i had a nice wireless network until i bought and installed a new pci card which crashed my windows system. When i came round to reinstall the internet my installer refused because of a faulty network adapter.

The faulty network adapter was the pci card i had since removed, when uninstalling, it had not removed all its drivers etc. so i went to device manager and attempted to remove the component - 'unable to uninstall, this device is needed to boot your computer'

umm no it isn't, its a wireless network card that isn't in my machine. so i went to safe mode searched the windows files and removed all traces of this card and edited the registry and rebooted. but it was still there. in the end i just formatted my system which meant reinstalling redhat too (not sure if that was entirely neccessay but halfway through installing xp on its partition it crashed. i fixed it by removing linux and reinstaling windows).

well the long and short is - would i have this problem with linux. will it ever refuse my request to do something if i am su - ?

Only if physically impossible or not logical in
terms of permissions ;)

Like, writing to a commercial audio-CD :}

Of course, some tools (like RPM) might
believe they're smarter than you and
act up, but as long as you stick to
Linux basics you'll be fine.

Cheers,
Tink

in short - no. it will do any damn fool thing you ask it to do (provided that you ask in the proper syntax, of course ) that sounds really weird - windows says you need a network adapter to boot? well, whatever. mind you that switching to linux isn't something you should do just on a whim (that's not to say i'm discouraging you, and this community will help you do it, i'm just saying that you have to want to do it. you shouldn't just say "hmm. well windows doesn't work on the first try, i think i'll change to linux." there's a lot to learn). i would reccomend that should you switch you start either with red hat linux or mandrake linux. i haven't used mandrake ever, but i have used red hat 8.0 and i discourage others from using it. i think you'll find that these operating systems are good as an introduction to linux but that's all (i know i did). after that i suggest you graduate (take linux in a little at a time, the learning curve can be steep for some people) to slackware (i've tried more than a few distributions and i always reccomend slack).

i've been using red hat for over 3 months now, but i have a dual boot on my machine becos i still (have to) use windows for some things. I havn't had the opportunity to tinker with red hat as much as i have with windows so i was curious to know if it would ever 'disagree' with a command, i know it hasn't so far . . .and its good to know it won't in future thanks

Well yes, I ran to 100% disk full, and got a 'Corrupted Media...run fsck' on a delete command, but that was a case of software being unable to physically do anything about it. Bottom line, as mentioned, root can do anything so long as the syntax is correct. One of the perks of Linux, I hate an OS second quessing what I really want to do, or not allowing me to do what I need to do.

RO