Linux: Your recommendations

[{PainCresT}DAn]

Your right about not having to get technical but in a "Ex-Military" environment you can't just say it crashes cause it sucks. Bosses don't look at that to kindly, especially when coming from someone who "LOOKS" as young as I do (btw I'm 26, I know this isn't all that old but it isn't all that young either and I look like I'm about 20 maybe... I know that eventualy I will appreciate this but its a huge pain and has been for a while... I'll be in my death bed before I'm taken seriously buy 40+ looking/old people). If you have grey hair then that would be the reason why people take you seriously right off the bat. In my case not only do I have to have proof (webpage upon webpage upon books upon... you get the picture) I have to have irrifutible proof that if someone was even careless enough to counter it they would totaly look dumb, welcome to my world .

But getting back to the original question I mentioned a few posts ago, I can't get the "vendor supplied kernels" to detect my tvtuner card properly and I haven't even tried burning anything yet... I can see the box though from windows so I got something working right out of the install.

One last question... if I have 512MB of ram on this box do I even need a swapt partition or what should I set it to if I have that much ram... Hard drive space isn't much a problem though I have 40GB for this box (I want ot make is a game(like CS, UT, Q3)/file/webpage/ftp/mail server and also be able to burn CD's and watch TV with it. All the hardware is supposed to be supported.

[{PainCresT}DAn]

Rugger I totaly forgot to thank you for the extra info on getting me start... sorry

[rugger]

Ah,

People around here understand windows sucks. But if they don't, ask them "Do you really want me to sit down with you for 3 hours while I explain computer hardware/software to you, and then give you the reason windows sucks?"

If they say yes, do it . They won't ask again.

(I know I am being silly here, I have the same problem too. All I can do is shrug and say that is the way windows is, and maybe give a one sentence technical explianation. Since they don't really understand it, they simply say OK and don't demand the in depth version.)

As for looking too young, growing a beard is a good way of making yourself look aged I have the same problem too, I am 22, but don't look a day over 16

For your tv tuner problem, learn how modutils works in your distribution (it ussually uses parameters from /etc/modules.conf, but since I use slackware, which is different, I don't know) Then modify the parameters passed to the bttv module so it has card=10 parameter.

For buring CD's, you may need to rebuild your kernel if the vendor kernel does not enumerate your IDE burner as a virtual SCSI device. Then cd burner programs will work fine.

As for a swap file, you probably won't need one, but if you feel more secure having one, or do massive work on your computer, you could create one of 1gig and use that.

[{PainCresT}DAn]

kewl thanx, I think the kernel already detected my burner and installed the appropriate software for it... Don't make fun of me but I did a Workstation install and didn't choose custome... ... Anyway I think I'll try Mandrake or SUSE anyway since I would rather a stable platform that doesn't use any development compiler (don't want to be learning something and have problems just because it isn't using a stable compiler... would sux that I'm doing things right but run into problems because of that).

[rugger]

Try slackware then

Originally posted by {PainCresT}DAn
kewl thanx, I think the kernel already detected my burner and installed the appropriate software for it... Don't make fun of me but I did a Workstation install and didn't choose custome... ... Anyway I think I'll try Mandrake or SUSE anyway since I would rather a stable platform that doesn't use any development compiler (don't want to be learning something and have problems just because it isn't using a stable compiler... would sux that I'm doing things right but run into problems because of that).

Try slackware then. It throws you into the deep end early, but is built well from stable components that can be depended upon. Almost all programs compile cleanly under slackware out of the box, and performance is good because it doesn't clutter the system up with junk.

Just be prepared for a lot of learning, because slackware does very little hardware detection, so you will need to tell it yourself how everything should be

And get this, slackware still uses text based setup

[villerk]

Well I'm glad that people are interested in Linux! About learning to use an OS: you can learn the basics of any OS in just a couple of weeks. It doesn't matter if it's fully graphical and GUI based or if it's only text mode. But to understand how it works, why it works and how to use it in a more productive way takes the whole time you ever use that OS. I've been using Linux for a good five years now and I still find out things I didn't know about it that help me use it more 'professionally'. I used DOS for four years (back in the good ol' 486 days) and whole the time I learned something new every day, even though I learned the basics of it in a month (hey, I was only 12 years old then! ). Windows was the same, so was BeOS. This applies to every single OS there is. That's all folks.

[{PainCresT}DAn]

Rugger if Slackware is a prompt mode os how can I see TV with it?

[rugger]

Heh

Originally posted by {PainCresT}DAn
Rugger if Slackware is a prompt mode os how can I see TV with it?

You configure the xserver, and then start it using (as a non-root user):

startx

which will bring up either gnome or kde on the Xserver (which is the name of the program that handles graphics under linux)

Or you could, as root, run

init 4

which changes the systems runlevel (runlevels are used to control "init", which determines what programs get run) to 4, and "init" will then start the xserver and provide a graphical login prompt.

Futhurmore, once you have your xserver setup correctly, you can make "init" start up the graphical prompt every time you boot, by changing the default runlevel to 4 in the file /etc/inittab. (/etc/inittab controls bootup and what gets started with each runlevel)

You need to realize what a distributor provides as the "linux environment" is not fixed "like windows", it is configured by lots of files (mostly in the /etc) directory. You can change these to create almost any environment you like.

Also another tip. When on the bare command line, outside of X-windows, you can use Alt-F1, Alt-F2, Alt-F3 to Alt-F6 to switch between virtual terminals.

[{PainCresT}DAn]

NO NO NO ITS ALL A BAD DREAM... NOT COLLEGE AGAIN!!!!

JK , Like the good old DOS(with I it was called quarkdesk... it allowed multitasking in DOS env... LOL)/Win3.1 Days again ... But better. I do remember the alt-F# thing... so running as root is that applicable to all linux distro's.

[{PainCresT}DAn]

BTW the Linux I learned in college was slackware 1.3.1 or somthing like that.

[rugger]

yep, root is the same on all linux distributions (more specificly, root is the user with user id 0)

root is the computers superuser, like the administrator account on windows, only MORE powerful. Actually, root is more like the "Local System" privledges. (administrator cannot kill or change service threads under NT, which means you need to reboot if a service gets stuck in an infinite loop)

Root can do anything, except forcibly kill init or kernel threads (which isn't a good idea anyway) Other than that, root can change/delete/add any file, send signals (that includes forcibly killing a program) to any process on the system, change the CPU priority of any program using the system. Root can also load/unload modules, bind to ports lower than 1024, lock memory (don't swap it out), and adjust system parameters. The strength of root allows system adminstrators to fix many situations that force winnt machines to be rebooted.

As an extra note, many programs on the system are setup so they run with root privledges, even if the user running them isn't root. (like passwd and mount)

Needless to say, you should avoid using root as much as possible. You should create yourself an account, and use it for all normal work. As an extra benifet, it forces you to save all your settings and data in your home directory, making upgrading and backing it up much easier.

[{PainCresT}DAn]

Originally posted by rugger
Root can do anything, except forcibly kill init or kernel threads (which isn't a good idea anyway)

LOL I guess that wouldn't be a good idea... Linux version of Memory dump...BSOD.

Originally posted by rugger
Or you could, as root, run

init 4

which changes the systems runlevel (runlevels are used to control "init", which determines what programs get run) to 4

This is more what I was refering to, what is init 4 and what do. You mean run level is 0 its like have an uber user with rights to access layer 0 in NT kernel terms. BTW there is such a user in Windows world and thanx to the slop code MS spews out people have figure out how to access that user account remotly even though you can't do it locally... LOL thats so funny.



BTW how in hell do ya upload pics to the website.... Got a great collage I made up of reall world occurences...

[rugger]

Not quite

Originally posted by {PainCresT}DAn


This is more what I was refering to, what is init 4 and what do. You mean run level is 0 its like have an uber user with rights to access layer 0 in NT kernel terms. BTW there is such a user in Windows world and thanx to the slop code MS spews out people have figure out how to access that user account remotly even though you can't do it locally... LOL thats so funny.



BTW how in hell do ya upload pics to the website.... Got a great collage I made up of reall world occurences...

You can use attachments for that.

Anyway, users and runlevels are different.

Each user has a number (called their userid) on a linux system. This number is used by the kernel and the filesystem to determine what access to a file the user has. The root user has the userid of 0. Each user also has a group they belong to, which is also a number called the group id. (Users can also belong to other groups, but that complicates my explaination). Root belongs to the group root, which also has a group id of 0

To demonstrate, say if the file /vmlinuz is owned by user root, group root, then the filesystem will store the owner user id as 0, and the group owner id as 0. Then, when a normal user goes to write to that file, the kernel compares the users id (not 0), with the id of the files owner (which is 0) and determines that the user cannot write to it. (its more complicated than this in reality, I am just showing how the security is based off the user id number, rather than the name)

Now runlevels are different. Runlevels are used by init (not the kernel), to determine what program schedual it should run. Runlevels that are commonly defined are:

0: Init should halt the system (maybe poweroff as well)
1: Single user mode. All programs are shut down, and a text login prompt is provided. This mode is useful for because you can remount the / filesystem as read-only and perform maintenece on it if it is damages. You can also use this mode to upgrade libc and other system libraries manually.
2: Not used
3: Multiuser mode: This mode starts up all programs and background servers and brings up a normal text login prompt.
4: X11 mode: This is the same as multiuser mode, but login now happens via the Xserver.
5: Not used, but ussually the same as runlevel 3.
6: Reboot. Init will shutdown everything and reboot the system cleanly.

In essence, runlevels simply determine the mode the system is running in. You can change the runlevel (as user root, normal users cannot do this) by running:

init X

Where X is the desired runlevel you want your system to move to.

As another useless comment, BSOD's under linux are typically called kernel panics, and it is VERY VERY rare to actually see one. I haven't seen a kernel panic from a normal system in ages. (well, 2.4.9, a borked kernel, did die at work after 2 weeks, but it didn't kernel panic, it just ran out of resources and locked up. However, 2.4.9 did have a lot of virtual memory problems, but they have been fixed)

As for root, yes, it is all mighty. It can even poke and peek any memory position via the file /dev/mem. It can manage any problem outside of the kernel, and since virtuallly everything in linux runs outside the kernel (no server is in the kernel, unlike ISS in windows), you can manage everything from it

[{PainCresT}DAn]

Re: Not quite

Originally posted by rugger
As another useless comment, BSOD's under linux are typically called kernel panics, and it is VERY VERY rare to actually see one.

I never said that linux was un-stable, you said;

except forcibly kill init or kernel threads (which isn't a good idea anyway)

and I said;
LOL I guess that wouldn't be a good idea... Linux version of Memory dump...BSOD

I was jk aboot that.

Linux way more stable than windows any day. You have the ability to controll everything (kinda).

Here's my collage of what I think of windows and M$:

[rugger]

Re: Re: Not quite

Ops,

I didn't mean to accuse you of saying linux is unstable Sorry.

I was just pointing out what a kernel death under linux is