Need serious help in vi (Red Hat 9, unchanged kernel)
 

I'm editing (trying. anyways) modules.conf. I opened in it in vi, and I need to modify eth0's alias. So I deleted the path, and now I was trying to enter its correct path (nvnet). I accidentally deleted the soundcard path however! I need to know how I can enter text and create a new line. All help appreciated.

Check this out:
http://www.cs.colostate.edu/helpdocs/vi.html

I'm assuming that you are trying do this in vi?

if so...

hit escape like 10 times...
type letter a and you should be able move about freely...

then when you're done, type escape, then colon (:) and the letters wq

:wq

this means write and quit.

hope that helped.

I was able to edit everything, then when I hit colon another thing came up. I hit w then q, but my comp just beeped. If I hit q enough times the bottom of the console said Recording... can I just close the window?

If you just close your window, you'll create a swap file, like a weird backup/recovery file that you don't want...

type

:q!

a few times until you get back to your prompt

this will close your file and not save any changes that were made (and not changed)

then start over

vi /etc/modules.conf

or whatever the file is
then type the letter 'a', this will get you into edit mode

then we you're done, type

:wq

Thank you very much. Hopefully the next messages posted here will be from my Linux machine! You've made it onto my good users list.

no problem... :)

I shall trump the beast known as Linux some day. THEN we'll see who's laughing, penguin! >_>

Until that day, may I suggest that man pages as your first resource.

would have told you all you needed to know in this case.