General Questions & Discussion
 

First off, Linux is hard. Don't get me wrong, I like it and am learning it and getting rid of Windows, but anyone that tells you it's easy is lying. Windows is easy, it's dumb and takes up way too much space, but when I try to install a new anything it usually works. Now that I've said that, I've got a few really dumb questions.

I love Red Carpet because I hate resolving dependencies. Why does Novell have to buy it and start charging for it. What a bunch of money grubbers. Same thing with Suse. Why would someone buy Suse when they could get any of the other ones for free? I think it's Novell's last ditch effort to get money by selling something that they got for free.

Is Kernel the same as core? I've just upgraded my RedHat 9.0 from the 2.4 kernel to 2.6.10 (which you RedHad folks did an awesome job with the xconfig screens). Does that mean I still have RedHat 9.0 or am I in Fedora land now? What makes the difference between the two if it's not the kernel?

I installed Wine and it works, but only when I type "/usr/src/wine-20050111/./wine" is there any way to get it to work by just typing "wine" instead of all that other stuff?

Lastly, I love this forum. Without it, I would have given up on Linux long ago.

Re: General Questions & Discussion
 

"Is Kernel the same as core? I've just upgraded my RedHat 9.0 from the 2.4 kernel to 2.6.10 (which you RedHad folks did an awesome job with the xconfig screens). Does that mean I still have RedHat 9.0 or am I in Fedora land now? What makes the difference between the two if it's not the kernel?"

Fedora Core 3 is a Linux "distribution", which contains the Linux kernel as well as the core applications. The kernel contains only the basic functions needed to boot Linux and control the hardware; it can be upgraded without upgrading your distribution, so you are still running RedHat 9.0. The core applications depend on the kernel and provide tools and services that most users need, such as editors, web browsers, email. For example, Redhat 9.0 provides Mozilla for web browsing, while Fedora Core 3 provides a Mozilla follow-on called Firefox.

In theory, you could upgrade from Redhat 9.0 to Fedora Core 3 by installing a lot of packages. However, it is generally not worth the bother. Instead, when you need a lot of the new functions, just install FC3 from CDs.


"I installed Wine and it works, but only when I type "/usr/src/wine-20050111/./wine" is there any way to get it to work by just typing "wine" instead of all that other stuff?"

If you execute
echo $PATH
you'll get a list of path names separated by colons. One is probably
/home/<your-user-name>/bin
Use mkdir to create that directory if it does not already exist, and execute
ln -s /usr/src/wine-20050111/./wine ~/bin/wine

You should then be able to execute wine without all the other stuff.

Thank you for your responses. I tried the echo $path and adding a symlink as you suggested, but I didn't seem to work. It could be because I ran make and make install as root. Anyway, I removed and instead found a wine rpm package and that seemed to work.

Thank you for the explanation on kernel vs. core.

I'm working on configuring my box to back up my DVDs and VCRs to DVD and have gotten wine, DVD shrink, and K3b working. I can now shrink and back up my DVDs, but I'm still having trouble with my WinTV Go card. Something about bttv not recognizing the right tuner. I've recompiled my kernel to 2.6.10, but the last time I tried it, I got a weird "no setup file found" error after boot. Anybody know what this means?? The only thing I did differently from my other compiles was to upgrade modutils.