Please help me

Squall__99 · 05-18-2005, 05:44 PM

I posted before about Dual hard drives. I want to combine them into one. Can't anyone explain this to me?

Another question that i have is i cant install liferea i think thats how you spell it. Anyways its an RSS reader but i can't install it for some reason, i unzipped it and everything but it wont run with my firefox.

O ya i have one more newbie question. I have firefox installed but how to do i create a shortcut for my desktop.

Anyone please help me.

godzero · 05-18-2005, 06:12 PM

Hard drives:
If you want to... say combine 2x40GB HDDs into 1 80GB... it doesn't really work that way. HDDs are mounted as subdirectories.
You can select a mount point for the second, like I have my second mounted as /home so I have lotsa lotsa lotsa space for /home. (did i mention /home should have much space?) The root of your filesystem in mandrake/riva usually has everything but /home in it, and it's *really* hard to get that to fill more than 20GB or so.

RSS:
Use a firefox RSS extention.

Desktop icon:
(KDE)
Right click on desktop, select "create new | file | link to aplication".
In the dialog box, name it firefox...
click the little folder icon to the right of the path field... browse to your firefox folder, double click the firefox icon that looks like a shell window (blackbox, >_) (it's a shell script)... that tells it what to execute.
(now you should be back to the first dialog box)
Now you can replace the default gear/application icon with one of your choosing. Click the gear icon, select any icon you want... I would sugest using browse to.. then to where forefox is, go into the icons sub dir, get the icon there.

PTrenholme · 05-18-2005, 06:39 PM

Maybe we could help you more easily if you'd fill out your member profile so we could have at least some clue as to what help you need.

For example, the method used for setting up a "shortcut" for an executable depends on the windows manager you're using, and you've neglected to tell us which one(s) you've installed. (For example, in KDE you could go to the "menu editor," and create a new item, or you could right-click on the bottom menu bar and add an application to he panel. In GNOME you could right-click on the top menu bar and add an application there.)

Also, creating a logical volume spanning more than one device probably depends on you Linux distribution and kernel version. (If it is at all possible, which, I suspect, it is not.) And, again, we have no clue from your post about what you're using. Nor, in fact, what exactly you're trying to do. You could be talking about a RAID-1 file system mirror, or a file system spanning multiple physical devices (which is, of course, the default in Unix/Linux systems), or the (problematic, and probably meaningless) suggestion with which I started this paragraph.

Bottom line: Please give enough information to make your question(s) meaningful.

Oh, another suggestion: The methods for, for example, creating new "shortcuts" are explained in the window manager documentation. Have you read it? It is available by clicking on "help" in most window managers. (Sorry if that sounds nasty. At least I didn't just type RTFM. Mostly because a lot of them really are "FMs," and need a little TLC or experience to make them meaningful.)

Cheers!

Squall__99 · 05-18-2005, 06:44 PM

i tried that but it says mozilla or firefox not available. Can anyone please explain how to install it and please dont tell me to look at there site because there are missing a lot of info.

Oh ya wat about lilo. Would that help combining my two hard drives.

And i have a kde gui and two 3gb hard drives. Im guessing i could use a raid configuration or lilo but i dont know what that is. So if you can help me please

godzero · 05-18-2005, 07:05 PM

Lilo doesn't handle linux file system mapping.
Sounds like you want to add two drives into 1 big one. That's called raid (mode 0). It takes a raid controler (hardware) to do that.
You can mount a drive in any place you want (directory). This is prolly best done durring install.
I have 2 40 GB drives. My first (minus 1 GB for swap) is mounted as / my second is mounted as /home, so I get 80 GB total.
Is Firefox installed?
If not:
Get the file firefox-1.0.4.installer.tar.gz
Unconpress it to /home/*YOUR_NAME_HERE*/bin
*Make sure there's no half-aborted firefox/firefox programs running in the background (killall firefox)
run "firefox-installer" (as root, so it can read the mozilla files), you may have-to make it executable first (a file permission attribute)
install it to /home/*YOUR_NAME_HERE*/bin/firefox
(firefox should launch)

then you can make a desktop icon as above, or whatever.

Squall__99 · 05-18-2005, 07:14 PM

Now thats one problem even though i had it already installed. But how to do install liferea, i know there is a lot more to do then what they have on there actual site and read me so can anyone please give me the complete way to install it??

godzero · 05-18-2005, 07:43 PM

I'm not familair with the rss progy you speak of, but.. in mandrake/riva the easiest way to install/unistall software is thru the urpmi database.

Quote:

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The fastest, easiest way to deal with this is to add repositories to your Software Media Manager. Go to Kicker/Foot=>Configuration=>Configure your computer; or just click the Mandrake Control Center icon on your panel, then go to Software Management and you will see the Software Media Manager. Unfortunately, it only contains the CDs you installed from as sources for additional software. That is still necessary, and can be useful, but you want to add external sources from the Internet.

Here's how:

Go to Easy URPMI, and follow the instructions there to add external repositories to your Software Sources Manager. If you're on dial-up, make sure to check the "Use compressed index, much smaller than normal, with less informations" checkbox.

The instruction "Type this in a terminal as root" is performed as follows:

1) Open a terminal.

2) Type su and hit enter.

3) Type the root password at the Password: prompt and hit Enter. The password will not be echoed to the screen, even with stars, so type carefully.

4) If the password was correctly typed, the prompt should change from a "$" which indicates user access, to a "#" which indicates root access. All commands typed into this terminal window from this point on will be performed as if root had requested them. If this does not work (and you have correctly entered the root password), the problem is that the user is not a member of the wheel group; go to the Mandrake User Management tool in the Mandrake Control Center and add the user to that group, then try steps 2 and 3 again.

5) Select and copy one line of output from the Easy URPMI page (from urpmi.addmedia to hdlist.cz or synthesis.hdlist.cz depending on whether you checked the "use compressed index" box) and paste that line into the root terminal using CTRL+Shift+V (Ctrl+Shift+V is the "Paste" keybinding for gnome-terminal; it's Shift+Insert if you use Konsole, and middle mouse button-- or right and left buttons together if you don't have a middle button or wheel/button-- in an xterm). You should see the repository being added before you are returned to the prompt. Repeat for all repositiores listed in the Easy URPMI Step 3 output.

You should now be able to open RPMDrake (Mandrake Control Center=>Software Management=>RPMDrake (Install Software) and see a great deal of software available for download and installation. You will see even more if you change the filter at the top of the dialog from "Mandrake Choices" (the default) to "All Software by...." (I usually use "by group", but you can choose from several options). And of course, if you know what you want to install, you can just type the program name (or a partial name) in the Search box to filter the list.

To install any program, check its checkbox, and the program and all dependencies will be downloaded (or pulled off the CDs, which will be requested by Mandrake complete with ejection of your CD tray) and installed. Be warned that large programs with many dependencies will obviously take a long time for you to download if you're on dialup, so keep an eye on the details before clicking the "install" button.

You can also use urpmi <program_name> to install programs from the command line with full dependency resolution (RPMDrake is a GUI front-end for URPMI).

If you are using Mandrake 9.2 or lower, you may also get alarming-looking messages telling you that there was "no public GPG key found", and asking if you want to install anyway; if you are installing from Mandrake mirrors, you can safely install, and get the GPG keys later to stop this message even coming up.

GPG signatures are encryptions on the RPMs to ensure that the file has not been tampered with. The packager signs the final RPM with a private key and with a public key, then makes the public key available to the public (you and me). RPMDrake compares the key on the RPM with the key on your GPG keyring (the little keyring in your system tray when you run the Mandrake Control Center), and gives this error message if the two do not conform (in this case, because you don't have the key on your keyring at all, so RPMDrake has nothing to compare the RPM's key with).

Mandrake's public GPG keys can be found in the /base/ folder of the Mandrake mirror that EasyURPMI gave you as output for Step 3; if you put the url (without the "with synthesis.hdlist.cz" part) into a browser, and go up a level in the FTP site that will be displayed, you will see the /base/ folder. Go into that folder and you will see 3 "pubkey" files; select them and right-click to download them to a safe location. The public key for the PLF repository is right in the folder given in the Easy URPMI output, so you will see it if you type that address into a browser. Download that, too.

Once you have downloaded the keys, open a terminal, su to root (as above) and then use the cd command to browse to the folder that you saved the files to. Then do an ls to display the names of the files in that folder for easy reference for the next step.

Type gpg --import <keyfile_one_name> <keyfile_two_name> <keyfile_three_name> <keyfile_four_name> (that's why we displayed the file list; you should be able to type in the names correctly since you can just look on the terminal screen to see what they are), and hit Enter.

The keys should be added to your keyring, and you should get no more key-related errors when installing software (unless there's really something wrong with the key).

This should save you from "dependency hell", which is chasing individual RPMs over half the world to try to resolve dependencies in the program you're actually trying to install.

Hope this helps.
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