Help me I'm an idiot.
 

Ok dudes; this is my first Linux machine and wow does it baffle me beyond belief.

This thing came installed with Lindows and I'm looking to switch to RedHat 9. As far as I can understand I should be downloading the three installation ISOs... but I have no clue what to do with these things once I've saved them. Is there an executable; where do I save the things, I want to do this from my harddrive and since I'm pretty sure this machine doesn't have DOS on it I have no clue how that's going to fly...

I'm currently downloading the last item on this list:
http://www.linuxforum.com/linux_downloads_cats/1009.php

It's the RedHat Disc 1 ISO.

hi mate i can see your downing the iso's, i dont know if u can boot directly from harddisk
but i think u need to burn them to cds "as iso" and then boot from cd-rom thats usually how iso works

Deag

Ah ok; so if I burn each one to a CD, then run the autoboot.bat that I hear so much about... it should all go fine from there?

exactly but remember to burn as iso and if required make the floppy to boot
but thats rarely needed

Regards

Ok so I can copy these files from this machine (running Lindows) to my Windows XP machine; from which I can burn the individual CDs (as the ISO filetype) and then it'll work; that's great!

Another seriously newbie question:

I've downloaded the Linux demo of Quake III Arena to play while I'm waiting on the downloads to finish; how do I open this file:

linuxq3ademo-1.11-6.x86.gz.sh

^ That's got to be the weirdest file extension I've ever seen before.

mate i would really love to help u but firstly i would advice u too look at my signature :)
i dont know anything about linux what-so-ever the isos i do they been killing me!

Regards mate

Deagle

try sh linuxq3ademo-1.11-6.x86.gz.sh

-Joey

Where would I type that in? I really have no clue >_<

(this is like my first 30 minutes of Lindows use)

Ok, buddy. Did you install Lindows or did it come installed on a machine that you have?

Also, when you finish downloading the ISO, don't just burn that file to a cd. The iso is a cd image. If you double click on it, you should automatically write the files to a cd. From there, you should be able to install the distro that you downloaded.

From my limited experience, try the Mandrake distro; the installation was really easy.

Hang in there.

Geoff

Thanks for the tip!

Now I'm staring at the console; what are some basic commands I should know? How to change directories; etc...

I don't have enought experience to answer this question directly, but you might want to download the One Page Linux Manual to get you started.

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~squadron/

Hope that helps.

Geoff

Ok I want to cry now; just as I thought I had figured everything out; this starts happening:

I tried to run AOL Instant Messenger (which came installed on this machine with Lindows) and while it has worked fine in the past now it doesn't run instead it gives me this error:

KLauncher could not be reached via DCOP.

What does it all mean *is pathetic at Linux*

quick fix for the "klauncher can not be reached via DCOP" is just log out and back in to KDE....basically restarting kde...i don't think you need to reboot the machine...i don't know much about lindows/linspire...but the error is a KDE thing..so just restart KDE. then you're aim should work again :)
also...ya gotta remember you didn't learn window$ in a day...linux is the same way...it's gonna take a little time and working with it to figure out how it works....and you gotta remember, linux is not windows...it's better, actually.
and hang around here...i learned almost all i know about linux simply by hanging around this site.

in console:

cd = change directory
ls = list directory contents
./<filename> = run a program in that directory
tar xvzf filename.tar.gz = untar a gzipped archive
tar xvjf filename.tar.bz2 = untar a bzipped archive
chmod +x filename = make filename executable

www.tldp.org = read the guides here to learn more :)