I was wondeirng if anyone knew of an easy to understand place to learn the basics of mandrake. Ive found a few but cant understand shit. It to me, seems like its telling someone who already has linux experience howto do things.

For fuck sakes I cant even play a CD! I know you cant mount audio (from what ice heard anyways) so thats no issue, but when running KDE (seeing as how I have no clue howto do anything in any desktop other then KDE or GNOME. despite my hearing those two are no safer then windows) i cant even use the CD Player or XMMS. in XMMS I goto mnt/cdrom or whatever, nothing. no problem I goto some other place, like dev/blah...blah/cdrom1 (i think its in dev anyways)

but for fuck sakes it enver finds any audio so I cant setup a play list. jesus christ!

ls /dev
*this is a list of devices, pick your cdrom and remember the name
ls /mnt
*this is a list of your mount points, pick an apropraite point for mounting an audio cd. otherwise create a folder by
cd /mnt/
mkdir cdrom
*now your mount folder is cdrom
su your_root_password
*now your logged in as root so dont delete anything
mount /dev/name_of_cdrom_device /mnt/cdrom
*you have just mounted a cdrom, natalus should open showing the contents, if not dont worry its still mounted.
*go do your thing with xmms
*be sure to log out of the su mode since that is equivelent to root and you can damage things running as a su or root.

i hope that helped let me know if your still having problems. alternatly you can
cat /mnt/ > /home/mnt.txt
cat /dev/ > /home/dev.txt
and post them so we can give the exact commands. hoped that helped. the documentation on the mandrake users organization web site is excelent. also i use a que book called practical linux.

ohh and never use kde, it sucks the big one in comparison to gnome

or you could use windowaker and have your system resources do something worthwhile instead of making your computer look perty....

nope i have plenty of resources to waste. i have a duron 750 which is more than enough for any app i run. i monitor cpu and ram usage with "top" and the cpu is never utilized past 12 percent for more than three seconds at a time (use goes up when you initially open an app). so unless your running a pentium or lower then you might as well have pretty pictures.

my mother taught me never to waste cycles...

ide like to use something other then both kde or gnome, but fuck, i cant figure out how to do anything in most others! like on (cant remember the name) has just a few squares, and another has nothing!

I'm getting a brand new comp this week, and I'd like to had an install of linux on it (probably gnome, for the GUI) so that I can learn the ins and outs of the OS. I know the best way to learn windows is just to screw around with it for a while, find this, change the background here, and soon you get the basic idea. Does linux work the same way? and how is the best way to have bootable linux and windows on tha same comp? And will it affect the performance (ram?, cpu?, HD?) of my beautiful new AMD XP 1800+ comp?

the mandrake setup has a partioning device already installed. real easy to use. sleect the windows partion, resize it, create the new one for linux, and youre done! as for figuring thigns out, ide say yeah, when it coems to figuring out as much as windows offers. like background, screen saver, etc... all you need to do is play around. but I got linux because its more owerful then windows, and hopefully when i get a linux compatable modem one of these fine days, ill be able to learn some more security stuff, seeing as how most you read, is based out of the use of a *nix terminal. (BTW, whats up iwth tehre being like 6 terminals?)

I switched over to gnome. just set it all up visually, and played around a bit. still cant get my sounds to work (though i fixed xmms. i had to reset the stupid output device from dev/cdrom to dev/scd0 (my buner) after trying dev/dbt (dbt... i think thats what my cd rom was) and not having it work! howwever its all good now!) seeing as how it always tells me to install the gnome sound files and i cant fidn the fuckers. tho i have the stupid sounds in KDE. (i just got so used to all the privilages of iwnodws, that its hard to stray!)

i seem to like BlackBOX. i think thats what its called? the stupidist one i think, is enlightenment. fuck i cant understand that thing! but with the blackbox one, i cant add icons or anything to the desktop. yes, yes, on might imagine it not important, as all files are (havent tried but ide imagine so) accessable through the terminal, however, once again, we get back to privilages! i didnt see what browser it runs (mozilla or something ide guess) but i also imagine you could simply use the link bar in there to browse files. even still, its a nice one, depite not being able to set the clock right! and its kind of annoying having a blank screen back there! and ingo on blackbox would help, as ide like to run that! however gnome seems to work well for me, but seems slower then kde? could have been those pc gremilens you get! hehe. but seriously, could have just been shittyness.

however, if i do find out the simple shit with blackbox, and come out liking gnome over it (i liked KDE over gnome first, however for KDE, depite it seemign to run faster that time, it takes a while longer to load, and a few programs always crash! but dont iwth gnome ) ide like to figure out this one thign i always see, just for looks! i dont know if its kde or gnome, but ide just like to ask if anyone knows how to do this. get all the forms, to be transparent? i have to say, that is the most awsome looking thing ever! i know looks dont mean shit to performance, but if youre gonna go good, might as well do it in every aspect!

thanks

well you have two feasible options for installing linux. the most common is just taking your hard drive(s) and making a windows partition then dividing the rest amongst ext2 partitions for linux.

the less common but clearly superior method is vmware which allows you to run windows inside of a linux window. this is a bit more advanced and i would hold off on it unless some one you know can set it up for you.


as for the terminals, i think your talking about shells (bash, ash, etc), they all do the same basic things but each have thier own strengths and weaknesses. bash is certainly the best in my opinion. a shell like ash is usefull becasue its much simpler and smaller than bash so it can be used in a floppy distro. there are a lot of shells to play with but in the end you will most likely go back to bash.

if you want to try hacking via the shell then go to hackerslab.org and signup. thye give you a shell via telnet so it can be accessed through windows.

i went there but fuck, i cant do shit! i know it sounds bad, but i really dont kno how to do anything with telnet, as all the texts i try and read pertaining to thigns liek this, speak towardsa those who already have knowledge. so when it says like "oh, do a finger on the victim, and telnet" that doesnt help me, you know?

ill sign up anyways cuz practice cant hurt anyways.

good idea. its always a decent introduction to the linux file system and navigating it on a remote machine.

http://www.slackware.com/book

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BTW, whats up iwth tehre being like 6 terminals?)

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Having six virtual terminals, accessable by pressing alt+(1-6), is handy if you like doing more than one thing at a time, reading a text file, writing a text file, where you need to do one thing without closing the other. It also becomes useful when a program crashes, you can flip over to another terminal and kill it from there.