Hi,

Right I am new to this linux lark, so please resist to snigger at my ignorance but hopefully I will address that in time.

As the subject of this thread suggests I have a number of issues with my system at the moment.

Before I launch off on my rather long essay I am running Fedora Core 3.

So here goes the list;

1. I am trying to get the Java 1.5 SDK running on my system. Now I understand the principle of environment variables from Windows and as far as I can understand from my perusing of the internet Linux runs on them in a similar way. What I want to know is if there is any specific location where the environment variables are listed. I did see also that bash ahad a command called export. I tried to read the man page on the matter but I made little sense of it.

2. At the moment on my system I am using GRUB to boot linux. I have a dual hard-disk setup on my computer. One of them is on an IDE channel while the other is on SATA. I have windows XP installed on the SATA drive while Linux is on the IDE channel. When I get the boot menu for GRUB and I choose the Windows XP option I have found that all that happens is the screen goes blank except for the line 'chanloader +1' and then nothing else happens. I went and had a poke around in the GRUB conf file and found that GRUB is trying to boot linux off of hd0,0 and Windows off of hd1,0 . I assume that the numbering works based on the boot order set in the BIOS. If it helps in this matter here is the drive map;

(hd0) /dev/hdc
(hd1) /dev/sda

3. This is the final thing, honestly! I am trying to install the NVIDIA drivers. Now I understand that I need to change the runlevel in order to stop the X server so that the driver can be installed. I read somewhere that it is best to change down to runlevel 3 and then back up to 5 when you're done. So I use telinit to drop down to 3. But as the system loads the various packages I get no command line and the last thing displayed is Starting anacron [OK] at which point nothing happens. Any ideas on what's going on?

Sorry about that rather long winded essay but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

In some distributions, it is located in /etc/profile.d. Almost all distributions will use /etc/profile to make sure the environment variables are set for everybody. For setting different variables you place it in ~/.bashrc. You can look at the list of environment variables by using env. To set an environment variable, type export variable_name="text". If you want to call an environment variable you type echo $variable_name. Linux has a lot less characters to type than DOS or Windows 2000/XP.

Well you need to look into re-mapping the boot device because chainloader will not work to boot into Windows. Look up the manual for grub. Sorry I have not use the re-mapping commands in grub because I did it with LILO a few years ago. Since then I have never used Windows and I switched to GRUB as my bootloader.

You did everything right, but telinit is still running. Try hitting CTL+C. It should bring you to the prompt. Then run the nVidia installer. If its not executable, type sh before the file name. After you have installed nVidia's drivers, you have to edit /etc/X11/XF86Config or /etc/X11/xorg.conf to change nv to nvidia. The nVidia documentation will tell you more what you can do.

Thanks very much for your help. Just a small problem with solution 3. I ran the telinit command and swapped down to runlevel 3. I tried Ctrl-C and the same result...nothing happened. I then pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del for a retro windows moment and the system switched to runlevel 6 and restarted. Any other ideas?

I read around a little more and found something suggesting that I would have to type in the export command everytime I wanted to use Java. Now obviously this would get very boring. Do I add an export line to one of the files that you mentioned in your post?

I keep forgetting that Slackware 10 is a little screwy when changing runlevels. Linux has a way that you can have multiple prompts running. After you change the runlevel, hit CTL+ALT+F2. Slackware is set so you can go through the function keys up to 6. F7 is GUI, if X is running. I think it is easier to just reboot and in grub hit e. Then add a 3 at the end of the kernel line. This will get you in runlevel 3 bypassing whatever your default runlevel is set at.

You do not have to type export variable_name to make java work. You can place something like
JAVAPATH="path"
JAVALIB="path"

export JAVAPATH JAVALIB

In either ~/.bashrc, /etc/profile, or in /etc/profile.d/java. When you reboot or login, these variables will be loaded in the environment. This also means if you open up xterm, konsole, rxvt, etc, these variables will be set.