Newbie Questions.

zoe at purdue.edu zoe at purdue.edu
Thu Jan 20 21:37:58 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:

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.  

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?

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



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? 


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?


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?

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)

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












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