very intimidated newbie...
 

Well I installed linux yestarday and suprise suprise within 24 hours had to install it again cos I messed up the first install so badly. I wanted to install mozilla 1.7 and java support - failed on both counts. I believe I did actually install java but it didn't do anything (after following the instructions). I got most of the way through the mozilla install (deleting anything I could find related to the previous version) but it refused to run the install wizard complaining it couldn't start the display or graphics or something. The thing is I want the tabbed browsing of mozilla 1.7 and the ability to run java programs such as azerus. Ok I thought I will download mandrake 10. So I did and waited the four hours to download the three disks burned them and the installer told me it had problems installing a few different packages so I burned the disk again and same error. So here I am after re loading up with the trusty 9.1 disks. I just don't get it you print off the instructions, follow them step by step and it still doesn't work. Hell I can't even listen to a cd cos I need a cable from the drive to the sound card. I think I can get a proggy that can play the cd without this but then I would need to install it and around and around I go. (oh I screwed up the other install cos I tried to install software using rmpdrake to make sure mozillas dependancies were satisfied, after I selected and installed the relevant packages linux said "reboot??? what the hell's that? oh dear!) where do I go from here? (that winxp disk on the shelf is winking and blowing kisses at me)

lol... are you asking a question, or just want some1 to give you a hug and tell you its alll gonna be okay ?

you go to the nearest bookstore, grab a few books on Linux and begin reading.
Don't try to run before you can crawl.

can't even crawl too hard. I'm not giving up. I like this os too much. I can see a whole lota re-installs coming my way, but to be fair that's the way I learned windows. If at first you don't succeed and all that!

linux is modular... if you break somthing, provided you can find what of the so called modules you have destroyed, a re-install is very rarely nessecery !

you will leanr more by fixing your mistakes than just re-installing.

maybe try a different distro or such if you don't like mandrake?

(Gentoo has a very easy installer, but it doesn't have every program, and its also not meant for people that don't know the command line (altho the docs an its web site are very good, but still need to know that command line or you might not know what to do)

by the way, you might want to check out firefox instead of mozilla itself, firefox is just the web browser, while mozilla comes bundled with the email programs, and everything else)

Okay, James, I'm a noob myself (3 mos and still running), but I've managed to get both Firefox and Mozilla up and running with Java, etc. Installing them is easy - all you do is download to whatever directory you want, then right-click on the tar.gz and select "extract here". That will put a MOZILLA folder right there. Click on the Mozilla folder and you will see a couple dozen files, etc. in front of you. One of them will be listed just as "mozilla". Click on that and you're immediately browsing! I also drag that file over to my desktop and create a link to the Mozilla folder, so I don't have to bore back into the files every time I want to browse.

Okay, now comes the tricky part - Java! Well, you can hope and pray that Mozilla will install it itself, (Mozilla says the Java Plug-in installs successfully), but it doesn't actually work. So, you go to Sun Java downloads and find the one that works for your version. I'm running SuSE and Fedora Core 2, so I don't know if this will be exactly the same for you, but I've ended up downloading the self-extracting file (not rpm). Then, I leave my browser open to their instructions page, while I sign into my terminal as SU (root), then CD (change directory) to where I have my Mozilla plugin file (in my case usr/local/mozilla/plugins) and then link the java program to that file by CAREFULLY typing the Sun Java instructions (by the way, there's a space between the "ln -s" and the "/"). Once you have linked the two, exit from the command line and restart your browser. Should be a link!!!! If not, you have the rest of your life to go and try again, right?

One more thing - here's a bit of online training that will get you started with command-line work for those times you need it: http://linuxsurvival.com/index.php?m...ceid=1&meid=-1

Once you've done that series, check this one out:
http://linux.org.mt/article/terminal

You said three packages were bad. You could download just those packages. CD to the directory containing the package and type:
urpmi <rpm-filename>.

Pressing the tab key will finish typing the filename after the first few letters (auto-completion).

Remember that the window manager is not linux, it is a seperate peice of the pie. Once you have installed Linux but have trouble with programs or X (the graphical user interface) You do not need to reinstall, For instance, say the graphical display keeps kicking you back to the console with an error, that does not mean you have to reinstall that just means you need to configure a configuration file called XF86Config or xorg.conf that is located in the /etc/X11 directory. Most problems can be fixed by manually editing text files that are just configuration files.

Thanks for all the replies. really appreciated.
justol'bob- I will give that a try, sounds good, cheers.

well mozilla 1.7 and java plugin is up and running now(cheers justol'bob). Can anyone tell me have to configure java so that I can run java programs such as azerus?

Oh, I thought it wasn't possible to download a file and it installs itself but that's basically what mozilla did so why can't other progs do the same?

[/quote]Oh, I thought it wasn't possible to download a file and it installs itself but that's basically what mozilla did so why can't other progs do the same?[/quote]

because mozilla is not downloading a program, its downloading a pluggin, and saving it to your home directory. which does not require root access.

plus, if you had programs that downloaded and installed themselves... well... then it would be almost as bad as MSIE !

Oh, I thought it wasn't possible to download a file and it installs itself but that's basically what mozilla did so why can't other progs do the same?[/quote]

because mozilla is not downloading a program, its downloading a pluggin, and saving it to your home directory. which does not require root access.

plus, if you had programs that downloaded and installed themselves... well... then it would be almost as bad as MSIE ! [/QUOTE]


I wasn't talking about the plugin - that was done from bash. Mozilla itself i was on about, as olbob said it basically installs itself