Newbie Questions.

Andrew Choens andy.choens at gmail.com
Thu Jan 20 22:58:31 UTC 2005


> Hey, I'm sort of new to *nix in general and very new to FC3, which I have just
> installed on a PII 350, 64MB Ram, 4,3G HD. It is a dual boot with WIN 98 SE.
> The following are a couple questions which I haven't been able to figure out:

Welcome to the party.  This isn't going to be the easiest sort of
thing to do.  It CAN be done, but you will have to be willing to learn
quite a bit.  I'll try to spend a few minutes here and see if I can
point you in some good directions to read.

You might want to check out a distro like Peanut Linux that was meant
for older systems.  Go to www.distrowatch.com and check out what
distros there are for systems like yours.  Otherwise you'll be doing
this by hand.

Even if you decide to continue wearing the Fedora, you might get some
"best of small and fast breed" suggestions from those distros, since
that's what they specialize in.

> 
> 1.My specs are far from optimal; gnome absolutely crawls, I don't much care
> for FCE, and I haven't yet tried KDE.  All I would really like is something
> simple with a nice fast file browser.
> 




You can forget about KDE or GNOME.  Honestly, I like XFCE4.2 on a
lower grade system that I have.  Seriously. google for their homepage
and try the new 4.2.  It is MUCH better than what comes with Fedora.

> A friend has recomended Afterstep, however the latest version of Fedora Core
> for which RPM's are available is FC2.  Can this afterstep be installed on
> FC3?  In general can RPMs for earlier versions of FC be installed on later
> versions?
> 

I doubt you will run into any problems with this.  You could also
check out Window Maker.  I think it's kinda neat, and is part of the
remnants of the attempt to port Next Step to Linux.  There's a whole
world of little apps out there to experiement with.  I don't know how
mature/stable/useful any of the Next Step (or is it open step?) stuff
is, but I know Window Maker is solid, I used it before using XFCE4. 
But, Window Maker doesn't have any file browsers, which XFCE does. 
You might want to try

http://www.hi-net.cz/blaza/bfcommander/en/index.html

or 

http://tuxcmd.sourceforge.net/


> Is Afterstep even a good idea?  Are there other, better options for a low-end
> system like mine?
> 

Windowmaker...nice and pretty.  FVWM...blisteringly fast, but I think
it's ugly.  Blackbox..hard to configure but it's fast as greased
lightning, etc.



> 2. At the moment I only have X11 installed, which is good enough for now,
> except that I cannot figure out how to mount my digital camera through usb (I
> use it as a thumbdrive)  Gnome would do this automatically, creating an icon
> named 'NO_NAME' on the desktop.  Under X-11 a folder called 'NO_NAME' appears
> in /media/ but it contains nothing.  I have figured out how to mount hard
> drive partitions and cd's using the mount command, and how to edit the fstab
> table, however I have no idea which device I should be trying to mount.  Also,
> what format would an Olympus camera use to format XD cards?  vfat?
> 

I have no idea what file format XD cards use, sorry.

> 3.  I discovered the 'alias' command today, and was very dissapointed to
> discover that it only seems to apply to 1 session in one terminal window.  I
> would like to be able to type one word into the terminal, say "collins.exe"
> instead of "WINEDLLOVERRIDES=riched20,riched32=n wine /C/Program\
> Files/Collins/Master\ Dictionary/Collins.exe" whenever I want to use my
> dictionary.  Is there something similar to alias only perminant?
> 

The other guy was right on the money.  Stick your aliases at the end
of your .bashrc file and they will load automatically every time YOU
log in.  Note:  If you create another user, they will NOT have this
set up until you add it to their .bashrc in their home directory.

> 4.  I don't have a television, much less a dvd player in my apartment, however
> I would like to be able to watch DVD's.  What is the minimum for acceptable
> mpeg2 decoding in Mplayer?  is such a thing possible on a PIII 350?
> 

I don't know.  I wouldn't use Mplayer on your system.  Look at ogle. 
It should be smaller and faster.  Another good option might be the
videolanclient  (vlc)


> 4.5  If I do get a DVD drive, it seems that I might as well spend a few extra
> euros and get a new dual layer burner.  Are any of these compatible with FC3?
> is there a hardware compatibility database anywhere?  Are there minimum
> hardware requirements for DVD burning which I cannot meet?  (some guy at the
> computer shop was telling me that there were, but I don't see how burning a
> DVD is any more processor intensive than copying a file)
> 

Yeah there is a list...can't remember what it's called though.



> Thanks in advance for any advice you have on any of these subjects,
> -Zoe
> 

I said alot in this.  I left a bunch of details out.  If you get stuck
trying to get something that I mentionned to install feel free to
email me directly and I'll see what I can do to help you.  I have most
of that stuff installed on my system or did at one point.  To help
yourself fix dependency issues, and to find most of what I just
mentionned, I would get apt-get.

Google for freshrpms.  Download apt-get and then follow the directions
it will give you after installing if with rpm -ivh apt*rpm as user
root.  Then use it to install synaptic.  It will be slow on your
system, but the GUI might be worth it.


La Paz
--andy



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