It's Linux, you know, there is nearly always something that needs to be tweaked a bit first before it runs (well). Like Suse not playing sound although it detects your sound card. I wouldn't write it off just yet unless you find something that does work out of the box.

I cant get Fedora to install, so it may be easier to deal with device problems in ubuntu and other distros.

Linux seems to be very sensitive to HDs. I can't mount in SUSE KDE, can mount one drive in SUSE GNOME. Fedora would freeze after selecting keyboard layout with my TV (DVR recordings) drives hooked up (unplugging them made it install once, before it started freezing while installing the kernel) Then it wouldn't boot when I plugged my TV drives in.

On a good note, what worked really really well was Xandros, but I kind of feel like it's cheating or something to use it

Pff, use whatever you like.

That recurring HD issue is suspicious though. Maybe you should just search google to find whether there are any known issues with your motherboard. It sounds like a hard drive controller that doesn't (fully) support Linux. And as I said, raid can sometimes be a bit tricky.

Thanks for all your help guys.

I've finally gotten a disto installed and configured. And it was easy as pie once I got used to everything. OpenSUSE. It was a draw as to which one I wanted, Suse or Kubuntu. I really like the YaST feature.

One final question though, and this is probably directed at the suse guys or maybe at the suse forum.

I was unable to mound my large HD with all my data on it (my docs, downloads, music..etc) because it was flagged NTFS in use. So I installed SUSE without a home mount, and it put home on the root drive as it should. However now that I have mounted my data drive, I find I can't move my home mount to be that drive. I want to keep all my documents and things there, and I want the links to my documents, and the save location for documents in applications, to go to my my documents folder (which I renamed documents). How do I do that?

I've always kept my desktop, MP3s, My Documents (with my ISO files, pics...etc) on my lard data drive.




A bit of a second question that I haven't read anything about yet or even bothered to research even slightly: my Creative Labs Audigy 2 sound card works well in linux, however I would like to have an equalizer and DTS and Dolby and some of the other features of the card. What I'm interested in the most is the equalizer and the "what you hear" feature (where I can plug another device into the card, radio, mp3..whatever..and have it play) Any ideas?

Are there any good linux books that the community has found good for people at my level?

OK, this was more than one question..

Well, you can either remount the partition on your home directory or you can simply create a set of soft links.

First case : you make a folder in your home directory called "ntfs" or "win" or whatever.

Then you unmount the ntfs partition from the terminal with: umount /dev/???? (you'll need to be root to have permission to do this; and you'll need to replace the ???? with the proper value for the partition in question, for example, /dev/sda1).

Then you edit /etc/fstab, changing the mountpoint of your ntfs partition to /home/username/ntfs (or /home/username/win).

Remount the partition from the terminal with mount -a.

Now all your data on ntfs will be inside a folder in your home directory. You can then also use soft links to reorganize a bit. For example if, you want your music to be accessible without going into the ntfs directory first, you can create a soft link to your "music" folder on the ntfs parition with:

ln -s /home/username/ntfs/music /home/username/music

You'll need to check that the folder on the ntfs partition is really "music" and not "Music" or "My music" or something like that - if it is, you need to adjust the first part of the ln -s statement.

Second case: you can also leave your ntfs partition where it is mounted right now. Then you have to create soft links from there to your home directory. Something like:
ln -s /media/win/music /home/username/music
ntfs may be mounted elsewhere, for example on /win, so you may need to adjust a bit.


As for the sound card, I have the same one, it's quite easy to do some fine-tuning if you click on the speaker icon on the top panel and select "Open Volume Control". If you go through the Volume Control Menus, you'll find that you can select extra controls. This is the gnome approach, I haven't got a clue about the KDE equivalent but it can't be all that different.

check the distro selection tool at "polishlinux.org"

Awesome! Thanks for the help. Hopefully with some work linux will work out quite well. I should go buy a book and learn some of these commands and how hardware detection works.

How can I make my drives show up in Suse's sysinfo:/ screen. I can mount them, but I want to see volume labels to know how full they are and give me quick access to the root directory on that drive. (Thanks for the tip on mounting hotlinks in the /home, I'll try them as soon as I get everything organized.)

Do the guis essentially run the command? Ex if I could look behind the gui would I see it running configs and doing whatever it is I'm doing?

If some people like to run text mode in Linux and not use a gui, how do you browse the web without one or play a file and know where the progress bar is?

Just curious..

It's up to you whether to use a CLI or a GUI (if available) - whichever you're most comfortable using. But do try using the CLI as much as possible.
There are text only browsers: w3m, Lynx, amongst others. Don't know how many use them.

GUIs are nothing else than a front-end to commands that you can type into a terminal. They may be more appealing because they don't oblige you to learn any commands by heart or to look them up if you don't know them; on the other hand, you can only put so many buttons on a (section of) a GUI so frequently convenience goes at the expense of power, flexibility, speed (the GUI = extra code to process) and sometimes even security (the more code, the more probable it is that it contains more bugs). For most purposes, a GUI is good enough but it's always nice to know that there is an alternative approach.

Yes.

You can use the framebuffer for displaying graphics. Look through the repositories for something called fbi or fbida, it will allow you to display images in a terminal. You can even play movies on the framebuffer using something like mplayer. As for progress bars and such, it may be possible to add them by using XOSD (X On Screen Display). I have been using XOSD in combination with audio players to print the title of songs on my screen when they start playing; I haven't tried using it for something progress bar like, though.