Mandrake 8, Questions please > > >

[Space~GhOst~]

Go on then, ask away :)

*uhm* yeah, a little silly, I know. :(

Ok, I installed Mandrake 8 yesterday. All went fine!
But, there's something strange going on. I had Mandrake7.2 installed sometime back, but only for a week... didn't really get to learn linux back then, but I'm up for giving it another go :)


1. On 7.2, I would boot into a text menu, where I would login and type 'xwindows' or something for the GUI.
Now, when I boot up, it goes straight into xwindows and I don't even have to login! I automatically log's me in as one of my 'users'. I think I select this option while installing, can I go back to the old(7.2) way?

2. With 7.2, I loaded up a web browser(Konqurer?) and all ways fine :)
Now, I loaded up Konqurer and the fonts were totally messed up :(. Was too small to read and when I increased the font size, still looked rough :mad:
Mozilla looks a little better, but doesn't seem to work as well as IE(*uhm*). For instance, on the opening page of these forums, some of the rows (the line between forums) all not visible. Anyone else had this? I changed the font to Helvetica, which is a little clearer.

3. I hope you appreciate, I'm a complete linux newbie :|
When I installed Mandrake8, I gave Linux 10GB of my Harddrive. I used:

- 5Gig for '/'
- 3Gig for '/usr'
- 2Gig for '/home'

And 512MB swap file, which took bytes from the above partitions.

I didn't have a clue what was going on, just felt like the right thing to do!?!

Problem is, when I'm in xwindows(logged in as a normal user)... I can only see the '/' partition and the partitions I'm using for windows. I've got no idea where '/usr' and '/home' are?!? Do I need to login as 'su' to see these?

Suffice to say, I'm totally confused over the way Linux uses partitions and directories. What the hell does it mean by 'mount', is that the same as 'mnt'?


Is there a newbie hand-book which I can read?

Also, now that I've got it installed, what can I do here that I couldn't in windows? Thats not a sarcastic question :)
Just wondering what i can use Linux for? I hear it's good for programming and has loads of free utils, I'd appreciate if someone could recommend free apps for the following:

- Programming (HTML/XML/XSL/ASP... mostly web based languages)
- Graphics (Anything like Adobe Photoshop and a good 3D app, like 3DMAX, or Maya...)
- Any other nifty utils would be nice :)

Been a long tread, thanks for reading!

[Ferg]

ASP... surely you mean PHP? :P

[Skunk]

ASP is a windows technology - PHP runs great on linux though and it's better then ASP anyway :E

The vast majority of linux installations come with the following software (amongst other stuff):

Apache - the best web server around.
Gimp - an open source graphics package to rival photoshop
Perl - open source scripting language
Python - open source scripting language
gcc - the GNU C compiler, great for learning C,C++ etc
There's probably an implementation of Java on there as well.

A lot of distros come with PHP pre-installed with Apache - I don't know if Mandrake does this. At any rate you've basically got a huge toolkit full of excelletn stuff for learning to program.

[334th Lenagh]

Tell me can anyone acutally point me in the direction of a fully fledged PHP e-commerce site ? I am to undertake a project which uses mandrake and apache / apache-asp to create a shop site template over the summer.

Although we are going to cover php as well it seems I can only find php in use on content rich / news sites and not when it comes to selling products ?

Were are all these blummin php sites hiding.

[aef]

I'd choose Perl over PHP for any large/complicated project, but YMMV.

I don't see what use finding a PHP-based commerce site would be to you, since they'd be unlikely to give you their PHP code anyway. A PHP site will work in approximately the same way (from a design point of view) as one based on any other server-side technology. You need a good grounding in your chosen language, and relational databases, but the rest is general web programming/design skills. (Many people who are not used to web programming write horribly insecure code - make sure you're aware of the security issues.)

AEF

[Ironheart]

To try to answer your questions:

1) I presume that on 7.2 you were booting into the console and then using "startx" to go into the GUI. In 8.0 you can set it up to go to the console you like used to, or boot straight into X. There is an additional option to automatically log in as a particular identity, using a stated user and desktop. I have mine set up to just boot to X then I login myself, as both my gf and I use this PC.

You can customize all these options in the Mandrake Control Centre, under the Boot submenu.

2) I believe that's a known problem. Check out this site (http://www.mandrakeuser.org) which I believe has a fix somewhere.

3) Linux only actually needs two partitions to run, being "/" (root) and "/swap", and will then create all of those other folders it needs ("/home", "/usr", etc.) in the root filesystem. However, you can specify some or all of those other folders as partitions if you would like. This is for protection mainly, although if you created a partition for "/tmp" for example, you could deliberately make it small so that a rogue program could not fill it up and slow your hard drive down to a crunch, as it might keep going and going until your root filesystem was Swiss-cheesed. Having a separate partition for "/tmp" avoids this (as an example).

Rest assured, if you didn't create any extra partitions, they would automatically be assigned from root. I have mine set up with only "/", "/swap" and "/home", though I'm sure a lot of people would have different opinions on what was best.

Btw aef, I'm expecting marks out of ten on this :cheese:

[Godin]

Well for pre existant php ec solutions you could always try
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/E-Commerce/
for a few premades, and phpShop, http://www.phpshop.org/ has been featured on devshed, so theres plenty out there if ya look.

[Space~GhOst~]

Thanks Ironheart ;)

Just a quick question on the partitions. I still cannot see my /usr and /home partitions. As you pointed out, mandrake did make these directories(/usr and /home) in the '/' partition, but I wanted mandrake to use the partitions of this name, which I can't see... if you get me!

A little off-topic, I figure linux is geared towards multiple users, which is why there's such a big empahsis on user-permissions...etc.

Please explain what the '/usr' and '/home' folders are used for. and isn't '/' the same as '/root'? Any other tips, or naming convention guides for Linux would be appreciated ;)

Finally, how do I install software and drivers?
In Mandrake, I can see my hardware in a 'win9x' type tab, but there's no option for upgrading drivers. Do I have to return to the console to do this?

Fear not people, I've bought a book on Mandrake, although it covers v7.1... I'm sure it'll do for v8!

Cheers ;)

[ybw]

AEF posted this in an earlier thread:
http://www.firstlinux.com/articles/cards/lds.shtml

Pretty good guide.

Andy

[Space~GhOst~]

Woah! My post above may no longer be relevant, thanks to Ironheart's link ;)

Thanks for that m8, seems like most of my questions will be answered at MUO.

One thing that 'is' confussing though, what is KDE and GNOME? I suspect these're the GUI managers, that load when you type 'xstart' in the console?
Is KDE the default GUI, how do I select the others?

Thanks, again.

[Ironheart]

KDE and Gnome are the two desktop environments as you thought. There are others, like Windowmaker, Enlightenment, Black Box (and a lot more) but most stick with either KDE or Gnome. I prefer Gnome over KDE myself, but that's just a personal choice, but I believe KDE is Mandrake's default.

You can change between the two at the X login. When you enter your username and password there is also another box to select which manager to use. What you have available will depend on which you installed (it was an option in the install program to install KDE, Gnome, "Other Managers" or a combination thereof). I believe there are also utilities you can get which allow you to switch on-the-fly without needing to re-login. You can always add other managers you didn't install at setup by using the Software Manager to install them as well.

And you're very welcome :) Makes a nice change to be answering the questions, rather than asking them.

[Edited by Ironheart on 31-05-2001 at 02:22 PM]

[Ironheart]

Oh and Ghost I've just understood one of your other questions (hey, it's early; well it is for me :) ) regarding Mandrake creating /home and other directories in / rather than on the partition you have made. These directories are actually the partitions that you have made, but Mandrake just makes them look like regular directories. For example, I have / and /home, and my /home is underneath / and to everyone else (and myself) appears to be a normal directory. Except it's a partition in its own right, because I made a /home partition when I installed 8.0. Mandrake detects this, and uses that partition for its /home directory or whatever directory you have made as a partition.

Hope that's clear :) So basically, everything is working as it should.

[Space~GhOst~]

Thanks for clearing that up ;)

But with these partitions, when I check the size for /home, it displays as 450MB. Whereas the /home partition I made was over 2Gig!

I'll investigate again tonight and find out what going on...

[Ironheart]

My initial guess would be that 450Mb is the size of files contained in /home right now, but that the whole partition still has up to 2Gb available to it.

Either that, or something dodgy is going on :)

Just to check, you did label that 2Gb partition as /home, right? As long as you made sure it was labelled correctly, Mandrake should sort it all out for you.

[Space~GhOst~]

Once again Ironheart, you've pulled through ;)

Mandrake was indeed using the partitions I made for /home and /usr. Although the normal 'file browser' only showed the space in use... I used another util(from the 'start' type menu, *uhm*)... anyway, that showed me the total space and space in use... all bytes were accounted for :)

[aef]

Originally posted by Ironheart
Btw aef, I'm expecting marks out of ten on this :cheese:

7

Pretty good, but swap is swap, not /swap. (It's not mounted as part of the overall filesystem, and so doesn't have a mount point.)

AEF

[aef]

I think other people have answered most of the questions regarding partitions, but I'll mention a couple of things.

To see what partitions are assigned to which mount-points, check your /etc/fstab file, eg:

cat /etc/fstab

To see what partitions/filesystems are mounted at any given point in time, check your /etc/mtab file, eg:

cat /etc/mtab

To see how much free space you have on your different filessytems, use:

df -k

(The -k option is important to get kilobytes, otherwise it might give you sizes in 512-byte blocks, or something equally strange.)

AEF

[Ironheart]

Originally posted by aef
Pretty good, but swap is swap, not /swap. (It's not mounted as part of the overall filesystem, and so doesn't have a mount point.)

AEF [/B]

Ah, useful info to know.