Hey all,

Well, some background I suppose; I am a total Linux newbie. Currently running a Dell OptiPlex 210L with Fedora Core 6 (KDE)/Windows XP dual-booting. Can add more details if required.

So basically, I have been trying to get MP3 support with a decent media player on Fedora 6 for the past three days straight. Very long story that I'll probably post about later (because it still hasn't gotten corrected, sadly enough). So I managed to get MP3's to play using Amarok ~1.4, and all was pretty much dandy except for some minor nitpicky details that bothered me. Ya know the old saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it" ? Well...

I booted up today and found that I had no sound at ALL using Fedora. Weird. So I checked to see if it was my hardware, nope. I checked to see if it was the program, nope. I couldn't get sound from any source (Amarok, Firefox, various other media players, the "test sound" button under the control panel). I thought it might be something to do with my drivers, so after trying a restart (nope, that didn't do the trick, either) and messing around with some sound settings on the control panel (nada) I looked up my problem online and decided it must be something to do with the sound drivers. I checked to see that the libraries for the standard linux sound drivers were installed (I forget what the actual driver is called, something with an A). Deciding it would be a good idea to try and reinstall the sound driver, I first uninstalled
the libraries using the Add/Remove programs tool, and then uninstalled the other part of the driver that was installed (again, the term eludes me right now) I think it was the core, or something.

After uninstalling the sound drivers, I tried to open up the "Add/Remove programs" program again, only to find that nothing showed up. Huh, odd. It refused to open, so I decided a restart of the system was in order. Only problem is, once Fedora booted back up, I was greeted with a very odd-looking login screen; very basic and bland-looking, and saying something to the effect of "Welcome to localhose.login.something" with two simple dialog boxes for name and password. So I try my regular username and password, and it takes me back to the same login screen. I try it again and again, followed by the root name and password, same thing. So basically I have actually managed to lock myself out of my own system.

Sorry about the wall of text guys, but any help would be seriously appreciated. I just really DON'T feel like putting up with the frustration of reinstalling my entire OS

BTW I'm stuck using Windows right now, if that's any consolation to get people to help me out here, lol. Anyway, hope you guys can give me some good advice!

Cheers,

Matt

The best advice I can offer, is to reinstall your OS, which you say you don't like. FC6 is very old...the latest is FC10, and supports a whole lot of new hardware and features, that FC6 won't.

Also, you may want to check out Ubuntu/Kubuntu instead....if you're wanting to move from Windows to Linux, that's a more 'Windows-user-friendly' version, both for setup and use....

As TBOne said, install F10 - it's much better.

Yeah, I figured that might be the only option. Does anyone know the requirements for Fedora 10? I'm running on an older machine with slightly limited resources (Windows XP-era) and I don't want to end up using all my hard drive space on just the OS itself. Also, is it absolutely recommended that I upgrade my OS with every new release? It seems like just a short while ago that Fedora 6 came out, and they're already up to TEN? How quickly do new versions get released, anyway?

Well, Fedora 10, here I come...

As far as I remember, there's a new release of Fedora approximately every 6 months. It's not a pain once you are up to date. I usually upgrade the system without reinstalling. I haven't had any major problems with it. Besides you could for example stick to 'even' releases ie. 10,12,14 etc.

What are the specs of your computer?

You can always go for a 'lighter desktop environment: xfce, fluxbox, etc.

Well on my Linux partition, I have about 30 gigs or so, I can't remember the exact amount. 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 with 504 Mb of ram, an older machine, but not "old" if you catch my drift. I'm mainly worried about the hard drive, and having enough space to work with. The total size of my only hard drive is 80 gigs, so I suppose I could always resize it if and when the time comes to add some more room to my Linux partition.

P.S. I'm incredibly broke lately, which is why I didn't just say "screw it" and buy a second hard drive already, lol

Thanks for the help guys, it's much appreciated. Downloading F10 with KDE as we speak. I'll remember to come back to this site with all my Linux needs

Since you do not like upgrading very often and Fedora only supports any one version for 13 months you might want to consider something with a slower cycle. Centos if RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) with the logos removed. It is free to download/update (unlike RHEL) and has a 5 year support life. Centos 5 was based on FC6 so it will "feel" very much like FC6. It also will run most (not all) third party rpms that were made for FC6.

30GB for linux is more than enough. I have one dedicated partition for my data (music, films, documents, notes, etc) so each of my linux installations is no bigger than 15GB.
You could still store your music where you've been storing it so far. Linux can access windows partitions, or better still, dedicate a separate partition for all your data. That way if you mess up windows or linux, you can easily reinstall them without losing your files.

I wouldn't recommend F10 with KDE. As far as I remember it ships with KDE4 which is quite memory consuming (so is Gnome). As I said, go for some light-weight desktop environment.

I have a 1ghz PIII with 512MB of ram that runs(gnome) fine as a media server/player. If you drop much below 512MB you will start to see things slow down quite a bit. At one point the machine had 1GB of ram and while it did run somewhat faster it did not run significantly faster on any task that I would run on it(for instance I would not convert avi files on such a machine). It is running C5.2 currently but has run FC4-F10 without any performance issues(due to hardware).

Thanks for the quick responses guys!

I have installed F10 successfully (after one very frustrating night) and have somehow even managed to enable KDE4 (which was a new problem I was having, lol). To the powers that be, you can close this thread now as it's no longer an issue.

Again, thanks guys