Newbie Questions.
Kam Leo
kam.leo at gmail.com
Fri Jan 21 00:00:05 UTC 2005
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 17:58:31 -0500, Andrew Choens <andy.choens at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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)
> >
You will not have problems burning data to a DVD drive. The problem
is processing power to encode and decode video. Your computer is not
fast enough to play DVD movies. You need at least a 600 MHz PII.
>
> 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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