz's I have?

Not usually, no I'm afraid. A tar.gz file (tarball) is just a set of compressed files (like a zip file in Windows). In some cases (like Firefox), this will be precompiled software. However, tarballs are very often used for distributing programs in source form. For these, then trey31357's instructions about configure, make and make install would (almost always) apply. You'll need to install various development packages to be able to do this - at the very least then gcc and make (and possibly others that I've forgotten about ).

If you've got a tarball containg sourcecode, there should be a README file with more detailed instructions. If you have problems with one specific program, then give some details (including output), and someone should be able to help you.

What would be the best method of editing the fstab file?

is there any way of using a non command driven text editor?

Congrats on doing the Firefox 1.0.4 upgrade. There is so much to learn in Linux. I do want to encourage you to learn your new best friend, google. I did the same thing today -- upgrade Firefox that is. Remember you have an rpm based OS to make installing/upgrading software fast and easy with an awesome tool YAST.

I googled: "Firefox 1.0.4 rpm for suse 9.3". Google led me to this repo: http://ftp.sh.cvut.cz/MIRRORS/suse/p...0.4/9.3-i386/. I downloaded/saved the Firefox rpm to my home directory. Pointed konqueror to the rpm file, left clicked on "Install Package with YAST". YAST opened, I typed my root password, and YAST went to work. Done. And YAST even places it correctly under "Internet" choices in the K-menu or Gnome menu.

Literally one minute and I can put extensions, themes, and mess around with it the same way as using the installer from the source pkg.

All that said, good for you, great job, welcome to Linux!

Assuming you're using KDE, then you can use Kate to edit the fstab. To do this, start up a console window and type kdesu kate /etc/fstab
You'll get a popup box asking you for the root password, and then you're away. All that kdesu does is lets you run any command as root from within KDE. I think there's a similar command for Gnome, but I don't remember it.

ironically enough I just found an rpm of this too , oh well I wouldn't have learned anything just by using the rpm although I think I'll remove the one I have and install it via the rpm

It should be noted that a .tar.gz file is simply a packaged, compressed file. It is the Linux way of saying .zip.
While it is true that these packages generally contain source code which should be compiled as described above, they could just as well contain a Python program, a shell script or, as is the case with ThunderBird, a program folder containing an executable file.