Complete newbie - some basic help

Hello there,
first of all - I am almost complete newbie (I have some experience with UNIX from work, but no administration).

I was wondering if you guys could recommend me some good websites with tutorials / guides to distribution Fedora Core 2.
Also, I am having some I would guess typical newbie problems;

1 - probably due to fact that I have newer graphics card than is the distribution, Fedora has detected my hardware as VESA generic (my card is GeForce 6600GT AGP). Now I have downloaded the drivers from nvidia website and in their instructions it says: After you have downloaded NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-7174-pkg1.run,
begin installation by exiting X, cd'ing into the directory containing
the downloaded file, and run: sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-7174-pkg1.run .

When I try to do that, I get the error message "no such file or directory" and I am in the folder where is the file located...I tried to chmod 777 the file (under root) but I got the same error message. What am I doing wrong?

2 - No music! When I want to test sound, it plays the sound without problems. But if I insert the audio CD to the drive, CD player opens, but I can hear no sound (does not happen in WinXP installed on the same machine). Same is when I rip one track from that CD to OGG file, it doesn't produce any sound. Sound device is integrated to the motherboard (Gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP-939).

3-Also, Fedora has only detected one CD/DVD drive (where in fact I have two); what can I do to get it "into" the Fedora?

Thanks for your time reading this!

For the nvidia driver make sure you are root then after you cd to the directory type ls to see what is in there,if its not there than you are in the wrong place,if it is in there you can just type a few keys and press tab to compleate the command so you don't have to type it all,then press enter.Follow the directions from the nvidia readme file at there site.

1)
which program produced the error message? Which command? A short transcript of the interaction would be helpful. Did you check that the file was there ([$ man x for x in [ls, find, locate]])?

2) you probably misconfigured your sound, so I'm going to give you a short sound-for-linux tutorial.

sound in linux is split in two components, which I'll call `mixer' and `streamer'. The task of the mixer is to take input from zero or more sound channels, mix the data into one sound stream, and send that to a streamer. The task of the streamer is to read one sound (only), and send it to the sound card/kernel/whereever.

(this is my mental model, and it works for me; YMMV).

most common streamers: alsa, oss.
most common mixers: esd, jackd.

mixers and streamers can be freely mixed (no pun intended). that is, there are four (obvious) choices of these 2x2.

However, jackd can also emulate the oss streamer, which means that if you have a (lame, imo) program that will only talk to oss, you don't have to kill all other sound-using programs to satisfy it. This hasn't been a problem for me, though (I run alsa/esd). Also, you can run esd on top of that oss (I think, YMMV), but performance tend to degrade: I ran xmms (winamp clone) using alsa -> jackd -> oss; whenever I switched desktop, the sound would skip for 0.1 secs. YMMV. A lot.

so, you could have a setup like this:
alsa -> jack -> [oss -> esd -> [program1, program2], oss -> program3, program4]
(where `a -> b' means `a reads sound from b'; in case b is a list, a reads multiple sound channels at once).

I hope I make sense.

also, try running
$ ps -Fe | grep -Ee '(alsa|esd|oss|jack)'
$ lsmod | grep -E '(oss|alsa)'

now, for fixing your situation:
for each of [test sound, CD playback, ogg playback]: what program did you use? Which sound service (oss/alsa/esd/jack) did the program use? What program did you use to rip the CD? Have you checked that the CD drive and you sound card is properly connected? You only have one sound card, right?

3) read man fstab--it won't conjure up a fix, but you'll probably need to learn how to edit /etc/fstab; also, try googling for a tutorial.

For the sound,are you using gnome with xmms to try and play stuff?

and 3 like jonaskoelker said you may only have 1 listed in fstab.

Ah yes, the nVidia thing.

I've had to go through this several times. You need to do this every time you update the Kernel.

I'm running FC3, so I hope that this helps for you.

Possible problems are:

The obvious. Are you in the right directory? Not to be insulting, but it does happen. What does

#ls

give you? Have you verified the file integrity? Maybe you just need to re-download the driver. Is the partition that you downloaded the file to mounted? (I could picture this happening if you downloaded the driver to a Windows partition- the mount point would still be there, but there would be nothing in it if something went awry with the mount process.) One last thing: I noticed that the driver you mentioned is a newer one. Perhaps it won't work with your version of Fedora? BTW, FC3 runs great after some tweaking and updating if you're interested.



Assuming that you get that figured out:

First, you need to have X not running at all. I do this by editing the /etc/inittab file. You replace the default run level of 5 (just after the table that they give you) to 3. There's probably another way to do this, but this is recommended by nVidia. Then reboot. X should not start. You'll just get a text login prompt.

Log in as root.

cd to the directory where you downloaded the driver file. Personally, I have a separate download directory in my home directory:

# cd /home/shane/Downloaded

You can put the driver anywhere you like, even on a FAT32 formatted Windows drive, if you have one. You just need to make sure that it is mounted.

Next, run the file:

sh NVIDIA-version-something-or-other

You'll get a Curses based installer. This is the easy part. Just follow the instructions.

After the installer is done, you will need to edit your xorg.conf file (could be Xfree86.conf for FC2, I don't know)

# vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Change the video driver from "nv" to "nvidia". Comment out the line that says "load dri" using a # mark at the beginning of the line.

You should then be able to start X:

# startx

X should start.

Before you do anything else, make sure that /etc/udev/devices has a bunch of nvidia stuff in it. If not, open a terminal and get into super user mode. then:

# cp /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices

(this is not outlined in the README file, so it'll take you by surprise)If you don't do this, the driver will "disappear" after you reboot.

Assuming that all is well, try rebooting for a test. Use the text login and then startx. If you're fine with a text login, you're done. If you want the graphic login back, open a terminal, get into super user mode, and edit your inittab file:

# gedit /etc/inittab

Change the default run mode to 5, and save it.

You're done.

Oops! one more thing. If a Open GL application doesn't start, you may need to edit your /etc/udev/permissions.d/50-udev.permissions file. Make sure that under "dri devices" there is a line that says: nvidia*:root:root:0666

Some people have to uninstall MesaGL because it will conflict with the nVidia 3d driver. I'm running the newest MesaGL right now, and I'm not having any problems.


Getting music to work from a CD was the other big thing that I had to overcome when I first installed FC3. I tried a bunch of stuff, but I think the thing that worked was to download and install a rpm that enables digital decoding of .cda files. I think it was called cdaudio or something like that. It may also just be a xmms plugin. That's what I ended up using for my music player. Unfortunately, it was quite a while ago, and I can 't remember for sure what I did. I'm listening to a CD on my computer right now, so it can be done. Don't give up!



For the mount problem, have you tried mounting the drive manually? It should mount automatically in the /media directory, but you may need to mount it manually. One gripe that I had with FC3 when I first installed it was the unreliable mount/unmount process for CD drives. It seems to be much more reliable now that I finally have the system up to date. That may clear up your problem.


Good luck.

All: thanks for your suggestions.

I have downloaded the driver from Linux and I have saved the file to Linux partition so partition should not be a problem.

I am (was) in the correct folder...if I did ls -la I saw the file right there but I still got the error message.

I don't know which program I used to play the CD, but will definitely find out as soon as I get home from work.

When I was reading the ShaneK's post I realized I'm actually having more problems. I wanted to get the latest updates (windows experience :-)) and have launched the RedHat updating program. It displayed the updates it had found but when I wanted to proceed, it said "Testing dependencies and integrity of RPM". I thought it was normal for the message to hang there for like five minutes but then it didn't disappear even after fifteen minutes.

Eventually I got the error message that the program stopped responding. I can connect to the Internet without problems ... would this be something with the firewall or something?

Thanks again in advance for your suggestions.

When I was reading the ShaneK's post I realized I'm actually having more problems. I wanted to get the latest updates (windows experience :-)) and have launched the RedHat updating program. It displayed the updates it had found but when I wanted to proceed, it said "Testing dependencies and integrity of RPM". I thought it was normal for the message to hang there for like five minutes but then it didn't disappear even after fifteen minutes. Eventually I got the error message that the program stopped responding. I can connect to the Internet without problems ... would this be something with the firewall or something?

Heh, yet another gripe of mine. The updater does the same thing for me on occasion. If I try to update more than say 5 things, it totally hangs. I use yum from the command line. Here's the commands I use:

[root]# yum check-updates

to see what updates are available.

# yum update

to get your updates. If you have a lot of updates to do, you may want to break it down. Just put the name of the programs you want to update after the word "update" leaving spaces in between each. For example:

#yum update openoffice xmms grip grep selinux-policy-targeted

I also update my kernel this way. So far, it has worked twice for me without a hitch. When I tried to update the kernel using the GUI updater, the whole thing broke. Fortunately, I didn't have much personal information set up, because I had to reinstall FC3!

Yum works great for installations too, so I would recommend that you have a look at their website:

http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/

good luck