The Promised Land is Great, But Plauged with Many Problems!
 

Late last night, after defragging the drive 3 times, I managed to install 9.1. It's everything I wanted from XP!

But there are many problems.

1) I managed to get the ADSL internet working through a linksys router. A win98 computer is also hooked up to this on the LAN. I tried, but am unable to connect and share files with it. Anybody know how?

2) My printer, Lexmark X83 does not work. I tried configuring it. And while there is an x73 listed (which doesn't work, BTW) my only option is the raw printer. Installing this on windows was a challenge in itself since the printer has known problems staying installed. Is there a simple way to install it? Raw printing doesn't seem to work.

3) I downloaded mozilla firebird as a tar.gz file but cannot install it. The people on the mozilla forums were very helpful in giving me the terminal code, yet I couldn't manage to get it to work. Is there a simple way to install mozilla firebird?

BTW, I'm running mandrake 9.1 on KDE

-Thanks in Advance!

Also, the sound doesn't work (Creative SB Live).

Please Help!

i can answer some of those i think.
1) to connect to win98 you need to set up samba. It might already be installed but not configured. Have a look at the samba site and on your box and see what you can do.
2)This is a big question.. you might want to look into CUPS (worked for me, but on what sounds like a more standard/newer printer) but a simple way? 'Fraid not :)
3)Good choice with firebird. There might be a GUI equivalent but i think terminal code is by far the easiest way. (sorry!)
Change to root : extract the stuff in /usr/local/ : (obviously you'll need to change this to where you downloaded it)
put Firebird in your path: I'm afraid icons and shortcuts you'll have to set up manually, cos firebird isn't totally finished for public consumption. However, the command firebird will now start firebird up.
If this seems like a lot of typing, don't worry: there are two great features to help you here. If you select text, pressing the middle mouse button will drop it wherever you want. It's like copy and paste with even less effort. Also, when typing long paths to files, pressing tab will attempt to guess the rest, quite the time saver.
If this doesn't work (i'm afraid there's a good chance), just post up your errors.
4) this might take a while. Try to solve the first three first, then search on this forum and google, and you'll get how to do it from about 20 different perspectives. It doesn't work cos it hasn't been installed, so you have to install it. If you get any errors you don't understand, that's a good time to ask in the forum, but don't forget to search first. I'm sure someones been there before with this one.

Anyway, welcome to linux, and hope some of that helped. If not, just post up what happened.

The easy way to start Firebird is to right click on your desktop and choose New Launcher, name it Firebird and for command browse to wherever you installed Firebird. Can't help with the rest I'm afraid, I think I was lucky, my printers worked from the word go.

What do you see in harddrake? Is there anything about configuring your soundcard? What do you show from:
lsmod

There should be alot, so be prepared for it ;)

Cool

I have the same sound card and i can tell you that the very first thing you have to do is put the sound up. Use aumix or kmix and put all the sound up and take off all the mutes and go from there.

actually, if you use http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon and use it to setup your urpmi, and you add texstar, you can just type "urpmi mozilla-firebird" and it will install it for you ;)

Thanks for all of the help, guys!

I figured out a lot of this stuff yesterday.

Now, concerning the soundcard, My dell dimension 4550 was apparantly shipped with a special model, designed to work exclusively in XP and no other system. Even 98 or 2000. Supposedly there is a workaround from opensound.com, but it's a trial version and I have no plastic. Does anybody know of this problem and a similar driver fix which I don't have to pay for?

-I used linneighborhood to configure the network. Easy and FAST.

-I think I found the proper drivers for the X83 and will try installing them soon.

-I guess I can live with the generic firebird icon until the new version comes and automatically installs the nice one. Unfortunately, I experienced the same problem with openoffice(V1.0.3)? It came with an installer for which I followed all instructions. The only thing that I got out of it was another generic icon. It said on the site that it would load up to the proper directories and menus (for the specific programs) in KDE or GNOMe. I'm running KDE..And the only icon that I was able to get a launch from was a stupid shortcut located in the directory. Anybody know how to get the proper icons into the proper menus??