hi, folks. I am brand-spankin' new at this stuff. I installed Mandrake 8.1. I'm dual booting with win98 and that part is ok. I have about 3 issues for the time being. 1) I can't seem to get this OS to see my soundcard. Do I need to disable it in Windows when I want to run Linux, or am I not configured right? 2) I have a MIDI interface that runs through my joystick port. Same thing...Linux isn't seein' my MPU-401 MIDI ports in or out. 3) I downloaded a couple Linux apps that are in the good ol' tar format, and put them on floppy disks. I got past the mounting thing, and I can hear my floppy drive doing something, but so far I haven't been able to access the files, let alone install anything. How do I open these files, and where do they go? Do I have to assign file associations? Or do I need a seperate application to open them? I would really appreciate any help on the above issues. Thanks in advance.
Ed

search the forums for the answers to these questions. or look in the FAQ (i know it has the answers to the last question and probably the first).

We always get asked this so there is a lot on the site about getting this working

HTH

Alex

Tar files are a little like zip files in windows (except that plain tar's aren't compressed). To extract them, use "tar -xvf <filename>" in a console. If the files are *.tgz or *.tar.gz then they are compressed with gzip, so you have to use "tar -zxvf <filename>".