Hello, all. I'm new to Linux ( like 3 days into it)... Currently running a dual boot Slackware 2.4 ( gnome) and WinXP machine. I have a list of burning questions that I'd love to have answered.

1. Is it possible for me to see a list of all hardware connected to the system? I know that the slackware installer detected most of my hardware, but I can't be sure which drive is what. I know hda is my first drive, hdb is my secondary, hdc is my CD-RW and hdd is my DVD-ROM, all that is pretty clear, but when I go into /dev I see a plethora of stuff... All very confusing. What am I looking at in /dev?

2. This is actually related to question 1... I've got a firewire card hooked up to my machine, with a removable drive attached. (NTFS) How do I mount that baby up? How do I find out what it is in dev? ( Just guessing that dev is where all devices are...) Additionally, do you guys have any advice on working with NTFS partitions/FAT32 partitions when running a dual boot system? XP doesn't recognise FAT32 partitions greater than a certain size, and this is a 200GB drive, so I'm at a loss. I really have no idea what I'll do with that drive. I still want to be able to access it in Windows, but I don't relish the thought of splitting it into that many partitions, since I work with large video files. Any thoughts?

3. When I first installed slackware, one of the first things I did was create a new user account to protect myself from... well, myself.. Now, I'm wondering how to give myself permissions for my NTFS drives. Is this possible, since they're read only (NTFS) drives? My boss tells me to edit my fstab. True?

4.Is there anywhere I can look up the directory structure of this particular linux build? The install seems fine at the moment, but I'd just like to know what evereything MEANS. bin? dev? ( devices? Just a stab in the dark here...) usr? (user?) local? Eh??? Hohoheh?

5. My boss tells me that after I've set everything up, I should try messing with the kernel, and stripping down everything I don't need in there. ( I did a full install, since I was told that I could remove whatever I didn't need whenever I wanted.) Any tips on that? I know, I know, it depends on what I want the machine for, but I don't need 5 differrent window managers and 3 different text editors do I? I'm just afraid that I'll break something that I can't fix.

Overall though, problems aside, using linux has got me excited about having a computer again!! Having a command line rocks. I've only had very little experience with IRIX, and everything was set up for me by an engineer at work. Now that I'm my own administrator, I'm beginning to see the flexiblity of it all. I was recommended Slackware because I wanted to learn about how Linux really works, so here I am. Great being here!! Thanks in advance.

Hello,

I'll try to answer question number 4:
Look at page http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/...ect_03_01.html and search for the section "Table 3-2. Subdirectories of the root directory". Answers to your question are in this table.

More generally, tldp.org is a very good page for an introduction to linux.

Best regards,

Benjamin

Excellent link dude. Checkling it out now.

also look at

http://linux-newbie.sunsite.dk/

it is an excellent resource for starters and will help you solve many of the above mentioned stuff.

I can try to help you with #3. Yes, to set permissions on mounted to partitions, fstab is the file to work with. First, the partition must be mounted. If you have not done this, you need to add a line similar to this one to your etc/fstab file.

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat uid=500,gid=500,umask=000,exec,dev,suid,rw 0 0

The vfat portion of the line is to specify a FAT32 partition, but you said you have NTFS. You can try changing vfat to ntfs, but if that doesn't work, try perusing this site: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/

If the partition is successfully mounted, then the uid=500,gid=500,umask=000,exec,dev,suid,rw part of the above line is what will allow you to have full read-write access to the partition for the logged on user.

For recompiling your kernel, I would recommend waiting a while until you're more familiar with your shiny new Linux box. If you leave out something you need but don't understand what everything is, it can become very frustrating.

It's actually pretty simple. You change to your kernel source directory, /usr/src/whatever kernel verion
then do a make menuconfig
which will present you with a menu to use to configure your new kernel.

after you've finished configuring, you do a make
do a make modules_install

once that's finished, you can copy your shiny new kernel image, called bzImage, to your boot directory as vmlinuzwhatever

Word of caution, don't over write your currently working kernel image. If you do and your new kernel won't work due to misconfiguration, you're left with no way to boot.

Now simply edit your bootloader's configuration and you're finished.

welcome to LQ, adp:

1) look into the command "dmesg", check out the logs in /var/log, and poke around in the /proc directory. also, if you have KDE/Gnome installed, I think they have some kind of graphical hardware browser thing.

2) for mounting, check out the man pages for fstab and mount (ie, type "man mount", etc.)

4) on the Linux Hierarchy, more than you probably want to know :
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html

Wow, talk about a response. Thanks for all the help. Looks like I have a lot of reading to do. I'll need a weekend or 2 to digest all this... Of course, I didn't take your advice, masonm, and I just tried to install the 2.6 kernel... ( was using 2.4) I couldn't resist... its like putting a big red "DON'T PRESS" button in front of me! I had to... Arg. Everything loads up alright, except I seem to have a black screen instead of the usual penguin and boot messages. Dropline Gnome still starts up but whenever I drop to init 3, I get a black screen again! I think I broke it, mommy. Still, this is the best fun I've had in years with anything. Its like the most addictive thing, worse than heroin. I'm up till 6 a. m. every morning dicking around trying to get Linux to work properly... Whenever I get something to work, BAM! Euphoria!! Har Har!! Der power!!

Adrian

If you're getting a black screen after exiting X, most likely it's a framebuffer issue. Manually open up lilo.conf (which is in the /etc directory), and change the "vga = xxx" setting to either a resolution you are certain that your video can handle (eg, "vga=771" which is 800x600 with 256 colors) or just play it safe and change it to "vga=normal". Save your changes, rerun the lilo program (as root, "/sbin/lilo" without the quotes) then exit X and restart it in order for the changes to take effect.

I can't promise that will fix the issue, but based on your description, it might. Good luck with it -- J.W.

Okay, I'll give it a go tonight. I wish I had my box in here so I could play with my settings.. Oh well. I'll be back after I try the fix. My boss reckons its a framebuffer problem as well... Something about the NVIDIA framebuffer? I guess I'll see. Good news is that IEEE1394 drive works now. It must have been something to do with the hotplug system... I can mount the thing now.

Thanks for all the help.
Ad

excellent!

go ahead and experiment - remember you can have a number of different kernels installed simultaneously, and as long as you don't delete your old kernel and just add the new kernel entry to lilo, the worst that happens is you fall back to the working version. check out the 2.6 install thread at the top of the LQ Slackware forum for more. and post your progress here, too.

other resources to check out this weekend if you haven't - the howtos at http://www.tldp.org, run a search for Rute User's Guide, and the great manuals available at the mandrake and redhat sites. good luck.

When you *finally* get everything working properly, then deliberately start fscking around with stuff in the hope that something breaks so's you can fix it - *then* you have an addiction problem!

As for #1, `lspci` will give you details of everything on the mainboard, including chipsets, but not peripherals. Handy for when you rebuild your kernel. (You know you want to...)

just tweaked the 2.6 kernel update. Yeah, I forgot to include VESA support. Pretty silly thing to miss, really. I haven't had the chance to make a bzImage file yet, nor make install ( The car pool was outside... Bah. ) but 'll try it out tonight! Nother question... I've got a Netgear Wireless LAN card (WG311) and a 3com Wireless Router&Modem. Any ideas on how I'd get my wireless connection up and running? I haven't called the ISP yet, but I'll be doing that once I get my salary this month.) In the meantime, thanks again for all the help, I'll post my progress tommorow along with my system specs. Hokay, now I've got to get back to work, lots to do.

Ad

Hello again, I've got another little problem... Its just me being anal, really, but I've noticed after changing my desktop resolution to 1280x1024 in the GNOME GUI, my graphical greeter and standard greeter login screens seems to be the wrong resolution every time I start up. Where can I change the default resolution of the graphical greeter? ( Its stuck on 1024x786) At first I thought the setting was located in the gdm config file, but It wasn't there. Any ideas? I know, its a stupid thing really, but I want to have a nice login screen, not one that I have to scroll around with my mouse just to check the time.

If the greeter is gdm then I think it's gdmsetup (or gdm-setup, or gdmconfig...I forget which!)