On Thursday 15 April 2004 13:45, Robert Fisher wrote: > Tomorrow, if the parts arrive, I will be building a new PC for a friend and > his family who are not highly skilled but can get around Windows 98. > > I am considering loading Mandrake 10 Official rather than Windows but I > want some advice. I want to make a sooth transition if possible otherwise I > will stick to Windows and not have to help them out all of the time with an > unfamiliar OS. Make sure that the distribution is able to upgrade installed applications and install new ones without having to manually cope with the dependencies. apt-get ( Debian ), urmpi ( Mankdrake ), and emerge ( Gentoo ), all do this satisfactorily most of the time. I expect that RedHat has something similar, but I do not know what it's called.
> Are there locally available PCI 56k modems which work easily with Mandrake? The Connexant modems are both widely available retail in town as well as being supported by the Linuxant offerings. http://www.linuxant.com/ You can either buy a Linux driver via the web site mentioned or d/l the source from:- ftp://ftp2.jetstreamgames.co.nz/gentoo/distfiles/hsflinmodem-5.03.27lnxtbeta03042700.tar.gz ftp://ftp2.jetstreamgames.co.nz/gentoo/distfiles/hcfpcimodem-0.99lnxtbeta03042700.tar.gz Choose depending on whether your modem is a software one or a 'controllerless' one. In my exp. both of these drivers work perfectly in spite of being marked 'beta'. You will need to install the kernel sources of the running kernel in order to compile the driver. The last version ( 9.x ) of Mandrake did not include the kernel sources on the distribution cd. One has to d/l them off a mirror. I do not know if MDK have repeated this particular sin in MDK-10. Anyone, Jason? The modem DSE offers comes ( came ) with a driver ( binary and source ) on a CD. I had to re-compile it in order to get it to work with a different kernel. Once again the kernel sources have to be installed. > Is "Internet connection sharing" (Windows terminology) easy to set up so > they can still use the old PC? Relatively. In Linux parlance the magic words are NAT ( Network Address Translation ), IPMASQ, iptables and portforwarding. FMs to R are:- http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~dranch/LINUX/ipmasq/c-html/ http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/networking.html Enjoy the resulting cranial overload. :-) -- Sincerely etc. Christopher Sawtell NB. This PC runs Linux. If you find a virus apparently from me, it has forged the e-mail headers on someone else's machine. Please do not notify me when this occurs. Thanks.
