I have been running the distro Mandrake 9.0 for about 2 weeks now. (Until the other night, when I switched to 9.2). Every day I would read for hours on end...trying to understand how to do many of the things that Windows had made simple for us.

Well - The thing is, when initially trying to install Mandrake on a slave drive, my primary hd w/ Windows XP crashed...(although if wasn't quite "windows" anymore, w/ all the 'adjustments' I had done to it, including a new shell and the removal of IE..lol)...So, it was then that I took this as a sign to completely do the "switch". "Forget Windows, I've been wanting to learn Linux for a while, now!" HAH!!! Not as 'easy' as I thought. We went through several modems to start w/, and finally realized it would accept none other than a hard modem.

Sooo....back to the 'Linux Project'. lol Now, the sound hasn't worked for the whole time, but I knew that I must first figure out how to install stuff. (yeah...that was fun) I read over some of the threads in here, in between reading man, info, howtos, and Mandrake docs. WHEW!!! Of course I tried alot of things in the terminal...they just never worked. Well, once, when trying to do 'some'thing w/ the sound, I ended up "redesigning", shall we say, my kernel. Needless to say, it still worked. But that was in 9.0 and I still wasn't getting any closer to understanding anything other than the basic file structure.

Last night, I was about to give up the whole thing and switch back to Windows, when I remembered all the reasons I hated Micro$oft. It was in my best interest to go watch a movie...(one of my favs...The Matrix)

Today, I came across the thread #283221. tg to theYimYeti and his link to the "installation guide"!!!! Through a few trial and errors, I was FINALLY able to install a tarball!!! Woohooo!!!! And it works!!! lol

Now......the sound, is another story. I have an Aureal Vortex 2 soundcard. So far, I haven't been able to find anything to activate it. (drivers, LKM's, whatever). If there are any suggestions here, I would LOVE to try them out.

thx so much.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...der=descending

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...der=descending

have you read thru the above search results for your sound issues??

LOL..........I have a bastardized install of 98se...........minus IE also..........and billl gates said it could'nt be done........ha!!

type 'lspci | grep "audio"' at the command prompt to see what chipset it uses.

LOL @ "bastardizing" windows!!

I did it to XP.

Anyhoo...I did the lspci | grep audio and it didn't give me a chipset #.

I have read through several "sound" topics, have tried several "methods" described...All to no avail. (Like I know what I'm doing anyways!! I'm still a nOOb!! Probably had the syntax wrong!)

Like I said, I've only been "using" Mandrake for about 2 weeks now. I don't know how to run ALSA or sndconf...I have tried!!! Reading just hasn't gotten me as far as I would've liked to have been. Most of the docs, info, man, and howtos are describing how to do something to someone who ALREADY KNOWS how to do it!! (that's just my interpretation...still haven't given up reading or experimenting.)

Besides the sound problem...Galeon and Mozilla just won't come up!! I mean, for a nOOb, I have SO MUCH work to do!! lol (it's worth it, once I figure out some more basics!)

lspci only works for root. Have you tried running alsamixer? Type m to unmute chanels. If you get it working save the levels with alsactl store
su
password
alsamixer
(press escape)
alsactl store

I switched from Windows XP to Mandrake 9.2 about a year ago. I knew zero about it. I had no idea that there were different distros and I thought "bash" was some kind of error. It took me a little bit of learning, but I soon was getting the hang of knowing where things were and common fixes.

I now run Mandrake 10.1 Official PowerPack and it's miles ahead of 9.2 in ease of use and functionality. It still has little problems here and there, but overall, it's great.

I'm all about being able to do everything I want and to never have to do any command-line. I guess I've been spoiled by Windows, but I like it that way none-the-less.

My main reason for posting this off-the-point reply is to tell you my experience that the latest version ususally fixes problems. Also, downloading the latest software for that version (Firefox 1.0, Gimp 2.2, Gaim 1.1.2, etc.) provides maximum happiness. Because newer versions have fixes discovered by others. It's my way of letting smart people fix my computer rather than me messing everything up.

hi kitten

looks like i'm in the same boat as u...after fiddling a bit with damnsmalllinux (www.damnsmalllinux.org) which is really cool, and installing a redhat 8 distro with an old cd set i had, i finally decided to begin experimenting in earnest with the distro thats *supposed* to be the simplest of em all, compared to windoze, mandrake ! and i'm sitting here in front of this box, laughing my a$$ off, wondering woohoo if mandrake is like this, imagine the rest LOL! -- mandrake not that simple at all, especially for a noob like me from xp land haha ! but i'm patient, and i'll take my time, and i'm learning a lil each day :-)

its funny, i just happened to glance at your post, and i'm like hey i'm doing the same stuff too !! reading man pages (eck!), googling (which is fun, and WORKS) etc etc.

anyway, wishing you too a revealing journey into linuxland ;-)

all the best!

-guy24x
mdk 10.1 official

ah...Found a few of the problems. Installed some "stuff" that mozilla probably needed from w/in the Mandrake Control Center, and also realized that I probably didn't have alsa installed, so I did a check from there and sure enough, there were the packages.

Btw - the first thing I managed to install was a better version of Gaim. The one that came w/ this distro wouldn't connect to yahoo and I have friends/family on yahoo.

So, now I've got a working IM AND I've got the Mozilla browser back! Woohoo! Two for me today! I was so happy that I did the dishes! lol

Next project - sound!! Ok, so when I tried to run alsamixer, as root of course, it returned the error "function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or directory". I take it this still means I'm missing something.

And, as far as "moving up" to 10 or greater, well, lets just say that I wanted to try RH 8.0 first, but, the cd won't boot. Oh well, I'll get around to it once I figure out how to do some more stuff on my current distro.

Yes, I'm a 'windoze baby' too, and I'm fighting w/ the ~evil~ command line, but that's because I'm surrounded by ppl who have NO IDEA what I'm talking about when I say that I no longer use WINDOWS!! Most, haven't a clue about Linux or the many distros it has...or what a shell is for that matter! lol And god forbid I should try to explain that the floppy drive is /mnt/floppy!!! Oh well.

Well, I'm off to see if I can do anything w/ my webcam. I'm closer to enabling that than I am the sound!

thx to all for the reply and support.

Mandrake has an alsa-utils package. I believe that this package provides the 'alsaconf' program. You need to be root to run it. It will install needed drivers and perform the configuration for you.

webcam before sound? :O OWAAO.. man.. that's...

well, i've started my journey in linux for an year... now i use.. gentoo (a source based distro), i started w/ fedora core 1, 2, 3! xP (the same creators as red hat), and then i've tried debian, and now gentoo.. i guess that fedora was really great.. because it detected everything.. for a start it was the best... well it seems difficult at the begining, but you will see that you'll understand about linux, faster than what you think. i've never used mandrake.. and i'm glad i didn't.. i guess!