FC2 Help

Using Fedora Core 2 with "everything" installed. Does anyone have a good link/guide that shows how to install programs and drivers and that sort of thing? Also a link/guide on how to use the terminal?

I more than know my way around windows for installing programs, drivers, tweaking the system, using the console, etc. But Linux is something else entirely. I'm trying to learn but there's a few things in my way. Namely, I've got the drivers and stuff copied from the cd and into a folder on the computer, but I'm lost as to how to actually install them.



That's the stuff I want to install (yeah I know that's a windows screenshot, it's just to show the stuff I want to install while in Linux and I didn't want to type out those hideously long filenames here). It's the Nvidia Nforce chipest drivers, graphics card drivers, Ndiswrapper and associated drivers and utilities to get my stupid wireless card working, and firefox. I've googled around and tried to figure out how to do it, but it's been a no-go.

Installing things varies by distro, but generally-

tar.gz and .tgz and .bz2 are common forms of compression, so you need to extract these guys. Ark is a good utility for that.

Once extracted you might find-

1) there are a whole bunch of files. In this case you should look for one named README. Often this is instructions for a source compile, which requires you to build a bunary of the file with some simp;le commandline action-

ex-
su
[enter root's password so you can become root]
cd /to/directory/where/the/stuff/is
./configure
./make
./make install

2) there's an .rpm

su
[enter root's password so you can become root]
cd /to/directory/where/the/stuff/is
rpm -Uvh filename.rpm

3) There's something like install.sh or filename.run. These could be scripts which do the installing for you. To run them-

cd /to/directory/where/the/stuff/is
./install.sh


*** Sometimes it is required to be root to install things and sometimes it isn't.***

Those are some common ways to install things in Linux. There are other package formats used by other distros, but that's mostly what you'll have for Fedora Core.

One thing you should figure out off the bat is if you'd like to use a package manager. I believe Fedora can use apt4rpm which is an implementation of apt-get. It can also use one called yum, but I don't know anything about that one.

The premise is that these programs give you some simplifed install/remove commands to make things easy to install. You in fact do not even have to downlaod the files, only type the command to install them something and it will be downloaded and installed automatically, along with any additional packages which it might require (also known as dependencies).

I suggest setting up a package manager first as it will make your entry into Linux MUCH easier.

Do you have a place I download those from in Windows? Because part of the thing I've been trying to do is get online with my Linux. My school, frustratingly enough, switched to wireless. The wired network is completely disabled and torn apart. So getting my network card and internet running is NOT going to be easy. I keep having to switch back and forth between Linux and Windows because the websites explaining how to do stuff are too confusing. Once I get online, it'll be much easier.

Once I get this package manager, will I have to do terminal stuff to install it, or is it easy a-la windows with clicking on a setup file? And once the manager is installed, will I have to do command line stuff? I'm finding working with the console very frustrating because it gives me errors 75% of the time I try to do stuff, and typing "help" brings up something that makes it look like someone spilled coke on their keyboard.

And I need to be able to mount my USB flash drive (256mb keychain sized deal) so I don't have to keep wasting CDs on burning stuff to get them to Linux. I looked around online on how to mount it, but it was thoroughly confusing.

The commandline will be frustrating for awhile. It takes some getting used to and the newbie distros often have GUI tools that can make a user lazy, and thus learning the commandline goes slower. The commandline is extremely powerful and flexible. There is no one on earth that knows every command.


USB flash drives are pretty easy.

For mine, I edited a file called /etc/fstab as root.

commands-
su
[enter root's password]
nano /etc/fstab

You might need to use a different editor if nano is not installed.... kwrite, kedit, vim, joe, ed, emacs.... well there are tons and some are easier to use than others.

I added a line like this-

/dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 vfat noauto,users,exec,umask=000 0 0

Then I made the directory where this dirve will be mounted, also as root.

mkdir /mnt/sda1

Then I made a desktop icon for it. Right-click the desktop, create new device (hard disk device), set the device name as /dev/sda1 and the mountpoint as /mnt/sda1.

Then I could right-click and choose mount to get access to the files on it.


I also have a couple of scripts to detect partitions and edit fstab automatically.

Try using the rpm -Uvh command on the ndis-wrapper utils and kernel module. You'll need to be root when doing so.

THANK YOU. That worked perfectly for mounting and browsing my flash drive. Although I don't have that add device option on my right click, the rest worked perfectly.

Would it be the same for mounting my c drive? Win2k NTFS. Would I instead switch the sda1 to hda1? what about the all the other stuff like users,exec,gid, etc? Same?

Oh, and how can I make all my folder browsing in one window? i.e. not opening new windows everytime I click a new folder.

One more thing is that the ndiswrapper thing isn't working. I think the problem might be because it's for Fedora 1. It gives me some sort of error (forget right now). Also, I almost had the nvidia driver working, but it said something about wanting to end X Window or something?

Arkaine23 said:

I also have a couple of scripts to detect partitions and edit fstab automatically.

Click to expand...

SWEET. How can I get ahold of those?

When I did any major things without an internet conncetion at school, I would borrow a friends laptop.

Here's my windows partition in fstab.:
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs ro,umask=000 0 0

How can I can I get my USB flash drive to remount after I take it out and then plug it back in again? For example, when I take it out while running Linux to plug it in to another computer, then copy files onto it, then plug it back in to Linux, it won't remount unless I restart. If I don't restart, it says something about an inactive block or invalid block or weird some-such about a block. Restarting gets kind of annoying just to remount the USB flash drive.

The reason you can't right-click to add device icons on your desktop is because you are using the Gnome desktop. I use KDE.

For mounting the drive without rebooting-

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
or
mount -a

For your ntfs drive, idunno246's post has a good example. Here's is an rpm of my scripts for fstab additions- http://overclockix.octeams.com/rebuildfstab-1-0.0.1.i686.rpm

To use it-
become root first, then
rpm -Uvh rebuildfstab-1-0.0.1.i686.rpm
/sbin/rebuildfstab -u your_regular_username -g users

Here's some info about automounting USB drives- http://ccomb.free.fr/wiki/wakka.php?wiki=UsbMassStorage


Need to know the error you get with ndiswrapper to help there. As for nvidia driver, it will ask to you get out of graphical mode to do the install. You can generally do this by hitting ctrl + alt + backspace, although there are several other ways to do it too.

In my limited experience with FC1 and FC2, I found that FC1 is MUCH easier to use. I don't know why, but a number of bizarre things went wrong when I tried Core 2. For instance, FC1 easily recognized my ethernet card, whereas Core 2 refused to acknowledge its existance. Frustrated, I reverted back to Fedora Core 1, which I still use today.

I really want to change distros, btw, but I'm not sure which one I want. I just need something a little speedier... any suggestions?

Speedier than Fedora? Try Yoper.

Well, I checked out yoper.com as per your sig, Arkaine. It sounds nice, but I was under the impression that it was a livecd like knoppix. Now I'm slightly confused, but I think you can install it on the HD, correct?

Also, I prefer to use fluxbox or fvwm as my window manager - is there any reason for these WMs to cause issues within the Yoper distro?

Yoper is a regular install-on-HDD distro. I am working on creating a live CD verison of it.

fvwm should be fine. Our core team hasn't been able to create an rpm of fluxbox yet, but it should compile form source if you use the newest fluxbox development release. We do have blackbox, icewm, fvwm, xfce, afterstep, gnome, and kde currently available in our apt repository.

Sounds good to me, I'll probably try it out.

I've actually gotten my wireless card up and running and able to browse the internet now. That's a D-Link "DWL G510" wireless PCI card.

Anyways, a few issues I have. I got the NTFS driver installed and my C: NTFS partition mounted, but it doesn't show up in the "my computer" type area. I have to browse to the mount folder. Help?

I've got my USB flash drive mounted and stuff, but when I take it out and put it back in, it gives me some sort of Block error message and I have to restart the computer to be able to view the flash drive contents. Help?

How do I make shortcuts and customize my start menu and stuff? Plus how can I make the windows key open the Fedora start menu thing?

There's more, but I'll leave it at this for now.

When you're ready to take out your USB drive, unmount it before you remove it. Then when you put it back, you have to re-mount it and re-unmount it to remove it. The console command for unmounting is "umount". If you used Arkaine's procedure, then all you have to do to unmount is type "umount /dev/sda1" or "umount /mnt/sda1" - they will both do the same thing. After it's unmounted, you can remove the drive.

EDIT: I just thought to warn you on a silly mistake I made when I first used mount/umount. I thought the uNmount command was "unmount", but really its "umount" with no 'n'. Just thought I should make you aware of that, first time I got really frustrated because I misread the word and assumed that unmount would be logical.