Hi there,
I have breifly tried Suse 7.1 which worked well for me, except couldn't configure scanner; Red Hat 8.0 where had problems with printer incompatibility.

Have had Mandrake 9.0 installed via ftp by a work colleague. Made a mistake and wrongly entered ISP as hostname, and despite lots of help unable to fix this, consequently Gnome and KDE don't work properly.

I have a spare ofl drive 2Gb and considering installing RedHat 8.0 to that to see if I can do better. The bootloader has a floppy option. How do I configure bootloader during install to make sure I don't mess up current booting options. Have already messed up MBR when attempting RedHat install before.

Also - linux info generally says I ought to be able to print with Epson Stylus Colour 600 using CUPs, gimp-print and foomatic. Yet I couln't configure printer in RH 8.0.
Any help/ideas really appreciated. Beginning to give up on Linux. A real newbies1
Thanks for any help possible
rose

as i can see from what you have listed is that you need to clean all of your distros off of your drive.

Start with a clean slate : A tick I do is that I have windows delete all partitions and do my small partation NTFS first.

when you install red hat and you have made your boot disk you can selsect to boot from your floopy by selecting the options in your BIOS *commnly it is usally the frist section labled CMOS or somesort*

if grub was not a good boot loader and your not getting results then use LILO as your boot loader then try that.

Linux should be the main boot on you MBR so their is not much you could really do screw it up *unless you have 2 hard drives and remove one that had linux or windows on it* from what I can guess is that you already have the MBR on linux so dont worry about it.

if you want to boot from devices go in to your BIOS and do this order

CD ROM
A DRIVE
HARD DRIVE

do it in that order so if you install via CD it read the cd first and looks for a boot disk if one in in the slot.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
if your wanting to keep Red Hat a sepreat distro just make a partitions and your main loaders shouldent have a problem recongniszing it.

hope this helps

Thanks for your reply.

The recent install (dual) of Win 95 and mandrake was a clean one - just that I have messed up with hostname issue and don't seem able to fix it, even with heaps of help.

I am wondering if the fact it was installed from a server is not helping? Maybe I should purchase some disks?

Do you think it likely RG 8.0 could be configured to print on Epson?
Thanks
Rose

if you want to change the host name it is as simple as putting in what you want in your eth0 configuration for example name.name.ip is what a common name would be on a closed network. you can do this in the eth0 divece config utility.

if the IP installs are not working then I would suggest going for a CD install I never do IP intalls sense some have the thendancy to have problems. Red Hat 8 cd install is nice you should DL the 3 disks nessary and then try from there.

and thanks for asking me of all people to help you out. Next time ask Master C finniegan or acid kewpie they have a far more advanced knowedge base than I do

Thanks for all that info. I'll print it and try absorb it.

I asked you because you had replied to a post with info which seemed relevant to my questions. I am happy for anyone to try help out.

I am beginning to feel Linux is not for me, and yet got Suse 7.1 going okay, and RedHat except for printer.

Anyway thanks
Rose