Frustrated with Linux FC3
 

I've been using FC3 for over a month now and I'm feeling like giving up. I can get the mplayer plugin working in Firefox but can't get any sound. I can't get YUM working but have managed to get some stuff installed with APT. My repositories in APT don't seem to be working right. They won't let me install the codecs for mplayer or the skins for XMMS. Most frustrating is my USB mouse freezes spontaneously for no reason every so often and I have to unplug it and plug it back in to get it working again. That along with the fact that I just discovered my CD player doesn't work. There's nothing wrong with the player as it works when I boot into WinXP however Linux keeps throwing a "can't read superblock" error when I try to mount it. Each one of my problems seems to be common as I scoured Google for answers but every where I google I get inconclusive results. Not one search has turned up a "this is how to fix that problem" answer that worked for me. If anyone is daring enough to grab any of the aforementioned issues and explain it I'd be most appreciative. Help!!!!

Kind Regards,
Cliff

I cant help you with FC specific problems, but Ill try to answer the other problems. And remember, if the nice installer tools arnt working for you, you can allways install from sources, like it was meant to be.. (;

The mouse problem does realy sound frustrating.. Does your FC use XFree or Xorg? Have you went thru the xorgconfig / Xfree similar, or just put up the mouse with graphical tools? It sounds like wither a configuration problem, or a general usb problem.. imho linux usb support isnt realy good yet.. A kernel upgrade might help..

The CD issue is a pretty common problem for beginners. You finally get used to the idea that you have to mount cd-roms to use them, and then suddenly your CD:s just wont mount.. The thing is, music cd:s work without mounting.. actually, thats the only way they work.. (; So, just insert the CD, and launch some music application (a dedicated cd player is a sure bet, but for eg. xmms has a plugin for cd audio) and it should work just fine..

Google is a double edged sword.. You can find lots of information with it, but you should allways rememberthat there is alot of info that it cannot find, and alot of info you could have found if your keywords were different.. What im implying here, is that searching is a skill.. If you dont get what you want, modify your serch untill you get no results at all, or what you are looking for.. quotes on errors and keywords like howto faq and readme are allways good things to try too.. (:

Thank you Artanicus,
I tried both XMMS and KsCD and I can't get niether of them to play the CD. First of all I can't figure out how to point XMMS to my CD drive. KsCD complains that I should have access permissions to /dev/cdrom while /dev/cdrom doesn't exist. I think my cd is under /dev/hdc so I konfigure KsCD to point to /dev/hdc and it gives the same error. What gives? Regarding the mouse issue I use Xorg. It looks to be setup correctly but I'm not sure. I have no clue on how to upgrade my kernel. I'm running 2.6.9-1.667 right now. Isn't there a way to use Apt to upgrade or is that more manual fumbling with Linux sources and recompiling the kernel advanced type stuff?

Okies, lets work on those.. (:

You need to make sure the permissions for the dev are high enough for you to access it directly.. So,
should do the trick.. Just make sure it is the actual dev and not a symlink to sometihng other, so if ls -la /dev/hdc doesnt show it as a ssymlink, your good to go.. kscd is a bit weird imho, sometimes it just doesnt work.. d: In xmms whe you have the plugin installed, enabled, and most important of all configured properly, and xmms restarted, you can add a cd like this: Select the add a directory button from the playlist editor, and surf over to the mountpoint you selected for your cd-rom in the plugin preferences.. Just add that directory, eventho it doest seem to contain anything.. And voila, the CD has been added to your playlist..

Mouse problems can be realy hard to figure out.. It might be worth trying to go over xorgconfig again..

The kernel upgrade realy is a last choise, but since they constantly add better hardware support, it might be the critical thing.. If you do a search here on LQ with your distribution and kernel installation, youll surely find help for that.. Also you might wana check your distributions forum here at LQ, there usually are some good tips.. (:

I used to use FC, so I can answer to yum/apt.

First thing to remember is that they are only as good as the repositories you use, definetly search for more repositories, download their sample configuration files and edit your yum.conf/apt.conf accordingly.

I personally suggest http://freshrpms.net/ Also remember you don't need yum or apt to install programs. You can just use rpms (Which is the actually package) and fix the dependancies yourslef (back in the day that was ALL we had).

The kernel itself is an rpm, you can just download the newest from fedora's site, open a terminal, su to root [type su, enter ], cd to the directory you downloaded it to and type

rpm -Uv kernel.(whatever or just press tab to autocomplete).rpm


Also Google = bad, Google Linux = good. http://www.google.com/linux

Thank you for the replies. I am having issues beyond belief now. It seems that things keep getting worse and I haven't even done anything. Now I have no sound. I keep getting errors on startup saying something like "cannot open /dev/dsp (do not have permisssion)" and I don't know how to resolve. I tried configuring the CD player plugin for Xmms to no avail. I pointed it to /dev/cdrom and then to /dev/hdc and neither path worked. I set the permissions as reccomened before hand. (used chmod a+r) I just used synaptic to upgrade some of my software. I'm going to try a reboot and see if that helps any. I dunno though. FC 3 just feels more and more like one big glitch.

I feel your pain Cliff!! Things started so well on FC3 for me....slowly things broke and I couldn't get anything to work. I've installed FC3 on 6 computers now and 4 of them all had similar problems. I fixed all the broken 4 with Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary. Its Debian based but man what a relief! Everything with Hoary worked right out of the box for me.

You could d/l the LiveCD version of Hoary and try it on your system to be sure. But so far Ubuntu fixed all my problems I had in FC3.

Good Luck!

Snipersnest,

Thanks for the suggestion. I have a couple of copies of Ubuntu and have not yet used them really. (I demoed the live CD and it worked smooth.) I tried to install Ubuntu @ home and I completely hosed up my partition table. What happened was the installer confused me on the partition part and I took some options that I didn't understand. In the end I couldn't boot into XP, I couldn't boot into Linux or anything. I ended up overinstalling Redhat 9 just so my wife (who is still pissed about it) could get on the net. Long story short, I eventually fixed it so XP boots as normal but its not 100% fixed. I ended up switching my HD access mode from auto to LBA and I believe my partition table is still screwed up somehow I'm just not smart enough to understand it. If I get a minute I'll try to install Ubuntu again at home. If all goes well I'll need a painless migration plan for here at work. I'd hate to lose everything I put into personalizing FC3. One thing I'd like to know is how easy if at all is it to install KDE on Ubunut? How would I go about installing it? I saw references to Kubuntu but that looked like a new project and I'd like to stay away from bleeding edge stuff for right now.

Cliff, I know exactly what you mean about "bleeding edge stuff." But to be honest I use my system for Gaming, so I need stability, Hoary has given me that without a problem.

I installed Hoary right over my FC3 install without problems. But if you want to make it really easy use Partition Magic in Windows and delete your Linux space, then install Ubuntu. The installer will find the "biggest freespace" and you can use that for your install. Grub should detect XP also and reinstall its self on the MBR. Worked for me like a champ both ways!

In short, Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary is bleeding edge, but seems perfectly stable on my Athlon XP machines and P4 1.8ghz.

I liked Hoary over Warty because everything was pretty current. This link will show you the differences, just scroll on down a good bit.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu


I'm not sure about KDE on Ubuntu, I've always like Gnome more. You could do a search on the Ubuntu forums about it though to find out.

GL!

Ok Cliff, I did some follow up work for you on KDE.

Heres what I found:

Snipersnest,

Thank you for all of your suggestions. I'm a little concerned/confused. When I tried Ubuntu Warty I initially attempted to overinstall Redhat 9 on my home PC. Because I am Linux-stupid I took some bad options and completely screwed up my partition table and to this day XP isn't working quite right. I recall reading the help section in the Warty installer that said Ubuntu could not be installed over an existing Linux partition. That's my area of concern and confusion. If I overinstall FC3 for example, will I lose my data? I've come a little too far at work to just throw away all of my settings and stuff and start with a new distro. I really need to make time to experiment @ home with Ubuntu (if my wife isn't paranoid by now) and I haven't done that yet. I'd also like to straighten out the XP side of my home PC (to set my wife at ease) before I get into any more OS twiddlings so I have to prioritize here. I am looking at the Ubuntu CDs as I type and wondering if this is something I could easily toy with at work. I've come to love the KDE enviornment (mainly because of Konqueror and its resemblance to Windows) and it'd be a pain to switch once again to a new environment. (I started with XFCE which wasn't giving me exactly what I wanted.) My main fears with KDE is the sound stuff. It says everywhere that KDE uses Arts and I've read all over that Alsa with the Dmix plugin is the better way to go but I don't have the experience or the willingness to delve into the hairiness of configuring the Dmix stuff. I feel trapped in a way. Anyhow, enough babbling and thank you once again for all of your suggestions.

Regards,
Cliff

Cliff,

Currently KDE isn't an installed package on Ubuntu, however there is a KDE version of Ubuntu called Kubuntu. I used both Gnome and KDE for a while and found Gnome to be doing a lot better job with my performance and maintenance. KDE to me just looks pretty like XP. But with Gnome you can also use themes and skins to make it look however you want. I would highly suggest using Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary) rather than Warty. Warty gave me no X support when I installed it. I like distros that can configure X to work right out of the box which Hoary does. Give the LiveCD version a try. Its a fully working copy of Hoary on CD that doesn't require installation. Its a good way to test all your hardware before you install the full version.

Partitioning can be tricky. I understand that you want XP back in tip-top-shape before you install Linux again. Sadly I think your only option would be to reinstall XP from scratch. Your going to want to create a boot disk in the control panel so you can access fdisk. Fdisk will allow you to format your "Master Boot Record" which is where Grub installs it self via Ubuntu. The command for formatting your MBR is "fdisk /mbr" You might also want to just delete your Linux partitions via fdisk while your there. Leave the space unpartitioned so that once you have XP installed Linux will just use the existing free space on the drive.

Once you get all that taken care of theres no way installing Linux would really effect your Windows XP. You just reformatted your entire drive and master boot record, so theres no trace of Linux on there. You might also hear that Ubuntu Hoary is "Alpha" which means beta. I use Hoary for gaming, I haven't found a leak or crashed it yet. So its pretty darn stable right now.

If you need help send me a Private Message on the forums and I'll give you other ways to contact me so we can talk further. Hope I helped you out and made it sound simple!

Nate

Nate,

I recently aquired a copy of Kubuntu live CD which features the latest versioon of KDE. Boy does it look nice. I think I will make the move to either Kubuntu or Ubuntu soon. However I also recently found out that my partition table is completely trashed on my home PC. I can get XP to boot only when setting the access mode in my BIOS to LBA (a recommended hack somewhere in web-world). I don't know what that means or what it does, I only know it works. I also know that I didn't have to do that before changing my partitions with the Warty installer. So whatever Ubuntu did during partitioning, it left me in a state of non-recovery. I absolutely have to recover my home PC before I'm allowed to do anything else fancy on it. (My wife's orders since now even XP is acting funny.) I have two options currently. I can toy with PTEdit on the partition-magic boot floppy or I can rebuild from scratch. I don't have any means of backing up the ton of stuff that I need to. I think I need to backup about 30-40 G of data before reformatting the drive. I hate to have to restore preference things in XP like registry settings and such. The second option doesn't sound any better than the first. I'd have to buy a new HD and backup to that prior to re-formatting and I don't have the funds to get the SATA drive I have my eye on. So I'm kinda stuck in the middle until I either mangle my MBR completely with PTEdit or chough up the cash for the HD. I'd love to just fix the whole MBR but even DOS FIXMBR command buys me nothing here. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.