Hey all. I'll try to keep this short, but I already have a feeling that it won't be.
I'll start off by saying that I know *very* little about Linux. I tried SuSE about three years ago, for about a week. I did very little with it. I primarily used KDE and its accompanying applications: Konqueror, some e-mail client, xmms, and that was about it. I didn't get into it.
Then I tried Mandrake 9.-something about another year or two later. Same thing happened. Used it for a couple days and that was all.
Present: I have an old Packard Bell sitting next to my Windows box. I installed Mandrake 10 Community on it. I typically use it by running PuTTY on my Windows box. When shutting it down, I use the "halt" command, and hit the power switch about 5 minutes later. Whenever I boot it back up, I receive the "system was shut down uncleanly" message and am forced to run a chkdsk (I believe that's what it's called). What may be causing this?
I am also experiencing difficulty setting up RAID on a fileserver at work. I'm using a PCI Promise FastTrack RAID card with two Seagate 160 GB drives in a RAID 1 setup. Same operating system as above - Mandrake 10 Community. When I get to the point where I have to setup the partitions, it's seeing two separate drives: hde and hdg. I have absolutely no idea how to set this up. From my understanding, Linux cannot boot off of a RAID partition. How should I go about partitioning these drives? From what I've read, the boot partition would have to be on a separate drive or partition that *isn't* a part of the RAID array. Almost defeats the purpose of RAID, doesn't it? Or am I missing something?
Last two questions: where would you guys recommend that I start if I want to seriously learn Linux? Are there any good books or online documentation? I don't want to flood this entire forum with my posts.
Last question - and one that may cause debate - what distro would you recommend I use, as a beginner? Mandrake 10 Community is nice, but it's also a beta. I was thinking about trying Fedora, Debian, or the final release of Mandrake 10. Who knows?
Well, thanks in advance for your help.