A few questions
 

I am fairly* new to Linux, so please bear with me. *Fairly is 3 months.
Don't think i'm too stupid for some of these questions, but here they are:

1. I have a nVidia Geforce4 4200 Ti with S-Video out. Mandrake 8 couldn't tell what it was at all. Man 9 sees it, however it only sees it as a straight up GeForce(generic) so I can only get 16 bit color and 640x480. I tried to download the latest drivers right from nVidia, but when i burn them to a disk Man can't access them. So i guess this is a 2 part question. Y can't Man access the files on disk? and How can i get my card to work properly?

2. Man 9 is using ALL of my memory. I'm not overstating either. I used KDE's System Guard and it is using 514 MB of my 512 MB. There are certain programs that run horribly slow and i'm deducing that this is the problem. Is there a memory leak somewhere, or is it seeing a type of "System Idle" process as using memory? I really don't know and would like to.

3. My Xine don't play DVDs. It tells me that it doesn't have the proper encoder, where can i get this from??

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The Wykyd1

2. It depends on what you are doing. KDE in general is a resource-hog. I have 1GB of dual-channel DDR and at the moment I'm using 940MB. I don't ever notice any slowness in apps, though, and I never use swap. Do you have swap enabled?

3. You need to download a file called libdvdcss if you don't already have it. I'm using Totem Media Player, which is a graphical frontend for Xine, and this is all I needed to add so I can watch DVD's.

I do have swap enabled, i just always heard that Linux uses "so little resources" that it surprised me. I know that the GUIs use the resources and if I was doing it all command-line it wouldn't use much but still......

and with the DVD thnx, and i don't think that I have that file, but i'll get it.

The Wykyd1

1. nVidia troubles

1.1 To access a CD ROM you first need to mount your CD ROM drive. You should find a user mounting tool in the KDE menue somewhere or you can use the commandline. If this dosn't work, look in the hardware forum and follow the instruction on how to post there.

1.2 You seem to be doing the right things - you *may* need a kernel which supports nVidia as a module though the drivers should work fine if you follow the manufacturers instructions carefully (but thoughtfully). If still no luck let us know what version your kernel is.

2. Memory Overused

Your system monitor should be telling you what is using all that memory and runtime. But for a reality check, how big is your swap partition?

Simon

You shouldn't have a problem running KDE on 512MB of RAM. If you're having trouble, though, you could check out some lightweight window managers. I'm using Fluxbox on my 64MB secondary machine, and it works fine. Blackbox, Icewm, xfce are some of the others.

Thank you Simon Bridge:
I am familiar with mounting and unmounting and have even gotten my NT Partition mounted so that I can view and access my Windows files (music, pics, videos) from my Linux. (I have it dual booted on seperate hard drives). Anywayz..... I can "see" the files, however when i try to access them it tells me that it is an unrecognized file. I don't know what the problem could be. Also, my swap partition is 274 MB. I just wish that i could run all my progs. and they would work right. For instance, XMMS or XMSS whatever it is takes FOREVER to load and then it skips while playing. And TuxRacer runs SO SLOW i can't even play it. Same with Cannon Smash and Chromium. The basic programs work OK, it's just the more system intensive apps that cause problems.

Thank you mbegovic: I have tried IceWM and WindowMaker, nothing makes a difference. I will try Blackbox and xfce too though. Also, i saw a window manager that mimicks Windows XP. I think it was XPde or something like that. Anyone familiar with that and if it's worth the download?

The Wykyd1

Yes, it is called XPde, and it is apparently supposed to mimic XP. Never heard of it before now, but then I have 0 interest in my Linux desktop mimicing the XP desktop, which I have never used. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be perfectly adequate if that's what you want, though-- it's just a window manager, after all.

However, looking at the project status, since the most complete section of the project (the Window Manager) is only 40.21% done, there's no release files at this time for you to download. So unless you want to help develop the project, you'll have to decorate KDE or GNOME to match XP if that's what you're after.

This situation is not as bad as it looks-- the memory usage is not as much of a concern under Linux as it is under Windows (any version) because memory management under Linux is much better than it is under Windows. So programs play nicely with each other, and in general don't crash each other (or the whole OS) because one of them is hogging mememory that the other needs, etc.

However, certain programs running "horribly slow" is a problem. This could be due to any number of factors, just like under Windows. The most likely suspects are: unneccessary services/daemons running; an invisible crashed process hogging resources; bugs/problems in the program itself; slow I/O transfer of data files; just to name a few.

Without knowing what program(s) it/they is/are, and without knowing when the slowness occurs, it's difficult to be any more specific.

As for your nVidia drivers, is there some reason that you couldn't download them to your HDD? But even from a CD/DVD, you should be able to transfer them to the hard drive, or install them from the disc, as long as the disk was mounted... if they were correctly burned to the CD/DVD media in the first place. Please explain more about exactly what you did and how you're trying to install these drivers. It sounds like you're making the whole thing harder than it needs to be.

Hope this helps.

I went through with the System Guard and killed alot of apps that didn't need to be running, however I only got the usage down to 497 MB :*(
As I've said before, I don't know that much about Linux, so i am not really what is necessary and what is not.
As for the drivers, I can't download them to my Hard Drive becuase I only have dialup at my home and i was cursed with a conexant WinModem(also unable to install drivers for that) in my compuer so I have no way to connect to the 'net in Linux. So i downloaded the drivers at my work (high-speed) and burned them to a CD. I was, however, unable to run the "unzip" the .gz and .tar files and couldn't run the RPM Packages. I don't know what is wrong, but I am getting very frustrated with my particular instance with Linux.

The Wykyd1

Mandrake should have definitely installed gunzip and tar, which are necessary to extract the file from a tar.gz archive.

If you are using the GNOME desktop, there is a program called File Roller (file-roller) which is essentially the "WinZip/WinRAR" of Linux... under Windows, if this is a dual-boot machine, you could actually open the archive with WinRAR.

If you are using the KDE desktop, there is a program called Karchiver (karchiver) which serves the same function of opening extracted files. Both File-Roller and Karchiver are GUI front-ends for the command line programs tar, gzip, gunzip, bzip2, bunzip, zip, unzip (all installed by default), and rar and unrar, ace and unace (not installed by default, but readily available once you get online).

If neither of these works, you can always open a terminal, cd (change directory, usually typed as cd /path/to/directory unless it's a subdirectory of your current directory, commonly the $HOME directory, in which case it's just cd directory_name) to the directory where the file resides and type tar -zxvf [filename with all extensions]. If you get lost in the file tree and arent sure of the name of the file, or even if you're in the directory with the file, the ls command will list the contents of the current directory. If there are a lot, and it scrolls by too fast, try ls |less, which will enable you to use the page up and page down keys to scroll at a more moderate pace. The vertical line in that command is called a "pipe character" and is (on my US keyboard) found on the key above Enter, above the "other" slash character (I can never remember which is the forward and which is the backwards slash :) ).

I would suggest copying the file from off the CD first, though; the tar command will try to extract the files into the current directory, which of course won't work on a CD-ROM.

Alternative instructions for command-line extraction of this form of compressed tar archive can be found at SimplytheBest LINUX information: How to untar a linux file-- with Linux, if there aren't at least 3 ways to do something, something is wrong :) .

Once you have the RPM free of its bonds, you should be able to install it either by double-clicking in the file manager, or by running the command rpm -iVh <name_of_RPM.rpm> in a terminal.

However, you would have to be root to do this successfully; the most common way of getting root access as a user is to open a terminal, type su, then the root password, then hit enter. When you see your prompt change from a "$" (indicating normal user access) to a "#" (indicating root access), you've done it right, and any commands (such as rpm), when typed into this terminal, will be carried out as if you were the root user-- but only commands that you type into that terminal. Clicking on the desktop icons, or opening programs through any other means will still be done as a normal user. Type "quit" and hit enter, or just close the terminal to end root access.

You can find out more about how to use the rpm command by reading man rpm (in the case you don't know, "man" is short for "manual" and is available for most commands that might confuse you. So if you hear "read the man pages", that's what they're telling you to do-- type man <command> into a terminal and read the details about it. To exit a man page, type "q" at the : at the bottom of the terminal screen). You can also go to Maximum RPM, which will probably tell you more about the rpm command than you ever wanted to know-- especially since once you get online (check out http://www.linmodems.org, and http://www.linuxant.com/drivers/), you'll probably be using the urpmi command or the GUI RPMDrake package installer anyway.

Hope this helps you to get the nVidia drivers extracted and installed, in any case; once you've got that done, we can help you with any further questions or problems you're having. Good luck.

I am familiar with most of the common command-line commands and parameters. I am logged on as root and it still gives me the same thing. File Roller is what I've been trying to use all along. It is the prog. that is telling me that it is an invalid archive. I would just re-burn the file to a CD, but I've tried that 3 times. Never works. And the Conexant drivers are in the same format and i downloaded them on my own Windows Hard Drive and tried to copy them from the Windows partition to my Linux partition, and that didn't work either. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. I have a degree in Network Administration and I can't even install drivers under Linux. I feel so pathetic.

The Wykyd1

Are you downloading them using IE? That browser has been known to corrupt downloads. You might want to try Mozilla or a download manager.

What is the actual name of the file? I have sometimes downloaded "the wrong way" with Firefox (by right-clicking and choosing "Save Link to disk" rather than clicking the link and waiting for the download dialog to come up), and when I do, the file is often saved as "*.tar.gz.tar" rather than "*.tar.gz"-- and nothing can read it.

Renaming the file to remove the final .tar generally solves the problem (as there's nothing wrong with the file, just with the name, so File-Roller doesn't know what kind of file it actually is).

Hope this helps. Don't feel pathetic. We've all had our growing pains.

And if you can't get Mandrake fixed, I suggest you try another distribution.

Redhat 9, Redhat Fedora Core 1, Knoppix Hard drive install

or something like that

I've expierienced some distro's run quicker than others.

Also expierienced that one version of a distro (redhat 9) for example may run slower than another version (fedora core 1, which is basically redhat)

So dont give up and try other distros if this doesnt work out

regards

I've tried Redhat 9 and I didn't like it at all. It couldn't find any of my hardware. Well, it found some, but not my graphics card, sound card, monitor, modem(which i found was becuase it's a winmodem). I just found that Mandrake in general was more enjoyable. To motub, i thought about the corrupting and naming so the second time i downloaded it i used i used Download Excelerator Plus(which by the way i had downloading at 600 KB/S on high speed wireless internet), and made sure that it didn't append any extensions onto the end of the file. The file sizes are correct and everything seems to be in order, but I just can't make it work. What I really would like to get working is my modem so i can download the drivers directly instead of using Windows. If i could get my Linuxant drivers to work, i could do that and hopefully that would work.

By the way my system stats are:
Mandrake 9.0 (have tried Mandrake 8 and Redhat 9)
Intel Pentium 4 2 GHz
512 MB RDRAM
Seagate Barracuda 80 GB (Windows), Maxtor 9 GB(Linux)
nVidia GeForce4 4200 Ti with S-Video Out
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz 5.1 Digital Sound Card
Conexant HSF v.92 Speakerphone Modem
GVC-REALTEK Ethernet 10/100 PCI Adapter

Do you have WinRAR or PowerArchiver installed on the Windows box? Either one of them should be able to open this file under Windows if it's not a bad download. If they can't do it either, then something is wrong with the file and you should try.... heaven knows what... a mirror, maybe?

If so, then maybe you can transfer the pure files to a CD and use them that way.