niall111
08-07-2001, 01:20 PM
OK, this is a total rant, but I am asking for some help here, so please bear with me. I decided on saturday that I was going to give linux a shot, and figured i would create a new partition with partition magic, under win2k, and put linux on there. well, that whole process didn't go over so well, and i lost my entire 60 gigs of software/video/audio/etc. that was kind of upsetting, but in it's place i now have a newly formatted machine with Mandrake 8.0 on it. I've got to say, this OS just blows my mind. my roommate and I could do nothing but laugh and giggle at how much this is INFINITELY cooler than windows could ever hope to be! first of all, the install took a while, because i was freaking out over my mouse not working during install. if the os can't detect my mouse, what is the sense installing it? but i read some posts on the net about other's who've had the same problems, but the mouse works find on install. so, i go ahead and install the thing in text mode. since the mouse won't work in graphical mode, and using the keyboard in that mode is craziness. finally it's installed, and it boots up. WOW! my mouse works, no questions asked. my internet works, all i did was enter a couple number during install! what the hell!? everything is working flawlessly, and it even plays this little song when it starts up in KDE! i LOVE this OS! I just have to thank EVERYONE who contributes to the linux world, because you have made my year. i'm selling all of the ridiculous windows software i have, and i'm going with nothing but linux from now on. i'll be going out tonight to purchase the mandrake 8.0 power pack, and getting SEVEN cd's with it! SEVEN!?!? for 80$!? you have to be kidding me! i ****ing LOVE this! OK, enough about my elation with linux, i have a problem i'm hoping to get fixed asap. i'll be formatting again tonight, to reinstall with the SEVEN cd's i'll be getting. and clean up some of the problems i think i've caused over the weekend playing with this crazy linux stuff. Here's what i spent my day on sunday working on: I wanted to try out tuxracer. simple enough, but not quite. some minor config stuff had to be done to get it to run, but when i did get it running, it was slow as hell. so, on their site they say maybe the GL drivers aren't up to date. of course, they aren't. so i have to get geforce2 drivers from nvidia and try to get that to work. of course, konqueror crashes on nvidia's site, because they have flash. so i get flash, install it for netscape, and now use netscape as my browser of choice. please, recommendations on that are appreciated, i hate netscape. now, installing drivers is NOT the simple task it was in windows, but damnit, i'm getting smarter with every minute i spend installing them! i installed them from .rpm files, but that didn't go over well. so i find out i have to install from the .tar.gz files. but they won't compile, due to some error in kernel-header files. i find out i need to have the kernel source files installed. they aren't in my software manager list. (that is one COOL program as well!) so i have to reinstall mandrake and select developer as one of the options so it will let me install the kernel source. i think this was right, but i'm sure there was an easier way. but it needs the 2nd distro cd to install this. i burn this CD using cdrecord. that was a pain as well, but finally worked. however, the cd takes about half an hour to get read by the software installer program. and something just isn't working out on that end. so i go to ftp.kernel.org and get the source for 2.4.3 kernel. i install this source, and try compiling the drivers again. no luck. ok, maybe i have to actually "make" the kernel source? "make config" "make dep" "make" in that order. takes a long time, and i'm thinking, "i wonder how much this is going to screw things up?" and the drivers still don't compile. so i had it for the day, it was 3:00 in the morning, and i had to get up for work at 7:30. so here i am at work, asking for some help with this. :) please?