how about you try Mandrake instead? XandrOS is kind of... in development in the linux community.

Or of course Peter could just install Knoppix.... since he has it.

The Black Screen at Boot is a known Knoppix problem (I haven't used Knoppix, but I have used Morphix), and is usually solved by using one of the Knoppix Cheat Codes at the boot screen.

The most common one used to solve this particular problem is vga=normal, but you might consider xmodule=vesa as well.

At least once Peter can boot Knoppix, he can use it as it was intended-- as a repair and rescue system-- to save any data he might have on the Xandros partitions before a reformat and reinstall (which is starting to look like the suggested approach if he really wants to stick with Xandros).

Good morning guys. :-)
I downloaded Knopix 3.3 last night, and that one booted perfect, mounted all my drives and so on. I can there take backup of my stuff.. but what i dont know is how to resue the system or recover it. dodnt even know what to look for that can have krashed.

So yes, i have been thinking of changing to another distro. I liked the very user friendly interface in the xandros, the xandros networks that very easy installs and updates my system. Allso the simplicity of installing software by the rpm and so on.

Was planing today to download some distros to try out if i cant recover my existing one.

You say Mandrake, does it have the same good hardware support as the one i use, or is it tricky to get drivers and stuff to work?

Edit. can i ask you to look in here?
If you log on to ftp.sunet.se as a guest, look in /pub/os/linux there is a few there, from there i can download at 300+kbit so i would prefer to find it there. Can you give any sugestions of the distros there?

Yep, sunet is pretty much a general ftp mirror, carrying the most common distros. Your best bet is to go to www.distrowatch.com and look up the distributions you'd like to know more about. The site has information about every currently active distro, links to download sites (if the distribution is freely downloadable), links to reviews for each distro (if available), and package lists detailing what major packages each distro contains, and what version of that package.

People can tell you what they like, but a Linux system is very personal, tailored to your needs and your tastes in computing, so the opinions of others are not necessarily as helpful as they might seem. You're going to have to decide for yourself anyway, so you might as well start now . However, I will say that yes, Mandrake is very easy to use, has quite good hardware detection, and uses an extremely good rpm package manager called urpmi (the GUI front end is called RPMDrake), but does not have a dedicated "network" like Xandros and Red Hat. Instead, you have to set up the external software sources yourself (using the Easy URPMI website at http://urpmi.org/easyurpmi/index.php makes even this quite simple)-- but once you have done that, installing software is a breeze.

As far as recovering the system, you can mount the Xandros partitions while Knoppix is running, and then examine/edit the various configuration files that seem to relate to the problem. You might also want to examine the log of your last attempted boot -- /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages might be two good places to start the troubleshooting process.

And of course you can post the contents of those files here, and we can all try to figure this out together .

Peter, If you are thinking of switching distros can I suggest RedHat as another choice. I started Beta Testing Americas Army on RedHat 9 and it worked great. I have had good luck with redhat. When I say RedHat I mean RH9, as have not tried fedora yet.

But I have recently (Last six months) switched over to Slackware for all my computers due to personal reasons, and standardization throughout my house.

People that are new to Linux seem to migrate toward Mandrake, yes I agree that it is an easy to use distro, but I personally don't like some of the ways they have it set up. RedHat is just as easy IMHO.

You will still need to manually install the Nvidia Drivers on these distros, but that is not very hard. I wrote a newbish how-to on the americasarmy.com forums under Linux General, its a sticky so you shouldn't have to search for it.

hanzerik Thanks for your reply, I can tell you that i have seen your sticky in the AAO forum, i hang there aswell, same nick as here, but not a frequent poster.

I will take your advice under consideration, having both mandrake and some other distros downloading right now, (have the bandwidth, so why not use it :-) ) Will add red hat to the list and see what its like.

Adding a new Q here. If i wanna install a new dist. can i then with Knopix just delete al the old stuff? or will new installation take it away by itself?

Thanks

//Peter

Depends on the distro. RedHat has a GUI installer that will be point and click, and has a really nice interface for creating your initial partitions, and managing existing ones. If you want to blow the old Linux partitions away it will give you the option to leave data unchanged, or format the Linux partitions once you choose them as the installation destination. I'm not sure how your disks are setup, but if you dual boot be careful not to have your windows partitions/disks selected as a available partition/disks. Unless you really want to blow Windows away Luckly RedHats installer will ask you for confirmation before doing it.

I'm not very familiar with mandy's installer, but I'm sure it's pretty user friendly.

Hey if you need help with AAO and Linux I am on IRC almost every night after 930pm EST, or you can ask the other guys in #aa-support. There are a few Linux users in there: DeichGraf, cybermans
irc.americasarmy.com
#americasarmy
#1VB
#aa-support

WARNING OFF-TOPIC POST

hanzerik...

I am a quite a great fan of AA and linux... I just can't combine them because TeamSpeak seems to be unable to get any sound through the card. Have you got any solutions for this problem? Since you are also in a clan (quite a good one ) , i guess you use teamspeak also.

Maybe you got one of those nice creative cards and you haven't got any trouble with it...

PS. Any chances that I can become a AA-beta for linux?
{dfh}ShadowHunter
42 Honor.

thanks Geert.

well, youll need to email icculus your resume, and he'll decide. his website is here:
http://icculus.org
he has a long criteria, so read it all, and youll have a better chance.

Sorry has been a busy weekend.

On the TeamSpeak issue, yes I use it and it works great. My card is an old SoundBlaster Live Value I picked up at a computer show a few years ago. It handles multiple sound streams very well. Some cards I have had trouble with are the Built-in sound chips and SoundBlasterPCI128's. These seem to only like one sound source, either AAO or TeamSpeak, not both at the same time. I worked on a friends machine over ssh for about 5 hours and could not get it to work correctly, but I could get it to make a screeching noise, but that was about it. He had an older SB-PCI128. I was talking to him on TS and trying to get an MP3 to play at the same time. Think it freaked him out when I asked him to put a music cd in the drive, and then opened the drive without him having to touch the computer.

On the Beta-Testing issue: Ryan may open it up again if there are not enough active Linux Betas, don't really know. Keep checking the http://icculus.org/ site, if there are going to openings they will be posted there, and I'll also make a sticky in the AA Linux forums when they open the Linux beta again.

On the "Clan" issue: Thanks for the kudos, but being that 99% of our members are Active/retired/reserve/NATO Military we like to stick to military terminology. 1st Veterans Battalion is not a clan, we are a Battalion www.1st-vets.us 300+ members and going strong.

Hello again guys.
Seemed like kernell crashed for me.
I reinstalled XandrOS, uppdated to newest nvidia drivers, i allso configuerd the XF86Config-4 file. But still ill only get 800x640 screen resolution in fullscreen game. same as before.. I really dont know what to do here, is the problem in my game config files, or is it in my Linux system files? I would guess on the game files since other games like enemy teritory worked great and all.
Do you guys install trough Wine?? or do you run the linux version of the game? Cause im talking about the Linux version here, just to clear that one :-)

Regards
Peter

In your /home/<username>/.armyops200/System/ directory there is a file called ArmyOps.ini, I'm not sure of the exact line, but there is a config line for resolution size. Try editing that manually and giving it a go. The default res is 800x600. I'm not at home so I can't give you the exact line.

Something = 800
Something = 600
Something = 24

So when you go to settings and try to change the res with the dropdown menu and select your screen resolution for the game it doesn't change? Try changing it then quitting and restarting the game.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that resolutions above 800x600 make the in-game chat barely readable. At least on my 17" monitor.

Yes !!!

That did the trick,, i had edited user.ini before, but never thought about that one.
Well, there was a few lines there to say 800x600 so i changed them all to 1280x1024 so now it works in that resolution.. prob is though that drop down list still wont work,, no choises, just the one i run, like its forced that way as it was on 800x600 before.
Anyway. now it works and im truly thankfull to you hanzerik.

Just thought the textures and stuff was quite bad.. but ill try to set them to very high on all it would do the trick.

About small font in the in-game chat. im running it now on a 19" crt and it looks allright to me, just as it did in win. Just wish i could push up my skills as easy as the resolution now :-) still at 20hp and played since the game was released 2+ years ago.

And yeah.. forgottet to kill Artsd so the sound was still bugging me.. but i figured that one out b4. so ill say that now this problem all in all i solved for now.

Again. Thanx all you guys for helping a newbie out.

Best regards
Peter

Damn spoke to soon. Sound is still a problem,, sluggish and late, not in sync att all with action, with a delay for allmost a second i would say. Very anoying.

I did uncheck the box that says start arts on kde startup, so i dont have to kill it before gaming. and still its not working for me. sound is just as important as picture so if u guys can bare with me for some more i would be most appriciated.

I have tried, software, hardware, hardware + EAX, and even failsafe mode in the game,, but none of it helps me out. I do use EAX in winxp so i think it should work here aswell.. Any other file i need to edit?
Any other setting?

Regards
Peter

Same file. A line that looks like:
UseEAX = true
change true to false

Change it through the game interface.

Had the same type of problem with EAX. I use hardware with no problem. Once you make a sound setting change in the game you need to restart the game.