Re: bloody newbies!!!!!

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Sat, 15 Jan 2000, kent wrote:
> the screenshots from the book i have (and the installation instructions) are
> for this version (6.0) of redhat!!! they have obviously just chose to change
> the title of the book and include the latest redhat version (6.1) without
> updating any of the content.

I seem to recall something called the 'Trades Descriptions Act', but never
mind .... ;)

> the first is that it asks you which GUI you want to install and only
> installs part of it (i chose kde) but been totally new i want to play with
> everything but the new installer only seems to install the basics and doesnt
> install gnome too (as version 6.0 did). how do install everything???

irresponsible answer:
'mount /mnt/cdrom
cd /mnt/cdrom/RedHat/RPMS
rpm -ivh *.rpm' :^)

Really, you should be able to choose other packages to install, although
I've no idea how RedHat goes about this anymore. I can't even recall if
there's an automagic thing like SuSE's YaST.. when I used RedHat last,
GnoRPM was the way to do things, but you said you don't have GNOME
installed. You can try the KDE KRPM/Arkiver/whatever it's called to
install the rpms you need, although this is not for a beginner generally.

If you go into the RPMS directory on your CD, it may possibly be where I
said it was just then, probably not though, you should be able to find all
the packages with 'gnome' in the name by issuing the command 'ls -l | grep
gnome'. You may want to write these down on a bit of paper at this point.
Then, you want to install them individually. Pick a name on your list, say
gnome.rpm (there won't be a file called this; this is just an example!).
Type 'rpm -i gnome.rpm'. All may go well, it may not complain - in this
case, cross out the file from your list. What's more likely is that it
will say 'I need such-and-such', where such-and-such will be a file on
your list or another file you've never heard of. If it's a file on your
list, go to step one and repeat. If it's not a file on your list, add it
to the list and then go to step one and repeat. Continue installing until
you have no files left on your list.

That sounds boring and arduous - it is. It will definitely work, though.
RedHat probably provide a tool to do it, I can't think of it off the top
of my head though - anyone else have any idea??

> secondly: in the old installer it asked me for my printer (epson440) and had
> it in the list, with 6.1 it never even asked me if i had a printer! how the
> hell do i get my printer working????

I believe there's a command called printconf, or something similar.
Alternatively, linuxconf ought to be able to handle the setup.

To tell you the truth, I don't really rate RedHat as a beginner's
distribution, and neither do a good few people on this list. If you want
something similar to RedHat, get Mandrake 7.0. It's *much* nicer. SuSE 6.3
is also a goodie..

> also when do you have meetings, perhaps you could find it in your valueable
> time to show a 'dummy' how this whole thing works??? or perhaps someone with
> a laptop would be up for me buying them a drink in one of sheffield's fine
> pubs (make you look all tech'y too!) then you can show me!

The meetings tend to be monthly, and you've just missed the last one!
(Never mind, so did I, I have exams..) The next one will be February
sometime I believe - watch for the notices on the list.

> i just thought of one last question: is it always neccessary to mount the cd
> rom? or can that be done with a linux equivalent of autoexec???

Mounting something doesn't just mean you're able to access the resource,
it's a little more complicated than that. For example, if you mounted a
floppy and then took it out, you would still be able to do operations on
that floppy until linux noticed something was amiss. It's hard to explain
to a beginner, but it is there for a reason ;). On the other hand,
supermount would solve your problem - and that's in Mandrake as well..

> are there any good graphical web site design packages available for linux
> like dreamweaver3?? and yes before smartarse says it i know about raw html
> but im too lazy :o)

I presume you mean WYSIWYG .. as far as I know, no, there aren't, which is
kind of surprising really. The best place to look for software is
http://freshmeat.net/. There's an 'appindex', which lists software by
category - you could look there to see if you can find what you're after?

Hope this helps,

Alex.

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