Ok im sorry but I gotta ask. Ok 2 things im sure you know how to fix. Well At least 1 for sure. . . First the hard one,

Im running Mandrake 9.1 on my dell 8200 inspiron laptop. Now I had a modular cdrom and i took it out cause im going on vaction for the xtra battery. So now It can't recognize it and I cant use it. But it stays on the desktop as CD ROM (2) and I want it gone.... ITS SO ANNOYING. Ive looked every where and cant figure out how to unmount it. I read in the help that I need to do this... But It dosent tell me how. Gay I know... Ok second item.

Easy question and I cant figure it out. I suck i know.
How do i install a damn program. a .tar.gz file. I can extract it and all and get it to run the install thing through root but I cant use it or anything. I know i suck but help would be awesome.

What are you trying to install from tar? you'll find your device mounted at /mnt/cdrom most likely. If there is anything in there, try deleting it.

Im trying to install multiple things. Opera, Visual boy advance, an mp3 player Mpg123 and just how to do it in general. Thanks i think i can get that damn cdrom out now! ;D

also i keep trying to delete the cdrom2/ dir in /mnt/ but it says device is busy. i tried rebooting and re inserting the cdrom and setting it up but it still dosent do it. gah! damn bastard cdrom wont go away! :P

of all you probably don't have all the dependencies set up. Here is the link for the mp3 plug-in . Run the RPM and you will be ablle to play Mp3s.


http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/1/i386/...vn.2.1.i386.rpm

Also in most tar installations you have to run terminal in root
cd to that particular directory
run:
tar -zxvf filename
cd to the installation directory
run the installer

You can usually find an rpm for most things though.
Try these sites:

www.Sourceforge.net
yarrow.freshrpms.net
www.freshmeat.net
www.rpm.org

Well, good luck.
I'm still trying to figure out how to get my DVD to work!

Ive ran the installer for opera as root but now what. :\ i try and run the program from the home directory and nothing. Also i cant unmount that damn drive. Any body else got an idea?

so you're saying that it still shows up when the drive is disconnected? look in usr/bin for opera. I'll install it and see where it goes. There is a nice key generator for Opera on Kazaa if you still have windows. Opera is ad-supported without a key and that is annoying! Anyways the path should be usr/bin/opera.

and yah it still shows up as cdrom2/ even if its not connected.
i will try the opera thing now

well it sounds like no matter what your pc is telling linux that there is a drive present. Mybe check for a BIOS upgrade and see if you can upgrade to Mandrake 9.2. I've found that I get the best support out of Fedora Core so you may want to try that. I've tried Suse, Slackware, Redhat, Lindows , Lycoris, Debian, ASPLinux, Knoppix (a cool distro that runs completely from cd) and Mandrake 9.2. Actually Lindows (Debian based)is a great system with their click-n-run but it cost 49.95 a year for unlimited software. But you can get it free at MSFreepc.com. Well, check it out if you want.

Nobody else have any ideas on how to get rid of this cdrom2/ mount on my laptizzy?

have you tried
umount /mnt/cdrom2
?

If it will never be used again you could remove the entry for it in /etc/fstab .

Hey thanks! umount worked great! Now if i can get my damn programs to run. I got Opera to install and I can locate .SH file that im guessing is the executable but It dosent do anythign when i run it. Via command line or via GUI so i dunno what to do. the one in /usr/bin

Should be in /usr/local/opera or usr/lib/opera

I bet if you just type opera at a command line it will run. I've never installed it so I don't know. You can do a search for all files with the word opera in it (Do it as root).
find / | grep opera