Hi folks...

I have just installed Mandrake 9.1 on its own 60GB HDD (XP is on 120GB HDD) and am trying to navigate my way around - this is my first experience with Linux.

ie - I am about as newbie as one can get.

Any tips for configuring Mandrake, hints, pointers whatever to make my learning process easier would be appreciated.

Kit used:

p4 @ 2.5GHz
788 MB RAM
1 x 120GB HDD for XP
1 x 60GB HDD for Mandrake.
GA-8ST800 board.

Cheers.

well i like to use kde for the desktop has some what of the same feel as windows.
google is always a good way to look if you run in trouble. and this place is always a
good place to ask for help. As far as tips i would sugest to play around in it. For me
that was best thing to see what there is to it. Im still new to linux. It is fun to learn
and lets you configure pretty much everything you want.

Plenty to read...plenty to play around with...


I'll be back.

yes there is. i really dont have anytips to give im still learing
and i found google to be my bestfriend when i have question
and if i cant find on there i come here to see what i can find.

If in doubt, make sure you are using googles linux facility, it should "throw up" about as much as you're going to need.

If, like me, you like to meddle with the "eye candy" type stuff, to make the system look "as smart as a guardsvan", then surf to the "penguin liberation front", then in para 1.2 you'll see a link to "easy urpmi" (if you haven't already worked it out, urpmi is mandrakes version of rpm manager, it's "alledged" that it's as easy as the debian "apt-get" system, but I haven't found that to be the case - I digress), follow the instructions in the easy urpmi page, select mirrors close to your location (usually makes sense), then if you selected the mirrors properly (like the contrib stuff for plf and texstar) you just do a cut and paste (again if you haven't worked it out yet, highlight it, then ctrl C, open a konsole/terminal, and click the centre button/wheel/both left and right together or maybe ctrl V) the code stuff should start doing stuff immediately, but you might have to press enter (well I only had too when it seemed to have stopped). Once you are back to the $ prompt in the konsole/terminal, minimise or close it.

Now open the mandrake control centre, then the rpmdrake+ facility and let it do it's stuff, then click on the radio button for "all packages" by groups button, again let it do it's thing. Then when the list of choices/groups opens just click on graphical desktop, graphics, kde and user interface.

You'll then see lists of stuff that you can install, you are looking for stuff called things like "kdeartwork", "kdemoreartwork". The ones that end in mdk are either on your install disc's, or they will download from mandrake, the ones with plf are obviously plf, and the ones with tex are texstar modified/written (dunno about the plf people, but I understand that texstar is a bloke in texas, who writes and/or modifies software for mandrake i.e. stuff that mandrake might not include for various reasons.

There's some mega good looking shit to play with out there - and the above is an easy way to get it. There's also an absolute mountain of stuff here, but I haven't always found it the easiest to install - not difficult, just takes a little practice/experience (you'd need to check out "installing from source" - there's advice that Jeremy (LQ founder/root) has written/posted here somewhere).

regards

John

p.s. and hello London and New York, I'm just off to scrape some seagull shit off my car

in addition to bigjohn's post here are some invaluable links that have served me well.

http://sourceforge.net/ (these folks are doing some amazing work)
http://www.tldp.org/ (if it is to be read, you'll find it here)
http://linux-newbie.sunsite.dk/lnag_commands.html (this link is from a forum search)

you've found this site so your on the right track. you will be amazed at the information that can be found here at this forum through forum search.

here is a link.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/search.php

welcome to LQ and good luck.

p.s. post any success as it adds to the forum knowledge base.

Thanks heaps guys - looks like I will be spending my two weeks off work in front of the PC...

I have a quick question unrelated to the above.

I cannot seems to be able to create directories or move files into any directory, other than the one set for myself in /home.

When using Nautilus, all directories have an orange pen symbol with circle with a slash through it in the right hand column - I am supposing that thi means that they cannot be modified.

Logging on as root rectifies this though - I can create directories anywhere (as one would expect).

Is there anywhay when logging on normally, I can create directories anywhere I want? The reason I am asking is when Linux set up the partitions on its HDD, it set home to 350MB which is small.

/mnt is on its own 20GB partition

Any help will be greatly appreciated, but for a windows user of ten years or so, this is all a bit new...



Many thanks in advance.

(PS - more questions to come, no doubt)

Welcome to linux. Persevere, and I think you'll grow to love it.

There are very good reasons why you should not go around making directories everywhere. There are also very good reasons why you should not just log on as root to enable yourself to do this.

If /home is too small, and you have only just installed, I'd re-install and make /home bigger before you do anything else - you might have to choose manual-partitioning.

I do not understand how "/mnt is on its own 20GB partition".
/mnt is supposed to be a directory, on which you can mount other filesystems (eg disks or disk partitions with windows on them). Maybe you have something mounted on /mnt and that is what is a 20GB partition?

It may be best to reinstall at this stage. I had to do this about 5 times over the first week I used linux, because I kept making fundamental mistakes, and generally messing things up. You get better at it. Five months later, I love it.

Hope this helps.

Hello tredegar...

1. When checking the properties of /mnt it says that t has 19GB of 20 free - this equates to one of the partitions on the HDD.

All other directories when checked for properties say that 34 of 36GB are free, which equates to another patition.

Seems a bit of a waste if 59 of a 60GB drive is inaccessible - ie all I can get to is /home which is on a very small partition.

How then am I able to save GB's worth of data? Is the only answer to re-install and make /home say a 55GB partition?

Or am I looking at this completely the wrong way?

2. Is it easy enough to uninstall? Is it as simple as going into windows, deleting the linus paartitons on the linux drive and installing from scratch? Am I right to presume that I will get an option on how big /home can be?

I really dont want to leave the majority of the 60GB drive empty - seems a bit od a waste...


Once again - many thanks for patience and help.

Its all new to me...but I think I am hooked already

TSCRYPTO, I'm not sure what's going on here. What do you mean by "checking the properties of /mnt"?

It would be helpful to see the output of the following command:

cat /etc/fstab

Do you know how to do that? (Open a terminal - the shell/screen icon on the taskbar, type, or copy the command, press return, select the text it outputs by swiping with the left mouse button down and paste it (middle mouse button button) here.)

The output from

fdisk -l

would also be useful, but you have to be root to issue this command.

Oops. See above post: What I mean is

fdisk -l /dev/hda and
fdisk -l /dev/hdb

That'll show the partition info for your disks. Also, it's "minus ell", not -1

Back again (Mandrake is on another machine).

I had a go at re-sizing one of the partitions and mucked things up - Linux wont boot up at all.

I had a bit of a think too and have worked out that I had unnecessary partitions on the HDD at the time of installation and not knowing what was what mounted / on the 36GB one, mounted /mnt on the 20GB one and what was left over became the swap file partition and home.

Am going to reformat the drive, create one small partition and leave the rest. Hopefully at re-installation time, the small one can be used as that for /, the rest for home and the swap file partiton.

Sound feasible?

OK
Shame about the resizing - maybe you should have unmounted the partition before you did this, but I'm guessing here.
Getting the partitioning right was one of the reasons I had to reinstall so many times.

You have 60GB free.
Give root 15GB
Give swap 2x your RAM ie 1.6GB, small I know, but more than enough.
Give /home 15GB

That leaves about 10GB free for later use eg installing a different distribution, or if you read up about mounting and /etc/fstab, you'll realise that this spare partition can easily be mounted as /home/TSCRYPTO/MP3Files if you ever needed 10GB of these in your home directory. Linux is neat.!

Good luck with the reinstall.

Cheers mate - re-install will be happening shortly...

Hopefully I will be able to report back with some good news.

Re-install seems to have gone OK.

I re-partitioned the HDD in windows first.

Root has 10GB

Home has 40GB

Spare 9GB

But...the swap file partiton set itself up at only 500MB. Way smaller than recommended above.

Is this goin to be a problem and if so, id it easy to re-size this partition?

Cheers