I have only been a linux user for about a month now and I am having a few technical issues:I am using Linux Mint 5 Elyssa

Computer Details:
Dell Dimension 4400 (bought in 2001)
Pentium 4 1.6 ghz
512 megs of ram
ATI Rage 128 Pro

1)Anytime I go into the screensaver chooser under preferences and once while installing updates,my screen locks up,turns black and says (creating molecules..)in white letters across the top.
CTRL/ALT/Backspace does nothing when this happens.The only way to fix is to cold boot.I thought about upgrading the graphics card but all the ones I looked at require a pci express slot,which were not available when I bought this pc,so all i have are regular pci slots.I went into Envy NG and it could not find drivers and said it may be unsupported,but how can that be because I have graphics.

2)Everytime I open firefox I have to uncheck the work offline box in the file menu to use the web.Is there a way to permanantly uncheck that box?

3) I ordered my copy of linux off of ebay,because downloading it would have taken forever considering I have dial-up internet.It came with a bonus cd containing several folders with software packages,how do I install the software on cd into linux.It is linux software.

Any help with these issues would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Gary

Hi,

Welcome to LQ & Linux.

When you get the lockup as you say, can you get to a terminal with the 'ctrl-alt-Fn' where n could be 1-6 or higher if setup to have more terminals? I'm not sure as to how you have your distro setup to login after boot.

As a alternative to purchasing a distribution via ebay have you tried the local library or even a local junior college library? Most will let you download something as big as a distribution. That's one thing BillyBoy M$ did right with providing hardware and monies to support local internet access.

Sometimes, some particular screensavers will crash. This is often a problem with, e.g., screensavers which depend on Open GL if the graphics card/driver combo doesn't support Open GL. You may have to find a way of disabling them to progress (don't know Mint all that well and can't help further).

Are these package files (collections of .deb files in your case) or are they, e.g., .tar.gz files? If you've got .debs, they should be relatively easily installable with one of the package managers on your system (there are several for .deb systems; I'm guessing you've got synaptic, adept, kpackage and a few others).

For this particular application, kpackage is probably easiest of the GUI managers to set up to use a local collection, but you might find that isn't present in a Gnome system. If you are going to do this, it is probably better to copy the .debs to a directory on your hard disk; using them directly from the CD will probably lead to the package manager complaining about a missing repository on subsequent occasions.

If that fails, the command line utils (apt, apt-get etc) probably aren't too bad, if you can cope with using the command line, that is.

(If the programs on your CD are rpms, you could consider converting them with alien; or you might not. If they are 'tarballs' you might not want to go through the hassle of building them yourself. In any case, there is a danger that the packages are so out of date that you might not want to bother with them.)