Everyone keeps using the term "learn linux". What do you mean by this?

I use Mandrake, I know many of you do not respect it, but I find it to be easy to use and it does what I need. I have a few questions though.

A) I have several CDs I wish to run, but I don't think it is reading correctly. Is there anything I need to do, or a troubleshooting for such a problem?

B) Are there any programs you would reccomend for a web programmer, software developer, and music-listener?

C) It might just be me, but it seems to be a tad big buggy, ie the text doesn't look perfect.

D) Anything else I have to know?

Appreciate the help.

B) learn vim (or emacs... I don't want to start a flame-war thread). It really is essentially if you want to maximize your "linux experiance" Also, xmms seems to be the weapon of choice around here for music-listening - Winamp skinable too!

C) I don't use Mandrake, but I believe there is some sort of "Control Dock" or "Control Panel" which you can access and mess around with fonts and font-sizes.

welcome to LQ and to Linux - you won't find many bashers here, but expect to put in some reading and experimenting time, no way around that.

A) you have to be more specific - are they music CDs? data? games? what steps and programs have you tried already?

D) yes, tons - start with the free docs at the mandrake site, and check out www.tldp.org, www.google.com/linux and rute's guide. and of course, read lots of LQ threads.

Carnage: 'preciate it, know where I can find this XMMS?

Genesee: yea, they are music CDs at this instance but my point is I cannot access the CD...music CDs are also data CDs, CD is just a way of storage as far as I know..am I wrong? Also, I dont have a huge amount of pacience to read so many docs, when I said that I was more refering to one liner pointers and such to help me along...thanks though

Audio CDs function a little differently under linux than data CDs as you can't mount them. What ever media player Mandrake uses (I'm not familar with Mandrake anymore) should be able to access the drive and play the audio without any sort of problem. If there is a problem please post, and try to be very specific on what you've tried and what errors your getting.

If your not willing to read alot of documentation, threads, etc... then your in for a very hard time of learing to use Linux. While it's become vastly easier to use since the mid- and late-nineties it is still a system that gives you alot of power. Power which you must learn to use and control. You can't do that without reading.

cyberliche: thanks for the help, I was in Audacity Media Player, and I do not know how to access the drive..normally I just click an upload button or something, which I found one like, but can only navigate to the 'mounted' (still cant figure out what that means) CD drive...

Also, appreciate your concern, but someone had to learn it in the first place, and the GUI seems to have enough features to fulfill my needs.

"Mounted" means that it is attached to the directory tree.

My box doesn't have audacity installed, but you should have some preferences and such that you can check. Make sure that the device that Audacity is trying to play from has the cd in it and exists (probably /dev/cdrom)

Im so sorry, it was actually Amarok that was the program.

aight, 'preciate the help...now another q...

I am looking for software to download, WYSIWYG HTML editors, music boxes, stuff like that...I do not understand these tar.gz files, so will someone please point me to a thread (I'm sure there must already be one) where this is answered? Much thanks

Also, looking for anywhere you know of a database of free and free trial linux stuff.

And for goodness sake, which IM can I use that will act normal?! I have PeXit! and Kopete, they both make me mad. Pex is glitchy, kopete is a pain. Lol...are there others?

Hmm, what happened to all the eager-to help peeps? lol

GAIM is a good IM that supports multiple protocols, but if you only use MSN I would download amsn from amsn.sourceforge.net

If you've downloaded a tar.gz file (or tar.bz2) it's most probably source code for a program. The tar.gz file itself is kind of like a zip file, only using a different compression algorithm. (history lesson: tar creates an uncompressed single Tape ARchive file from many other files. gzip creates a compressed gz file from a single uncompressed file. gzip can only zip one file, hence tar is used first. a tar.gz file is a group of files that have been tarred together and then gzipped).

To untar a tarball do:Once uncompressed, and if the tarball contained source code, move to the directory created when you untarred the file and type:
to install it onto the system. ./configure will only work if the tarball contained a configure script - most source does, but not all, so if anything goes awry read the INSTALL or README file included in the tarball. make builds the executable from the source code, and make install puts it system-wide (hence you need to be root for that bit). Now is should just be a case of typing the program name to load it.

Thank you so much! Very helpful.

Love the sig btw, its something people need to take into consideration.

(the 'its' above is sarcastic, btw)

still having trouble getting to music CDs, can anyone help?

To find stuff there are three sites that I like:

www.google.com
www.freshmeat.net
www.sourceforge.net

XMMS is probably already installed. Try typing "xmms" without the quotes in a terminal, and see if it starts.
If it doesn't, then you can download it from www.xmms.org.

Using XMMS you can play the device /dev/cdrom using XMMS, and the CD will play.

I hope this helps
--Ian