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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