Well I installed Linux a week ago on a machine that i got from my school.

System Specs.
P3 450Mz
192Mb Ram
Rage 128 video card. 32Mb version
CD Drive
Zip 250 Drive internal
Floppy Drive
On board crystal audio sound.

8Gb hard drive Setup in this fashion
2.3 Gb Windows 2000 (kept in case i need an emergency windows computer.
500Mb swap
2.5Gb directory
1.8Gb Home directory

Oh and No connection to the internet.

Ok well first i need to say that i am a very technological person. I am a major geek. But this is my first linux box. And i love linux but i have a buch of issues to iron out to make it better.

So installation went smothly and i got it dual booting Windows 2000 and Mandrake 10 no problems. Ok.... Strait to the problems.

The major issue is the fact that i am trying to install games and i keep getting errors that i need many different liberarys. SDL is the biggest one. i manually downloaded the lib's that the programs were asking for and some of them will not install.

List of Probems
1. Lib problems i will post what are the messages later becuase I am not at that computer.

2. USB key: I can read off the key just fine and that is how i transfer data to the linux machine but how do i set linux to allow write access to it. Every time i try to set the permissions linux says i cant modofy a protocal divice.
3. Zip Drive: same as the Key drive

Well i have to get some sleep so i had to rush this

Please help and ask questions i will post more problems later but having the USB key be able to write to would allow me to show the exact problems.

Thanks All in advance

You'll have to set permissions for non-linux-system drives (USB, ZIP, Fat partitions) in fstab (/etc/fstab). I'm still trying to figure out WHY it worked (what the numbers represent and how to tweak this config finer), but adding "umask=000" to the 4th column of the fstab entry of the FAT patition did the trick for me.

will this work for removable drives?

Dunno, try and see

Come to think of it, CD-ROM is in fstab, isn't it. It's not exactly a removable drive, but removable media, and fstab only says how to deal with it once it's mounted. Same should apply to USB keys and the like.

I am not sure
what exactly do i change in fstab

Hi,
I've been messing around with Mandraka 10 for about 2 months now so I'm not quite an expert With regards to fstab I found this adress http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html very handy. All I need to know now is why Mandrake itself seems to insist on putting an extra line in my fstab on full auto that mounts my ntfs partition as an ext2 partition (sigh), but that's another topic. I hope the link helps and wish you good luck, and may the google be with you

for the SDL. Use the installer that comes with mandrake and install the rpm. search for SDL. man 10 has the latest or very close to the latest SDL that you need. this should fix your SDL problem. you will only really get any SDL install errors from the tar.gz. This is usually due to already having some version of SDL installed. I do know that the latest SDL that man 10 installs will work with most recent games. I have not had 1 game not work with the Man 10 SDL installed from their disk. If you can get the actual error message that would help alot. Now hehe. Man 10 is more of a headache then not. so I am back in man 9.2. One other thing.

<snip>
Ok well first i need to say that i am a very technological person. I am a major geek. But this is my first linux box. And i love linux but i have a buch of issues to iron out to make it better.
<snip>

you can be a very technological person in windows. but Linux/Unix is a whole new ball of wax. Takes a bit getting used to. If you liked DOS and other command line stuff. You will like Linux/Unix. takes a bit getting used to. some things are hard to see or find. In time though. It gets easier.

I searched the install program and it says it cant find any entries with the name SDL. Checked the remove program and all the SDL libs are already installed. Also how do i save the changes to the fstab file. I know i need to be root to do it but how?

seems that SDL will not update. it nags and tells you that the lastest SDL cannot be updated or installed. There may be ways around this. I have not read or found a way to do this. If you have time to kill. I know the long way works.

First try doing this. and see if it will work for you.
try installing this SDL rpm.
http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-de...2.7-1.i386.rpm , This development SDL rpm should work. I never tried it though. but the FAQ on the SDL website says this should work if the other RPM's will not update your SDL library. If it doesn't. then you may have to uninstall the SDL's that you have installed. Grab the tar.gz's and install the tar.gz. I do know that if you install the tar.gz's. it will install and will compile, setup and will work for you.
That is the way I did it and it works great. now of you want sound. You will need the SDL mixer. Try that rpm link above first. if it doesn't work. then we can do the tar.gz way. It is a longer way. But it will work for you. good luck.


NemoSwitch

I had problems with the binary so i did the tar.gz way and also did it for SDL_image and SDL_mixer, and SDL_net, and SDL_TTF. I think most of them finally worked with the Tar.gz install. But SDT_TTF refueses to make. It keeps saying that it has a problem with Freetype 2.

But... Here is what my Fstab file says.

Now... how do i edit it so that my USB key can have write acess. Also what is going on with 3 entires for it. I have 3 icons on my desktop for the drive and only 1 accesess it. Could this have something to do with the fact that I used diffrent USB ports for the key?

Please tell me what to add and also how to allow saving the changes to the Fstab file. This is the biggest issue right now becuase it will allowme to transfer data and code more easily.

It's only a guess, but I'm surprised there's no /dev entry for the USB key. Maybe that's where the trouble starts?

ok first what exactly does that mean? and what do i need to change. Also still can't figure out how to get permissions to edit Fstab file.

A quickie for editing/modifying.

You open a terminal.

at the prompt type and then when it asks you, input the root password.

For info, "vi" is the default editor with mandrake.

So at the # prompt,

Once it's open, just to look at it, navigate with the arrow keys.

To change something, hit the insert key (you should notice the word "Insert" at the bottom).

With insert showing, change whatever it is that you want to change. When you've finished the changes, hit the Esc key and insert disappear's from the bottom of the screen.

At that point, you then hit to save and quit or hit to quit.

Alternatively you can used "kwrite" and do the mod like with a word processor, but you'd have to log in graphically as root first to do that.

Oh and if you decided to use a different editor (say Emacs or something), then the command's to save and quit etc etc are probably different (some of them like nano have a little guide at the bottom to say what the keystrokes for basic functions are). I suspect that you installed the base system doc's by default. they're usually found in /usr/share/docs (found via konqueror).

maybe this help's a little (though not much, as I know precisely bugger all about usb key's)

Norm

p.s. Yes, as per the examples, you must type the colon : before either the q or wq

/dev stands for "device". So what Linmix is saying is that this device (the USB key) does not have a "node" on the system which allows it to be used. All detected devices should have a node in the /dev folder; if you look in yours, you should see things like /dev/floppy, /dev/input/mice, /dev/cdrom, and /dev/usb. Inside the /usb folder should normally be nodes for the individual USB devices that have been detected (or something; I don't have any, as I don't use any USB devices).

You see this being used in your /etc/fstab file:

/dev(ice)/h(ard)d(rive)a(partition_designated)5, for example. Without going into why a particular HDD is "a" and another is "b" and why your CD drive is usually "hdc" (which has to do with how they're connected to the motherboard), or why a particular partition is designated as "5" when it's actually the second partition on the drive (which has to do with whether the partitions are primary or logical), this is the basic working example of what /dev is all about; if there was no /dev/hd* symlink present in the /dev folder, it wouldn't much matter what you put in /etc/fstab, as the drive could not be mounted, since the device would not exist to be mounted.

But if you have at least one working entry on your desktop, this is likely not your problem-- continue with your editing of /etc/fstab. I just wanted to answer your question.

Hope it explains things a bit.

thanks all now my final question is where should i put the "rw" command in my fstab file. I figure this is the line it should be in.
but inbetween what?