Okay, then, I'll join you in the challenge. As the American saying goes, "put your money where your mouth is!" I don't mean that ugly, but seriously.

You format that commercial Mandrake distribution out of your system, and get Slackware 9.1 (first 2 CD's). Email me your complete system specs (hardware) and I'll personally walk you through the Slack install. No problem. This will help me because I'm writing some documentation that a total beginner in *nix can understand. It will be long, but it won't leave out anything that's necessary, and it won't be so esoteric they can't comprehend the lingo. Then, we'll work together on the project.

So, put up or shut up!

Where to start..? Well, I've grown a interest in Linux about 6 months ago after reading some online articles (can't remember which ones though).. Anyway, the thought of 'free' OS software got my interest. So, one day I went to my local Barnes and Noble and found a book on Red Hat 8.0. I discovered that the book came with three CDs that at first thought were mere training or tutorial CDs. To my amazement, it was actually a full blown OS...

After fiddling with RH version of Linux, I came across http://www.distrowatch.com and discovered that there were in fact many Distros to choose from. So I started researching ones that sounded close to what I was looking for in a OS. The distros that I've tried are:

Knoppix
Gnoppix
RH 8.0
Lycoris
Debian woody
Mandrake 9.1

I ended up sticking with Mandrake because of the similarities between them and RH8.0. Now, installing most of the distros (as a newbie) was no problem. On the other hand, I admit, getting some non-essential hardware to work was a different story. But help is a mere phone call...er... Internet call away!

However, I have installed many versions of MS in the past, and have had problems with Hard disks, video cards, keyboards, processors, NICs, etc... and my thoughts were that it would be fixed in the next release. The problem usually was that instead of fixing the problems, the new version of MS created other problems with drivers that used to work in previous releases. One example that comes to mind is when you try and "upgrade" win98 to win2000. The installation actually says that some of my programs and hardware will not work, and that I have to get with the vendor for a fix.... WHAT?

One of the greatest things about Linux is that you can find help on literally anything from people (sometimes even real-time). And also, if you upgrade Linux, it usually has a common appearance. (unlike win2000 to winXP)

I guess basically what I'm trying to get at is that if your a newbie, try not to get frustrated. Go to a message board and post your problem. It not only helps relieve some stress by getting it in the open, but also you might get a friend in the process :D

Ok - let me get a Slackware CD or two and we'll see what's what. AND, BTW - just how do I format Mandrake out? fdisk? MS Format?? Or is there something on the SLackware CD that will do this?

Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-R5002
Video - Radeon 7200
MS PS/2 Wheel Mouse
Linksys LNE100TX(v5) Fast Ethernet Adapter
Creative Sound Blaster 16 Plug and Play
AMD-K6 3D processor
256MB ram
Maxtor ATA 40GB drive

Oops - one more question - where can I download Slackware? I went to the Slackware site and tried to download the ISO CD and was told that I'm not authorised to do this.

If your totally sure you want to do that then you can use

cfdisk

during the Slackware install to delete your Mandrake partitions - after logging in as Root you can type cfdisk to bring up the cfdisk menu - make sure you write the partition table to disk after deleting the relevant partitions - then reboot and use cfdisk again, this time to create your new Slack partitions.

You should have seen that link on the home page for Slackware where it says Get Slack, sixth link down on the left. Download Slackware from http://www.slackware.com/getslack/ and choose a mirror near you, or if you can use it, get it via BitTorrent here .

Just for future reference, please post the link that said you've not authorized.

Skyline is totally correct about how to format your Mandrake partitions. Since you've not got it installed, I'll assume you don't have any data in it's /home/<username> partition that you want to keep.

Okay, how about your current OS? Is it Windows? Which version? How are you partitions setup? Do you want to access data read/write from Slackware and Windows? If so, you can't do that with the NTFS filesystem - you'll need a FAT32 partition. We should create that before we start installing Slack.

For now, please answer these questions, and I'll look at your hardware in terms or support, and we'll go from there.

:cool:

Andy - I found MEPIS to be the most trouble free install of those I've tried - the fact you can run from the live cd and install (if you wish) after seeing that all your hardware is functioning. I use it daily.

I have a Romtec switch, so the OLD OS is switched out of the loop - for the record, is is Win ME. When I am playing with the Linux install, I set my BIOS to boot from CD and have an OS-free system (well, except for whatever remnants of Linux are on the 40GB HD) SO - I have a whole disk to use for any install I do without concern for anything that may be on it from past attempts. What do you mean by "if you can use it, get it from BitTorrent"? I think BitTorrent was the one I tried to use and got the "YOu are not authorised message".

Ok - I went to Slackware, Getslack - and it gives me many choices - 9.1-iso, 9.1 NON -iso - selecting iso, I can then choose iso.asc or iso.md5 - I have no idea what ones to pick - mainly because I don't know the significance of the acronyms - iso/asc/md5 etc - I assume iso is Intern Stds Org and asc is ASCII - but, what does that mean to me?

Iso is an image file which can be burned to a CD-ROM to create a bootable CD. When you get the iso file, you can burn a CD with Nero (or some other critter in Winders, though I use *nix and burn CD's from the command line). If you do burn it with Nero, just use the option (I've almost forgotten my Winders stuff) that says to burn an image to CD and not the option that says make a bootable CD. The latter will put Caldera DOS or whatever on the CD and you'll have a coaster.

Asc is the file extension used by PGP encrypted files. This is so you can verify that the file is from a trusted source. I personally never considered it necessary with an iso image file from a Linux distribution.

MD5 was developed by Professor Ronald L. Rivest of MIT. What it does, to quote the executive summary of rfc1321, is:

[The MD5 algorithm] takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128-bit "fingerprint" or "message digest" of the input. It is conjectured that it is computationally infeasible to produce two messages having the same message digest, or to produce any message having a given prespecified target message digest. The MD5 algorithm is intended for digital signature applications, where a large file must be "compressed" in a secure manner before being encrypted with a private (secret) key under a public-key cryptosystem such as RSA.

In essence, MD5 is a way to verify data integrity, and is much more reliable than checksum and many other commonly used methods.

Now, to answer your primary question. Get the two files labeled ->
slackware-9.1-source-d1.iso
slackware-9.1-source-d2.iso
and you'll be good to go!

I've been able to convert 2 of my home systems to Mandrake 9.2 and the difference between that and being a Dos/NT/Windoze nuts and bolts programmer/reverse engineer since DOS 1.1 is that when I went to Linux I had to do about 20 hours of learning curve all at once to fix the 5% that didn't work. Windows was gradual learning over time and probably took much more time over the years.

What I've learned is this: it's cheaper to just replace whatever components don't work with generic ones than try to fix driver problems under Linux--unless you're bored and out of work or a student (in which case you should try the National Bank of Dad).

Now hear this: If windows wasn't way more tolerant of hardware and user bungles, my complete newbie father in law (70+) years old would NEVER have been able to use his system without calling me ONCE over the past year--and he does a LOT with it. OK--off the soapbox now.

The thing that helped me was reading up on Unix, not Linux. Most Linux doc takes for granted that you learned Unix in college or something (seems to me anyway).

I would love to volunteer to help make Linux documentation less sucky because one cannot expect people to RTFM if they cannot hope to Understand The F*ing Manuals. Here's my impression of how Linux doc looks to the unitiated:

----------------------------------------
To set up your blank is really simple, just do:

fnoozle /r /f /x /v /u:1280
rfxqr -sdb -x -n -rw
meps -h

then do a

make -q -x

remember not to dissassociate the partition from the linked areas or your system will be hosed when you do this!!!!
--------------------------------------

Oh that taught me a lot!!! I would re-write the documentation that does the complete secure encrypted setup (the complete paranoid absolute privacy install) , but the doc that's out there isn't something I can even get working yet--it's incomplete and cryptic.

Anybody know anything about a collaborative Linux documentation project?

Thanks folks.

I see your problem now, rfxqr -sdb -x -n -rw needs to be rfxqr -sdb -X -n -rw (with a capital X), LOL :D Seriously though, go out and buy "Linux for Windows Administrators" by Mark Minasi and Dan York. Minasi translates Windows jargon into Linux jargon quite well. As to the collaborative documentation project you inquired about uh, well, it's called The Linux Documentation Project (go figure) ;) http://www.tldp.org/

...uh well, the The Linux Documentation Project has instructions like this (from The Linux Sound HOWTO):

"Just the all time ``./configure - make - make install'' stuff. Do this for drivers, library and utilities."

Huh? Was that an instruction? Did I sleep through a verb somewhere there? (In fact, the author liked this "instruction" so much that it is repeated on the same page in a different section.) So I welcome the efforts of Sick-O, Chinaman, and anyone else to create some Linux docs that don't assume either 1) you already know Linux, or 2) everything is working correctly.

Now can we please drag this thread back to the topic of SOUND problems in MANDRAKE? That was pretty much the main complaint of Sociologo who started this.

The Slackware installation tutorial obviously belongs in the Slackware distribution section. If someone knows for certain that sound is FUBAR in Mandrake 9.2 (as I am kind of suspecting after reading the various 'worked in 9.1, dead in 9.2' accounts) then that knowledge would certainly be welcome here and then some of us might be interested in some other distro. In the meantime, for those who are interested in actually helping some of us struggling with SOUND problems in MANDRAKE, may I suggest that you respond to any of the numerous problems already posted. May I humbly suggest looking at the remaining questions in the "Silent Night" thread (mine) or the "Xawtv + mandrake 9.2 = picture without sound" thread (VincentB's and mine too) or numerous others still unsolved.

One final issue: Isn't it true that, if we get the correct device driver installed then if we knew what the correct parameters were for our particular sound board, we could edit them into the various config files (assuming those are described somewhere and don't vary too much by distro) and have working sound regardless of the distro we started with and therefore the distro question is just a red herring? I'm asking quite seriously and trying to understand.

The Minasi book I already mentioned covers those basics. I imagine someone who had never used Windows would be equally perplexed by instructions like "run setup.exe". It kind of assumes you know how to open My Computer, double click the CD-ROM icon and then double click the setup.exe file.

All I can tell you at this point is that sound worked perfectly on my initial installation of Mandrake 9.2. I think you'll find other Linux distros to be even less accommodating to newbies, but feel free to try them and see for yourself.

Sociologo try this hint. http://www.mail-archive.com/freevo-u.../msg04361.html
It might start you in the right direction. The alsa drivers for the i810 chipset from intell tend to be the fastest updated ones so your hardware should work.
Remember that in linux which is close to but not quite Unix linux goes by the chipsets on the cards and hardware and not the nameplate.
All I did was Google i810 and the forth entry gave me that one.