Howdy,
I decided to give a go at building my own system. I got a bunch of expensive hardware, which left no $$ left for software.
I actually set out to learn Linux before I ran out of money.
Freedom.

Well, I got a few issues with trying to get the devices working properly,
I installed Red-Hat 8(our library has the book, not 9, and I can only boot from dvd/cd drive) and am going to eventually move to slackware once a better understanding comes about.
Thats where I need your(linux experts) help.

A few of my devices are not working or are not maximized.

I discovered the Command Shell, and am slowly learning to work with it.
First off, no sound comes out the speakers. I don't have a sound card,
But I'm quite sure my nForce2 chipset and biostar MB have some sort of onboard support.
I have a stack of books, and one of them said to run "sndconfig".
Which I did and got a bunch of cryptic error messages.
Is there a command to configure it correctly? Do I download and install a driver? How would I install a driver anyway!?
I discovered Modules briefly last night.

Next, I have a fireGL z1 video card, and would like to maximize it's capability instead of a default generic setting. I saw drivers on the ATI website, but I have no CD burner at work(where my net connection is)
I may just buy a floppy drive, but I have a zip-100 at home.
I haven't even considered trying to figure out how to get that old thing up and running yet.
any suggestions are helpful.

And lastly, I have a Digital Research DVD+RW/+R drive.
I went to their site and they have no Linux drivers!!
Is there a way to still get that thing to work?
Right now it is recognized as a CD-Rom device(I think) because it appears to run CD's.
It'd be nice if my speakers were working so I could actually listen to those CD's.
It would be even better to watch and burn DVD's.
My buddy rented "Triplets of Belleville" and I want a personal copy.
I would also like copies of my faves: Scarface, Casino, and Gladiator.
If anyone has any suggestions to better movies; you are incorrect.

So, I work at the library, where all the books are thorough, but old (in computer hardware years), and I am taking a stack home tonight. My intellect is limited along with my comprehension. ahem.
Seeing as to how this project has went so far, I expect to make a small amount of progress.

I need help.
My computer friends are "user friendly" computer friends.
My technical knowledge is small but growing, and hungry.
Once I get an extra $200 then I'll get Windows XP. *cough*

Somebody out there knows how to help. Please do so if you have any suggestions.
Gracias.


books. check'em out.

well I can tell you right now that half of your problems could be solved by updateing your redhat distro. I'm not a distro man myself, but I know from experiance that it's just easier to and (in the long run) better to upgrade your distro than to try to get all of your drivers to play nice with it.
If you don't want to update your distro, at least get a new kernel (this will unfourtunatly break a lot of your programs) but unless you get a newer kernel you will not be able to compile the modules (drivers) for your hardware.

There is no drivers for CD-ROM drives. For your chipset, go to nvidia site and download the drivers. I like to use tar or tgz files. In your case you can use rpm which are fine for now. To play movies with minimal problems you can use mplayer.

You can use a USB thumb drive (aka pen drive, cigar drive, stick drive) if your library has a USB drive and its enabled. ZIP drives can give you a lot of problems and in LINUX its confusing to mount it because IOMEGA uses a different partition scheme.

IMO, Mandrake is better showing what it does than Redhat. Lets say you are formatting or mounting a drive and you are using diskdrake. If you load up a terminal and type ps ax while diskdrake is formating a drive. You will see what diskdrake is using. It uses normal tools like fdisk and mkfs. Redhat uses its own tools that you do not know what is it doing. Plus Redhat complains when it has found new hardware. Mandrake does not care if you have taken hardware out or put new hardware in.

Free advice - consider it worth what you paid for it.

Slackware 9.1 is a much more mature distro than RH8 - or RH9 - or Fedora Core. It's been
around for almost 11 years. Slack uses the BSD init style, whereas RH uses their own brand of SysV.

So, to quote some old hackers who are much more knowledgable than I, if you use RH, you'll learn RH.
If you use Slackware, you'll learn Linux. And I think Slack will be more up-to-date on your hardware
than RH; plus the Slack forum (from my experience) has much more experienced users.

Having tried three Linux distros, may I highly recommend:
Slackware
Get Slack
Slackware Linux Essentials (Slack book)
Slackware Mirrors
Download Slackware 9.1 d1 and d2, burn those iso images to CD, and install. In the long
run you'll be glad you did.

QUOTE]Free advice - consider it worth what you paid for it.[/QUOTE]

well this is true but seeing as most distros are free to download then u can only go with which free distro u wish to try out.
IMO I would take ur probs one step at a time...sort out the probs that are top of the list and if they are not really necessary at the time then work with what u have and then when u have read all the info re what ur `top of the list prob ` is then take it step by step ....dont try to solve all ur problems inone fell swoop....remember its not windows and that ur trying to get to grips with a whole new os (world) there are plenty of turorials on plenty of forums and also google is a big help....good luck

Great advice! My biggest headaches have been trying to get all of my hardware configured
properly in *nix, and finding the software replacements. Rome wasn't built in a day...