Dear All,
I have made some progress since my first post. Thanks for all the help. I now have a partially working system. Not as broken as I first thought, I did not realise that many programs work under either Gnome or KDE but not both, Scilab for instance does not appear to work when run from KDE but if you run it under Gnome it works OK. Confusing isn't it? Add to this the fact that not all the applications appear in the desktop menus and there is no catalog to tell you what applications are installed on your system. Oh well (sigh).. .. . . .
Why cant we standardize on one desktop? Or make the two desktops compatible with each other so that any application will run on either of them?
I still have no connections. The two PC's connected by NE2000 ethernet cards (works OK under windows) will not talk to each other under Linux (SuSE 6.4). I have finally found out how to get yast to admit that there IS an ethernet card in the computer (Yast2 the graphic installer told me the card was not detected). Now there are a host of other things which need to be set up correctly before it will work.
There is still no luck with the internet either. Compuserve does not support Linux. I spent quite a long time speaking to unhelpful drones from compuserve customer services before being put through to someone who sounded as though he knew what he was talking about but was equally as helpful. He said that compuserve had its own authentication protocols for the added security of its customers. His advice was "not to run a non standard operating system" and "if you would re install Windows it will solve all your problems". Oh well it seems like I need a new ISP.
Regards
Paul J. Miller