PersonalFinally after quite a bit of work yesterday the Linux Computer is working. I wanted one to start programming in sourceforge and pickup a few projects to apprentice with. I hope to make a pitch macro one day out of audacity's source. I have a dual partition of XP and mandrake with lilo on my laptop, but mandrake died and mandriva was born. I'm too scared to update it and risk messing up the data. I want to be able to screw up patching the windows kernal and expirement. I needed a new compy.
I had bought the comp in pieces for just 230$ in parts(plus modem 60$ new cable modem and $40 3 day shipping...) from newegg.com. It's 1.8gz sempron with a biostar motherboard, built in nvidia gforce, audio and lan. My dad's friend Hector was teaching me how to assemble it. I had setup the cpu/heatsink(which sounds cooler than fan) and the ram which was the easiest part. Yahoo answers helped with a few questions, but the answers there usually suck, it's better to search.
Once done building I choose debian linux, because I wanted something stable and simple for developing. Debian has 15,000 software packages available free that are very stable. It literally takes 3 years for them to update their versions though. They also have a testing version, for those who want the best new stuff, but at the sacrafice of stability. Ubantu linux is a bit faster in updating but also debian. Knoppix is a debian distrubution that's 1 cd and very good at detecting stuff. Other popular distributions include slackware, gentoo and mandriva.
First off I had an error when I installed a new cdrom drive, cannot verifying | verify dmi pool, then it froze on boot. I messed up in that I didnt use ide power source 1 and the ide motherboard connector one. I just kinda mixed and matched, because it fits, not taking into account master and slave configurations.
During the debian instllation I had a few problems. Since I had already installed woody on my new laptop I knew about the complications that could happen when linux tries to auto detect new software. It couldnt detect my network card, a Realtek 8201BL PHY which is built into my biostar tforce6100. The site hosts no drivers but gives an annoyingly technical manual. Supposedly there's a kernal patch to make it work, but uh, yeah right. Linux is asking me to enter an io and IRQ for it lol, heh, no.
So I got a generic PCI 10/100 network card that my dad had laying around, and it auto detected. Thank God. The netinstall is the only option other than installing the 12 cd distribution. Yes, 12 cds. As slashdot said in a recent article, linux is getting way too fat. Thank God for open source, but common, lets be selective.
Finally after the installation was done, X decides to say it didnt like my video card. "No screens." Gdm.. please let me configure you. "Gdm is already running, aborted." Gdm didn't like my video card and X wouldnt run, it was improperly configured. I tried to configure it by going to the configuration files in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf but, uh, nothing about video screens, screen depths or possible resolutions. I tried to run the recommended XFree86 -configure, but again, no screens detected, go away. Finally I found I had to say some random command, dpkg -reconfigure -xserver, or something like that to get the screen to come back up to select, nvidea or nvidia, whatever it is as a vga (or was it vesa?) 24 bit(gdm apparently doesnt like 16 bit). Bah... My memory sucks.
So it finally works and can't start because I didnt plugin the mouse. I plugin the mouse and restart and detection fails. I reconfigure it again and setup the mouse as ps2 /dev/psaux and it works. bah bahhhh!
Apparently I cant use a USB mouse or else it looks for the keyboard to be usb. It's kinda weird to plug in something else and have something already working just fail because of it.
You have to set the mouse to imps2 instead of PS2, my mistake. There's free software like imwheel to also quickly configure it. It's actually the most common linux question.
Ah, there goes the day. It worked. It was fun '-_-'. Now to start programming.... after I cleanup all these boxes screws and wires... and vaccuum the mess... and get rested enough now that my eyes are super dried... nevermind goodnight.
Checkout my Mp3 and files search that uses google to find music/albums, anime, games and movies with direct downloads. It's very safe and easy to use, just search for a song, then right click save as to download it.
I make video tutorials on a variety of topics on youtube. Please help me out by adding me as a friend if you have a youtube account. It really helps.
Clicking the links above will give you a random but extremely high rated video. There are over 15,000 awesome videos indexed so click as many times as you'd like.
Save To Del.icio.us, 
Submit to Digg, 
Stumble it!