Quoting Shawn Grover <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> This past weekend I was finally able to create the CDs (my burner doesn't
> support 700meg cds properly, so had problems), and installed Mandrake 9.0.
> I installed it with most of the workstation options (games PC, network PC,
> etc) except the developer and scientific stuff, and also included Web/FTP,
> Mail/News, DNS, etc for the server end of things.

I had a problem with the 699MB CD at first as well, however it turned out to be
bad media and not my burner. I whent out and purchased a case of Maxells, and it
worked fine.
 
> My goal with the installation is to learn Linux a bit better, but now I'm
> stuck - where do I go from here?  

Try out the various programs under the the Applications menu. Surf the net to
find more software, etc.

> The only thing I had to do to resolve a problem was to add an entry to the
> HOSTS file for my computer name (Gnome complained the first time I started
> up).

This often happens to me on new installs. I usually use x.localdomain as the
hostname. For example on my home network I have ulb.localdomain and
laptop.localdomain. Just add your host name to the first line of of the
/etc/hosts file. For example:
127.0.0.1   localhost x.localdomain

> Oh, I also seem to have some video problems. Tux Racer (I think that was
> the
> name of the game) - it's incredibly slow, even with my G-Force 4 video
> card...  

That's probably because your not using the official NVidia drivers. The ones
that come with X suck. You can download the drivers from
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_display_1.0-3123
the site has lots of great documentation, and they are quite easy to install.
There aren't binary drivers for MDK 9.0 yet, so you'll have to recompile the
NVIDIA-kernel src.rpm ie. # rpm --rebuild NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-3123.src.rpm (make
sure you have installed the kernel sources from the Mandrake CD. Your other
option is to sign up for the Mandrake club as they have precompiled binaries, or
just ask, I'm sure I have the rpm lying around somewhere.

Also, the Xine video player doesn't display video, though I hear
> sound.

This might be a result of your video plugin. The NVidia drivers might clear up
the problem. Type "xine --help" to get a list of the available drivers, and try
them all out to see if one works I know this has happened to me when I was using
the wrong driver. The other thing is that Mandrake doesn't come with support for
DIVX, so if your videos are DIVX then xine won't play the video (this happened
to me as well). Luckily you can download DIVX and other plugins for xine from
the web. Check out: http://plf.zarb.org/
 
> What else can I do with Linux?  I guess I'm looking to see how it can
> replace my windows environment, where I do web browsing and development.
> Hmmm... any comparable tools to CFStudio?

I replaced Windows with Linux so I know it's possible. The amount of software
available for Linux never ceases to amaze me. You just have to start looking in
different places. One good site for software is http://www.freshmeat.net/ . What
kinds of things are you looking to do? There are lots of great web browsers for
Linux such as Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, etc. There is also a large
development community. I'm sure other people on the list will be able to
recommend IDE's.

Jesse


Reply via email to