For 3D support for your card take a look here http://www.xig.com/. But their products are sort of expensive, as for me if I had problems with XFree86 (my video card wouldn't be supported or else), I'd save 100 bucks for their product.

Most of my replies are going to be based on command line entries, but I will be as explicit as possible. I use Mandrake daily, but as each distro's cute GUI tools are different, and which ones you have installed may vary, getting advice on them may be harder than using the command line as your interface. I prefer the command line for many reasons, that you wouldn't necessarily want to read right now, nor would I be as articulate as is probably necessary. Until, as you deftly pointed out, we can speak directly to the computer, the command line is going to remain the best way to interface with the system. GUIs, by definition, are just many layers of abstraction. For the verbose version, if you're not tearing your hair out over all of this, you may want to read this little essay.


At this point I'm a little confused. What is the current status of the operating systems on your machine and the space that each of them is alotted. In Mandrake, to find out the status of the current hard drives, open a shell in KDE, an xterm, whatever as long as there is the good old command line and try:

df -h

This will show the disk usage and the -h will put it in human readable amounts: Mb, Gb etc.

Also, in order to see if you have a bunch of un-used space on the hard drive, try:

cfdisk

This will give you a listing of the current partitions in your harddrive. In windows terms, /dev/hda1 would roughly be equivalent to C: Mandrake probably cut the drive into 4 partitions by default.

Also, to make sure that Mandrake detected and is actually running your system as SMP, try this:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

If there are 2 listings, one for a processor 0 and one for a processor 1, then that is taken care of. A few years ago this would have required a kernel re-compile no matter what distro you purchased.

Linux USB support is flaky at best. If you are having problems with any USB device, please post this as a seperate thread, probably best under Linux-General.

The Lite-On CDRW is almost definately an IDE hard drive. In order to get this to work, you will have to enable SCSI emulation on kernel boot. Try the following:

lsmod

If you see a module called 'ide-scsi' listed in the left-hand column, then you do not need to do the following.

modprobe ide-scsi

The best GUI front end I have found for burning CDs is XCDroast, which is available from www.xcdroast.org Go there and there should be an RPM for Mandrake 8.0.

Also, I don't want to start in on sound before the fact, but is that working for you?

In order to get movie playback out of the DVD player, I highly recommend Xine, which I should poke around about before mentioning. In order to play DVDs, however, you will be technically breaking the law as there is no licensed DVD codec for linux. Then again, I plan on J-walking twice on the way home, which I have to do now so I'll start back on this later.

However, to keep there from being confusion...

Xfree86 is the base level of windowing for Unix, Linux just happens to be one OS it runs on. The Linux kernel just controls all of the hardware, from the hard drive to the keyboard, blah blah blah. Think of it in Windows terms, and I mean the older windowseseses, where Windows sat atop, and was much more intrinsically tied to, the simple command line interface of DOS. This dichotomy is somewhat of an over-simplification, but its good enough for now.

Also, the reason Mandrake 8.0, 8.1, and 8.2Beta don't have XFree4.2.0 is that XFree4.2.0 is almost, but not quite, six weeks old. The 8.2Beta came out right around the same time. There are a few fringe distros that have the brand spanking XFree already on them, but I wouldn't in good consience recomend them for a newbie.

The instructions Mara gave are exactly what you need to do to get the new XFree to work. I can provide an even simpler step by step if you would like.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks for your excellent response. I did say I posted a reply stating that I had completed the Xfree installation. However for reasons I won't go into, it got posted in a new thread by mistake. I have though taken note of everything you have said and will turn my attention to these matters as soon as this initial issue is resolved. One thing at a time... as the saying goes.

Anyway here is the response I posted: Sorry if it seems a little verbose, but I thought it best to provide as much detail as I could.

Thank you very much for the last piece of advice, that seemed to go great. However not unexpectedly I ran into a couple of glitches. I ran the setup for the Xfree86 modules in terminal mode (no X as suggested). All appeard to go smoothly, except I had no idea how to get back out of terminal mode and restart my login screen with the selection of GUis. How do I do this? What is the command to restart the GUIs? I tried rebooting, but Mandrake seemed to just remember my previous settings and only started up in console mode.

Also during the install a couple of things happend. Nothing major I think though.

Firstly I got a warning which read as follows:

You appear to have a termcap file /usr/share/doc/vim-common-6.0/termcap

This should be edited manually to replace the Xterm entries with those in /usr/xllR6/lib/X11/etc.termcap

Note the new entries are required to take full advantage of new features, but they may cause problems when using older versions of Xterm.
A trminal type 'xterm-r6' is included for compatability with the standard X11R6 version of Xterm

What does this mean and how do I edit these entries?

Also when I couldn't figure out how to start the GUis again (KDE) I tried rebooting in safe mode to see if this would let me start up next time with a GUI. It didn't, but it did give me another warning. It read as follows:

Warning: it looks like there are some old *.so modules in usr/x11R6/lib/modules/codeconv.

The state of the system is not in sync with the current/updated configurations. You are allowed to make it current, or continue with the current configurations.

Here are the commands to execute:

Changing permisions of file /usr/sbin/ppd from 105755 to 104755

Changing owner of file /var/ftp to root.root

Changing owner of file/var/ftp/pub to root.ftp

Again what do I write and where do I change these entries?

(The* in *.so did'nt seem to be in upper case)

Lastly, I noticed in terminal mode that only one of my processors is listed. I noticed this in Harddrake too. I saw somewhere something about addiing a module in Mandrake to enable SMP support, I didn't pay much attention. It was just a file that was available for download and I'm not at all sure what it was, I was too busy looking for other things. What is the deal here? I can't remember where I saw that file, or even what it really was. (I must have been on about 3000 web pages in the last week). Is there a way to fix this and where can I get the module/s and/or files I need to do this?

So far you guys have been great. If I can get these things done I can get on with my life again and begin to enjoy learning about Linux. I do hope I don't seem like too much of a pain, but I am picking things up slowly.
I can almost see the attraction of this command line stuff, as when you do something that works, it is a little bit of a buzz. However I am still struggling with the basics, and therefore any help you can offer is greatly appreciated.

Yours trully,

Q

PS

BTW do you guys have a live chat channel, like on IRC or something? That would be neat!

I wish. There is a thread going on about trying to get Trickykid to start one, but I think its purpose was for the regulars here to have somewhere to bitch about job/ex's/work/etc. From the command line, in order to re-start x,

startx

The installation of XFree 4.2.0 may have left you without an XF86Config file. If X refuses to start normally, or much more likely, the screen setting will look quite demented, you may have to try one of the following:

./usr/X11/bin/XFree86 -configure (although the 'c' may be a 'C', its been a while)

Then follow the command that it gives you. You will have to kill that X test manually with ctrl+alt+backspace. If you find that file to your liking, copy it over the existing XConfig with:

cp /root/XF86Config /etc/X11/XF86Config

The file may be named with a -4 after it, if so, substitute that in.

If this is still not to your liking, you might want to try:

./usr/X11/bin/xf86config

This is a text based configurator, and may or may not have support for your card.

The last time I installed Mandrake 8.0 on my dual chip PPro it installed for me an SMP kernel. As far as I know, and I'm pretty certain, it is not possible to enable SMP support by simply inserting a module. This will probably take a full blown kernel re-compile... but I'm still leary as to why you do not have an SMP kernel on your machine as Mandrake is wont to do that if it sees that you have an SMP board. Again, it may be that the hardware is too new for Mandrake's installer to figure that out on its own.

Those permission changes aren't very mission critical, and if someone else doesn't post back how to fix it, I'll post that tomorrow. I keep having to go places...

Cheers,

Finegan

Well we are almost there perhaps... I couldn't resist giving the install another go, just to see if I could restart X, but this was before getting your response. It may be no surprise to you that it didn't work. It just freaked out, went black and spewed a lot of gibberish on the screen. The long and short of it was "X cannot start... No screens installed.... gibberish..... if your card is newer than 8 months try going to the official Xfree86 wed site and downloading the latest version.... more code/gibberish.... can't start, no driver installed.
So I know this isn't accurate as there is a 2D driver for the Radeon 8500 (3D for 7500) and a 3D one on the way with the next release. Are you saying then that if I do as you advised this should resolve my problem? I do hope so.
As for SMP support, yes I agree this is confusing. My interest in Linux was sparked because I believed it offered SMP support by default. However there are two versions of the Kernal installed on my computer, one is an SMP version and the other is a single processor version. It seems that the single processor version is the kernal used by defualt in Mandrake 8.
Ultimately, I am just messing around here, just learning what I must do to achive a full Linux install with a later version of Mandrake, or indeed another more advanced 'distro'. Nonetheless once it is learned it will not be forgotten, so the practice I recieve here will no doubt prove very valuable indeed should future problems arrise, as no doubt they will.

Many thanks,

Q

Ps

It would be nice to do a full xfree86 update of Mandrake, however I did manage to extract the driver files from the Xfree86 module I downloaded from the net. I tried simply copying and pasting them into the driver file in my computer. However as expected this didn't work. Nothing is quite that easy in Linux (nor in Windows too, since several changes must be made to the registry too). Is there potentially a way to exatract these drivers and install them individally, or is this limited to the version of Xfree I have?

Hmm... You'll almost definately have to install XFree 4.2.0 using that cute install.sh in order to get X to work even somewhat reliably. If Mandrake put an SMP kernel in your machine, then bootng to it is a rather simple procedure. If your bootloader is LILO, the it will probably be quite easy.

Find the SMP kernel, which will either be at the top level directory of '/' or possibly in '/boot', I haven't messed with mdk installs in a while and the one I have left is no longer anywhere near defaults, so my apologies, but it will be in one of these two places. The kernel should be named something like: vmlinuz-mdk-SMP or something like that. Write that name down very carefully.

Also, to make certain everything is cool, try this:

ls /lib/modules

This should show 2 directories, one for the uniprocessor kernel and the other for SMP. If there is not a directory for the SMP kernel, go no further. There probably will be...

You will have to hand-edit a configuration file now. I recomend for starters using pico, the commands are at the bottom of the screen and rather intuitive.

pico /etc/lilo.conf

now manuever down to the entries for the kernels. You should add something like this:


image = /vmlinuz-mdk-smp (or whatever its name was)
root = /dev/hda1
label = SMPsmokinonDaAMDs (or Bob, as I usually call them)
read-only
# Linux bootable partition config ends
To save, ctrl+o, to exit, ctrl+x.

Then you have to re-run lilo so it writes this to the master boot record, always referred to as the MBR, the very front of the hard-drive. Do this with:

lilo

Depending if you are using Reiser or not, that read-only above may have to be read-write. Basically, if in doubt, use the same setting as whatever other entry is there.

If lilo does not error, reboot the machine and you should have the option for the smp kernel. If lilo does error, change those things about, possibly making the label shorter, make certain the root=/dev/hda1 is right (it should be the same as the other entry). Do not re-boot the box. If exasperated, remove all changes and re-run lilo just to make certain you can get back in.

On more general terms, the set-up options for X that I posted above should still work, also, I wouldn't give up on Mandy just yet. Each distro has their own little quirks that are hard to get around at first, but learning one's quirks before shifting to the next may help. If you are just exasperated with Mandy, I would recommend a coin toss between the newest SuSe, 7.3 and RedHat 7.2. I'm going to be installing the former on a Sparc station in about a week and the later is on my athy box and took exactly 45 minutes compared to win2k's 3+1/2 hours. Juggling things around in Linux is much different than windows. In Linux, there are major differences between every version of even minor applications. There is virtually no difference between 98 and 95... A good example is X. When I first put Linux on my main Athlon box, the XFree at the time was 3.3.6 I think. I had a lot of problems with X displaying correctly with my ATI card until 4.0.1 came out. This took about 2 weeks. Overall, this was only ten months ago. The pace of improvement in Linux is just about impossible to keep up with unless you want to install a package a day or rely on something cute and automated like RedHat's up2date or Debian's apt-get.

Post back with anything new,

Cheers,

Finegan

Man this sucks... I don't know how much longer I can go on doing this... Its all getting very familiar, install driver... Windows freaks... Reinstall Windows.. Install another driver Windows freaks... Reinstall Windows. Install Linux seems stable. Install Xfree drivers for Linux. Linux freaks... Reinstall Linux, Try install again, using different commands... Linux freaks, reinstall Linux and on and on it goes.
Oh well never mind, the long and short of it is that none of those commands worked.
I can do no more than post what exactly happend when I tried (yet again) to install the new Xfree86 modules. Maybe some folks wont like this, but I don't know what else to do. And just in case you are wondering I made sure I was root throughout the process.

So here goes : installed the Xfree86 4.2.0 modules, rebooted gave the command startx. It freaked and died and dropped back to the command prompt.Here is what I saw:

Xfree86 Version 4.2.0?X
Window System
(Protocol version 11,
revision ), Vendor release 6600
Release date: 10 January 2002
If the server is older than 6-12 months, or if your card is newer than the above date, look for a newer version before reporting the problems.
Build Operating System: Linux 2.4.9-13 smp i686 [ELF]
Module loader present
Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
(tt) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational,
(WW) Warning. (EE) error, (NI not implimented, (??) unknown.
(==) Log file "var/log/XFree86.0log", Time Wed feb 27 19:30:41 2002
(++) Using config file:/etc/X11/XF86Config-4
(EE No drivers available.
Fatal server error:
no screens found

I tried writing /etc/X11/XF86Config

But it just said permission denied, even though I was in admin mode.

I also tried to look at the log, but it again said 'access denied.'
Has anyone got a clue about what is going on here?

Are there any terms that will enable me to configure Xfree for My Radeon 8500 card? Or must I wait for a subsequent release?

Regards,

Q

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the above seems to show me as having an SMP kernel installed. However in the terminal screen at the very top it only lists me as having 1 processor. At least it correctly identifys it as an AMD MP processor, but if its only using one then that sucks bad. I paid a load of extra cash for that. Any ideas what is going on here too? Harddrake can only see one too. They show up fine both in Bios and in in Windows. In Windows I can watch them both working together.
Any ideas on this are welcome.

Regards,

Q

Well, the kernel you got is compiled for one processor. It will work a lot better after a compilation with SMP support...

Phew... well this does go on a bit... Linux certainly isn't an easy O/S to set up. Mmm well ok, go on then, how do I go about recompiling to enable SMP support, and how do I know if any the commands I use will actually work? The guy 2nd above was very helpful, but maybe he was giving instructions for a different 'distro' and not specifically Mandrake 8.0. Hardly a criticism, as I find it hard to imagine how anyone can remember all this stuff. Maybe if he, or anyone could give the process a go, their instuctions might be more specific to my particular instance? I can only hope I suppose... Or give up and wait ayear till Linux catches up with my system. (Though this is harldy an ideal scenario).

Regards,

Q

A bit of advice you could use unless you dont mind re-installing OS's all the time.
Format your hard drive & create your windows partition using DOS FDISK but do NOT create your Linux partition's this way.
Install Windows before doing anything else.
Secondly create your linux partition's using diskdrake or whatever it is in Mandrake (do not create your Linux partition using fdisk)
Always install Windows first if you are going to dual boot.
Hope this saves you a few headaches!!

Yeah man, you would think that would be a sensible idea, exept when you install something Linux doesn't like, like a new video driver Xfree86 component and then can't start X again, you don't have any option but to reinstall the O/S again. Besides NT/XP won't even boot (it will the first few times) if it even as much as sniffs that you have, or indeed previously have had a Linux partition on your disk. To be honsest I'm getting a little tierd of all the hoops you have to jump through to get anything to work in Linux. I did get a 3D driver for the Radeon 8500 called the accelerated-x, but I was told that in order to get it to work I would have to manually compile the server on my own from source. I mean for Christ's sake who want's to spend seven hours sitting compiling code just to get even basic features on a computer to work? I mean who has the time? Unless that's all you want to do and can afford to spend every minute of your waking day doing nothing else? Windows may suck, and it does so in a trully royal way, however until Linux reaches a stage where even everyday ordinary users with no or very little programming experience can use it it will never replace windows as the consumers main choice of O/S. Sure there is nothing wrong with giving programmers total access to the system should the choose to do so. However there is equally nothing wrong with providing a genuine choice, whereby inexperienced users can enter a novice mode, where all the most complex features and applications are automated for them. If the choice was there, hardcore Linux users could just select their level of experience and the level of control they want to have over processes and applications within their systems. Linux gurus are good at promoting the idea of 'choice'. They swear the driving force behind Linux is to provide computer users with a genuine alternative to Windows and other commercially based O/S. Yet when it comes down to it, for those who just use their computers as work tools, or for entertainment/amusement or both, and who find programming uninteresting and who find Linux a little impenatrable, the usual, if not always so blunt advice is 'learn code, or feck off'. Many people already have carreers, family's and other intersets to concern themselves with and cannot afford to spend 24/7 stuck at their computers just so they can get a fekin' MP3 to play!
Maybe I'm burning my bridges here, but I'm not sure. It seeems that if you do ask too many questions and begin to show the extent of your inexperiience, that same old false sense of elitism creeps back in and continued requests for help soon get ignored. So I pose the question, is Linux an O/S intended for pissed off programmers only? From where I'm sitting it seems more and more like it is..
Yet I genuinely hate Windows, genuinely loath Bill Gates and genuinely wish there was a real useable alternative. So windows is unusable, totally unstable, probably run by the most corrupt Corporation in history, and Linux is so fekin hard, so time consuming to use, so always in a state of beta development that only hard core programers can get any real benefit from it. Undoubtedly it is a powerful O/S, I just think its a shame Linux programmers don't attempt to distrubute that power a little more evenly. What if my 67 year old granny hated Gates as much as we do? Hasn't she got a right to a genuine alternative too? Or the school teacher who teaches for 8 hours a day and then spends another 6 hours at home doing administartive stuff, or the homeworker who needs quick access to their computer for 10 to 12 hours a day? Must we all learn programming to satisfy the purist sentiments of the Linux community? I repeat my earlier belief that the ultimate goal in computing should be to dispense with the keyboard and mouse completely, and replace it with an effective contextural voice recognition system. While The GUI may not be an inteface that takes us any closer to that objective, neither do I feel is the command line, as there is very little that is naturally intuitive about command line interactions.

So on the whole it looks like I'm screwed, I can't use Windows and I don't have enough time to spend the next couple of years learning Linux. The end result is that ultimately I may be out of a job., That's how serious this whole thing is. No one's messing around here guys. There's a hell of a lot at stake. My case is probably only one of countless thousands and the sooner you realise this the better. Revolutions are supposed to be for everyone, not just about one elite group replacing another elite group. A power shift is not a revulution.

Well that's all I have to say, I don't expect anyone out there was about to offer any new suggestions anyway, so if I have upset anyone then it probably won't matter. But that's not what I intended to do. Anyway, thanks for trying, at least the few that did. Right now I have to go away and explain to a a lot of people why I can't deliver on a whole bunch of deals I made with them over the last two years.

Oh well, time to look for a new carreeer I think....

Regards,

Q


(Written 12 hours after trying toi install/compile linux to take a simple everyday video driver....)

Oh... and you had me up until there. I've got a friend, a reluctant windows user who's putting together his first new box in 4 years. He got the exact same card and Win2k.

He's on his 3rd install... and sitting around waiting for Windows to spend 2 hours foratting a 60Gb for NTFS adds up to half of the linux problem.

I've installed Linux on everything from a dual-chip PPro, to a bunch of ancient P1 133 laptops, to a brand new Athlon, to the buggy X-windows settings of laptops, and once... on a knockoff of a Palm Pilot. I'm not an elitist, I have a crap job and I don't know how to code... heck, I don't even know HTML all that well. I am however a junkie level hobbiest, but if I've learned anything in the sinlge year I've been playing with all of this, is that it will work.

You have very very new hardware and an operating system that was built for geeks, by geeks... they do it for fun, no one is getting paid, which is why the OS gets more powerful on an exponential scale and easier... on a geometric one.

I recommend one trick, a programmer term that usually doesn't help, but may in this case:

shotgun debugging.

Try the other current distros: The newest Mandrake, RedHat 7.2, SuSe 7.3, hell... maybe even Slackware. See what happens.

Cheers,

Finegan