hello all. newbie here, so bear with me. i'm slowly trying to adjust myself away from the comforts of familiar ground (microsoft) and tackle the whole linux thing. just installed mandrake 9.2. i don't know diddly about kernels. how do i upgrade my kernel to the newest one?

another question...when i insert a music cd, nothing happens so i try to open my cd icon on the desktop and it says theres nothing on the cd. i don't have any type of mediaplayer (at least i don't think so). i figure if i explored the cd though, that at least some kind of unreadable files would come up, but nothing.

hey tonto - welcome to lq.
since you're quite new to linux, i wouldn't suggest upgrading the kernel (i won't even begin to explain here to you, though it's rather easy once you know wht you're doing.) you can also hit a search on these forums and you'll see many posts about the same.

http://www.tldp.org

and,

http://bh.udev.org/filez/doc/rute/rute.pdf
should help you a lot.

hey thx for the feedback.

Open up konqueror. It will probably be the file manager which opens when you click on the home icon on your desktop.

Make sure there is an audio cd in the drive.

In the address bar of konqueror type (as though you were typing a website address):

After a little while (a few seconds) various folders/icons should appear.

Select the folder labelled "By Track" and look at its contents, clicking on the first track will enable you to play it in an embedded player.

If you have ogg vorbis or mp3 libraries/utilities installed you'll see folders by these names, copying the files in them to a folder on your hard drive will result in oggs or mp3s being created on the fly, this takes a while so be patient. Plus if you are connected to the internet whilst doing all of this then, you might find that the tracks have been named appropiately.

Cheers
Amos

hey amos, i tried what you recommended but it still doesn't work. what's really weird is if i insert a data disc, the files will pop up. if i insert a music disc, nothing happens.
know any good media players i should try out? something relatively easy to install. i was looking up a few yesterday and jeez, installing them is quite a daunting task. "go to the root, modify this, add this to this directory, change this." i'm just too used to pressing "next" a few times and an "i accept". i'm sure it's not that difficult but it is a shock to a new user.