A little testimony. Had some Unix experience in Universerity some 6 years ago, but only learnt enough to send email, use telnet, ftp and some scripts. And here I am running Mandrake 6, KDE 1.1.1, XFree86 3.3.5 and having a blast! I've got an IBM Aptiva. It was manufactured on September 2nd, and I bought it on Sept 6th. Interesting. The computer came with Win98 of course, ESS Solo I Audio and the SiS 530 gfx chipset. And a bloody winmodem. I'm so glad I kept my external 33.6! Anyway, The Xserver installation (video and monitor stuff) and the sync probing went horribly. Of course, I didn't know what that meant just a few days ago, so I kept trying to reinstall Mandrake over and over again (20 times?) from the booting CD trying different configurations. (I'm so glad I know how to use the config file now!) So read read read read. :) Found out that the 3.3.5 version of Xfree fixed the SiS 530 bugs. Downloaded it, installed it and voila! Could finally see a terminal window in the X server. But KDE wouldn't work. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but stumbled upon the xinit command which is the only command I've found so far that loads the X server, gives me a term window that I can type in the 'KDE' command and the graphical adventure begings. Perfectly. Had problems with virtual desktops (although I answered NO to all questions asking if I'd like to use them ???) but read read read and found the alt-ctrl-+ sequence to put my screen res high enough so that the 1024x768 it virtually used to for all screen modes, would equal the exact resolution therefore getting rid of any virtual effects. Phew! So now I've installed StarOffice (WOW!!!!!!) and I'm having a ball. I haven't booted into Win98 in days heh. Hadn't had the need to of course. Linux rocks. Was a bloody ride at first, but now it's smooth sailing. In 4 days (8 hours a night) I went from 'whats this Linux stuff?' to mounting my Win98 partition into Linux to access the bigger hard disk , compiling apps and editing those config files that people usually complain about. It's all so straightforward. Is that average learning curve? Or am I just catching on at a healthy rate? Still can't get audio to work however. Those motherboard chipsets are difficult to tap into. I keep getting 'resource busy' errors with any 0xnnn, DMA n, etc. Tried playing with the BIOS to turn off pnp, reset assignments, toggled IRQ sharing. Just can't get it! Halp! :) I've read messages from people having difficulty rebooting or shutting off their Linux, involving all those 'didn't shut down cleanly' or something messages. I'm so glad to say that I can either 'HALT', or ctrl-alt-delete and linux shuts down perfectly and even turns the power off on my computer. Just like Winsloth does. Power management works too. I love Linux! It really does lack nothing. best wishes, Darcy.
