Until you get a bit of experience with your distribution of Linux, there's much to be said for dual booting with something like Win98SE. You can mount your Windows partition(s) in Linux and read/write to them. The you can use the winmodem to download additional software for Linux while waiting for a full fledged modem to show up.
I spent a frustrating weekend trying to install Red Hat on my Linux box cobbled together from odd parts, with no success. Turned out I had a bad CPU and a bad stick of memory, both intermittent. All went much better with good hardware. I found it difficult to debug my installation software decisions while trying to identify the hardware problem. Doing them one at a time helped. Welcome to the Newbies. Choppy At 09:28 AM 7/12/02 -0500, you wrote: >Hey y'all, > >I'm a brand-shiny-new newbie (to Linux, but not Unix) having just >installed Mandrake 8.1 last weekend. I'm up and running, but having a >few problems that 'Net research hasn't shed much light on: > >1) I can't mount the floppy drive, even if I try at the command line >with filesystem types msdos, vfat, ntfs, or auto. Error I get: >"Unknown Device". My /etc/fstab entry looks like this: >/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto >user,iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,sync,exec,codepage=850,noauto 0 0
