I'm trying here, i'm trying real hard to like this caos system.

Having been spoiled by xandros and it's ease of install, i'm trying out something new. The lack of community for the caos foundation is staggering by the way, but that is just anger talking right now....

anyways, pot shots aside, i can only get the base config onto my system. i'm am in the throws of trying your newest cinch installer out as we speak and hope that it fixes some of my dilema's.

i can't get a default mirror url , or i can't access it somehow.

i am connecting over a wireless connection, i don't have a wired connection to the modumb... i feel this may be a problem, as i am trying to get the packages, and caos won't let me get them. i want to see what this puppy looks like with x.org and make it intuitive from a gui standpoint.

your base system is stable, i can say that of caos. i want pretty pictures on my screen, not dossy prompt, hence my frustration.

help a guy out here.

I am curious what you mean by "the lack of community for the caos foundation is staggering"? We are completly developed and maintained by volunteers of the community. Granted cAos Linux isn't widely adopted at this point but we hope that will change.

Thank you for attempting to keep the pot shots aside. I will do the same. ;-)

Now on to your probem... You noted that you are installing via wireless. Cinch/Sidekick shoud have no problem with this, but there are some dependancies and possiable difficulities that will arise (none of which is caos specific). First of all, is your wireless NIC supported with a default 2.6 kernel? Next is it coming up successfully, and able to ping the outside world? Is WEP enabled?

Something you can do is escape from the sidekick system configration tool during first boot (you don't have to do the steps listed). This will bring you to a login prompt. From there you can debug your wireless setup a bit and once it is working properly, you can rerun "sidekick --init" to get back to the login configuration.

As far as debugging your network connection, I can't help with the information you provided, but I can give some hints. First of all look at the output of 'dmesg'. You may want to pipe it into 'less' so that you can then search for everything related to 'eth' devices.

On a last note, if cAos Linux doesn't work for you, it is perhaps a good idea not to slander it or speak with anger when asking for volunteer support. I can guarantee there are many people that it does work for and find it both incrediably stable, fast, and easy to deal with being that it is very straight forward for those that know Linux. It isn't glitzed up with GUI's where it doesn't have to be. All of the Linux distributions have aspects to which they focus and GUI is not primary focus of cAos Linux. Granted, you can make it do pretty much anything including an amazing looking GUI, but the goal of cAos is just to be a clean, lean, fast, and straight forward Linux system (to those that know or want to know Linux and not a GUI implementation which is actually not even specific or standard on Linux). So I guess that is the question.

You may also want to send email to the list or join the IRC which gets more cAos specific traffic then here.

Best of luck to you, and don't forget to breath! ;-)

i appreciate your resonse to me, but please, this passive aggressive way of telling me to 'chill' honestly is tiring.

yes i am not as smart or experienced a user that you may have wanted in your caosity community. however, i am the type of user who you are targeting, to try and spread the word. i tried the new cinch, and it works a bit better, more thorough explanation etc... but it wasn't working for me.

the forums on caosity.org and on the caos linux site, have not been used since may 28 of 05. now to me, that says we don't have a community.

after re-reading your post, i concur... caos is not for me. i do want a gui install, pretty shiny things that distract me while i'm going through the install phase. Also, lastly, i quite like it for it's fast and solid feel. i tried debian, arch, yoper, chaos and xandros as of today, chaos is second in my books. the other 3 are making some wonky errors and i won't give them the time of day right now. i tried caos, didn't work. just one man's opinion in a world where he is allowed to speak his mind.

Please take my sincere apologies for any miscommunications on tone.

Your comments about us/me not wanting less experienced users to be part of the community is not correct. We have been known to even help people learn 'vi' and how to add users, change passwords, mount disks, and various other basic skills to get them going. We welcome all levels and tallents into our community. We have found that the opionions of new users are just as important as the developers, and we take them seriously.

You are 100% correct about the use of our forums. We have not had many users choose to use them. Our most common vector of support has been IRC for the real time communications that it provides. You are welcome to join there.

In a nutshell, I would be happy to help, but I really would need more specific information about the enviornment. There are so many variables at hand, and to compound that you are already attmpting something that has many more potentials for complications.

You mention that Cinch didn't work, but you give no reasoning as to what didn't work. Is it the same problem as before, and if so I still need to know more about the enviornment. I can add better wireless support (eg. WEP) into cinch and sidekick but to debug this I will need more info.

Thanks
Greg

Cinch works great. it's the input of what i don't know that makes my output wrong.

in laman's terms, i can't make it hook up to my wireless lan connection. i get this repeating eth0 message that annoys me to death, similar to debian, as i had the same problem there.

to trouble shoot, i don't know how i can use your system config section, where it asks to enable 'eth0'. i am then asked if i want to use dhcp and also a submask...?

I know (not to name drop again) that arch linux allows you to "mount" the packages onto the HDD somehow... hence, not having to go online to get xorg and all that stuff... it's ideally what i'd like to do.

Ahh, ok.

What is the wireless message?

Something that you can try to do is quit out of sidekick (on first boot) Once you finish the network configuration page and exit out of Sidekick (the system administrators assitant tool) the system will proceed with a login prompt. Log in as 'root' and then type the command:

Once you see that output you want to search for all occurances of 'eth' (you can use the '/' (forward slash) to do the search). You should find information about the type of card, and hopefully see if there are any errors. Chances are it is at the bottom of the output. Once you see the errors, paste those in.

Also, does your wireless network implement WEP? Is there more then 1 wireless network in your range?

Thanks and good luck!

yes it enables WEP, and whenever i enable my eth0 (in my case) i get a dmesg saying the following, over and over and over again (not a caos thing, but don't know what to do, as there is no iwconfig on the base system).

again, it keeps coming up over and over and then it even comes up when i am logged in as root. the invasive error just keeps popping up like some sort of unwanted cousin at a family reunion.

how do i enable my WEP code? am i filling the network configuration right??? i doubt i am, need help there.

i use the base system and everything that i have used in the past isn't there... alas i am adrift at linux sea.

i've decided that i want to totally geek out and use a WM to customize the look and feel of my caos linux. (like gnome or E11 or something).

Is there a forum i can check out as well?

HAHA!

OK, I am pretty sure that this message is just a warning that your eth0 device is up but not connected to an actual wire. What if you don't enable the device?

Does it stop then?

You bring up a good point. We don't have wireless-tools as part of a core install. I can add this to the core install, and you will see it in the next release. Otherwise if you want you can download the wireless-tools and iwconfig and copy it there via a floppy (for an interum solution).

At the moment Sidekick doesn't support WEP and other wireless extentions but I will add that support. It is easy to add the options by hand. I can walk you through this if you decide to do this before I get the next release done (about 1 week).

lol, cool. Aside from the email list and IRC network, this is about a good a place as any.

Best of luck!

I got to this quickier then I thought... Please test:

http://mirror.caosity.org/cAos-2/ins...-2.1a.i386.iso

I wrote some logic into sidekick to probe for wireless device, and if it is indeed wireless to prompt for WEP KEY and ESSID and apply to device.

Let me know ASAP if this works.

Thanks!

just downloading now.

what i said about the community before... i can't say to you how i was so wrong!!!!

i hope this works out for us both, cause i've now tried (ahem... drumroll please)

• arch linux
• alinux (didn't work at all - MD5 number was wrong,)
• debian (ok but man 8 CD's... i did the quick one..sucks...)
• foresight (great look and feel but crashed when i tried adding ndiswrapper.. sucks again)
• yoper (bad md5 but tried anyways.. no dice)
• gentoo universal (live CD's i hate them for what i need)
• mepis (live CD that wouldn't partition my HDD!!!) sucks.
• Vector (looked ok but crashes again)
• xandros ( old stand by.. want to get off the teet)
• Ark didn't even install properly
• munjoy (cool canadian one but no xorgconfig wouldn't work with my setup).

I want caos to work, i need it to work. i have a feeling, for me at least, you'd have to add ndiswrapper to the base settings for me and the wireless-tools (iwconfig etc...) in order for it to work.. who knows, we'll see. 75% and i'll come back with an answer.

no essid or anything on the system you had me download mate.

good news, iwconfig and ifconfig are there.

will add ndiswrapper and see what happens.

will report soon on how ndiswrapper went.

honestly, if you allow a person with wireless only access (alot of laptops and some stand alone machines like mine, then you may have a winner). i want to see what it is like getting enlightenment on this bad boy.

as well, i'm hoping that the wiki can be updated to reflect all/some of these things. i'll take upon myself if i'm allowed.


hey, do you know how to mount some stuff i have off of my floppy drive onto my machine, now that i am up???

I am hoping cAos will work for you as well! As I mentioned, it is light and flexiable, but not quite as newbie friendly as perhaps some of the others.

I am surprised that you didn't get the ESSID and WEP KEY questions... I am beginning to think that perhaps the wireless card is not being supported properly. Can you send me the output of the command:

Detect is the cAos hardware detection tool and this will show you all of the NETWORK devices that it spots and knows how to deal with. You can also compare against /sbin/lspci to see if there is anything that is not being "detected".

What the network configuration tool is supposed to do is detect if the device is wireless, and if so present 2 other questions. That is why I am concerned that the device is not being recognized properly by detect and/or kernel.

Thanks, and good luck!

i am using a wireless card that isn't really linux friendly... hence the ndiswrapper, which will make the driver for my card be recognized by the OS.

i'm off to learn how to mount floppy's and i'll report back with the message STAT.

p.s. i got it i think and am about to try it.

hopefully next posting is from my caos machine baby!

Sorry... I actually forgot what ndiswrapper was when you first mentioned it. Bad me.

Let me know how it goes!

Unfortunately the ndiswrapper package has not been built yet. I guess I should fix that, huh?