Peep

thanks, that helps. i'll compare that to mine :) i wanted to make sure there wasn't a "must have" that i was missing. that's the good and bad about switching a machine from mandrake, it seems--you have so many choices under debian of what to use because there isn't a set of "drake" utilities that are automatically installed and things aren't customized as much. but it's a lot more work figuring out how to configure things--i'll just play around and figure it out :)

i'd appreciate that, gowator. i found apt-get.org and that helps a bit with adding sources, but i guess there's no single tool like the "easy urpmi" to set things up? apt-get is cool to play with, but i have to learn to be careful when mixing up different sources... i installed some things from stable onto sid, then did a dist-upgrade and it uninstalled KDE and a lot of other things. it was pretty easy to fix, though. live and learn :)

i have a very similar machine (it's a pIII 500, yours looks like an athlon 750 or so??). we've upgraded the RAM to 384mb and added a new video card, but it was just fine on mdk 9.1 even before those changes. link where i got info about your system right now it is a great webserver, but it also gets a lot of use for email, web browsing and occasional games of armagetron too. its uptime is something like 110 days at the moment, and that downtime was only because we lost power for a few days. i'd say you can install just about whatever you want on that machine. :P 9.1 runs great, there's no reason that 9.2 wouldn't run even better on it.

My laptop is doing well with debian unstable so far. The biggest thing that I've done is uninstall a lot of the knoppix stuff I'll never use, and install synaptic (which is very nice). Are there any other "must haves" that I should be looking for? If anyone has a good "newbie to debian" link, that'd be great too. Most info I can find is several years old and not particularly useful since I already have a general sense of how linux works thanks.

a year later... thanks again MottS. Just installed Debian and that script found my cdrom when the way I had been doing it in mandrake wouldn't work! :P

wow. i'll agree with steve on this one. i'm really impressed with debian (via knoppix). it only took about a half hour from the time i burned the livecd to my first boot into installed debian. and things may be working even better than in mandrake. :o

it's been a long time since i used icewm, but it doesn't use icons natively. you'll have to run another program to get icons, i think the two most common are dfm and idesk. someone else may be able to chime in with more info, or you can search here or google for those terms and it may help. try here at the icewm page.

you can also try acme (available via urpmi/rpmdrake). it was suggested here a while back and it worked like a charm on several laptops i've used it with.

ok, wait. are you saying i should have put in the full location of directories instead of using ~/ ? here's what the konstruct readme says to do: so i basically put all of those lines into my .bashrc (removing the "export" from each because it didn't seem to work with them in there). could that be causing weirdness? and as long as i'm exposing my cluelessness... was i supposed to leave "$PATH" as that, or insert something else in its place? that may be my whole problem right there. :unsure:

ahh. i see. i saw the "." in your ~/.kde3.2 and red flags went up because it's just ~/kde3.2 i put the settings in my /home/bill/.bashrc and it SEEMED to work. was that the right thing to do? i've never really messed with environment settings etc before, this is my first big adventure.

konstruct installs 3.2 to ~/kde3.2 by default. you can tell it to put it elsewhere, but that's where i left it too. i've rebooted 4-5 times since installing 3.2 and haven't noticed any problems other than the splash screen. (it's a laptop and i shut it down for my commute since suspend to disk doesn't save all that much time and isn't as reliable for me yet) i hope no new problems pop up. apparently there are 3.2 rpms floating around that work now (i've heard, haven't seen yet). maybe you could install those? i'm not exactly sure what happens when you install a kde rpm on a system with compiled kde... i'm a little curious about that in case i need to do it.

i can't really help much, but i can confirm that i have the same issue. the splash screen hangs at interprocess communication. BUT i haven't noticed any loss of functionality and everything seems to be working fine, so i wasn't too worried. have you noticed anything not working? i had just been clicking on the splash screen and it goes away, but if this is an underlying issue, i suppose we should figure it out. :P if anyone has any ideas, i'd be appreciative too.

i wasn't being very clear. when you do what you described, yes, the taskbar is on the right, but the text is all still horizontal. i want to find a way so the text is vertical (as if you'd have to turn your head sideways to make the text appear "right side up").

i think yours was the thread i was looking for when i posted. for whatever reason i was having trouble finding threads i KNEW i had seen before. maybe i misspelled "konstruct"?

konstruct successfully built 3.2 (stable) for me. took over a day, but that was largely due to the overburdened kde mirrors. it'll take me a bit of time to get it looking like it did in mandrake (lost my menus, etc), but it seems to be working just fine.

I would like to find a way to put the kde taskbar on the right side of the screen, but instead of having things right-side-up, i would like them to be rotated 90 degrees. so, for instance, programs in the taskbar tray, instead of being tiny boxes that you cannot read, would be approximately the same size that they are on the bottom of the screen, and run from the top to the bottom of the screen. all the text on the taskbar, including the clock, would face the side of the screen, rather than the bottom. does anyone know of any way to do that? thanks. :P

urpmi burgerspace :D

it sounds like you need to re-run lilo (or whatever bootmanager you're using) after removing the drive? i know this was a problem in 9.1, so it was probably the case in 8.2 as well. from my experience in 9.2, this seems to have been fixed, so from now on you can keep doing exactly what you did and it should be fine.

i couldn't get konstruct to compile 3.2, either. it stops pretty early telling me that it can't find the command "patch" (which seems like it should be pretty basic). i'll worry about it later, i guess, not going to fool with it right now. edit: ok, nevermind. i'm a dork. after urpmi'ing patch, now konstruct is humming along again. maybe it'll work after all. :P

i find it hard to believe that any ISP would be windows only (maybe if you have a USB dsl modem??)... just about any broadband service should allow you to use a router/firewall. aside from the great benefits of protecting your network and keeping you logged in, the router should keep the ISP from being able to see what OS you're running. as to web sites requiring IE, just use konqueror and set browser identification to IE for that particular site. the only time i use konqueror is to get into sites that tell me i am not using a "secure" browser. :lol:

cool. you can optimize it later. the vesa driver may not have high color depth or different resolutions, but it'll definitely get you started.

maybe this is the driver? http://ranger.s3graphics.com/viaarena/380drv/

is this link any help?? i can't tell for sure, but i think your chipset is also called "twister" and the via savage chips are apparently not compatible with s3 savage chipsets. i can't tell exactly what your computer needs, but this page of via drivers might help too. if you can't find the right driver during install, maybe you can install a plain VESA driver and find the "correct" driver from within mandrake? i think that's what you usually have to do for nvidia chipsets, so it may be the case for the prosavage as well due to proprietary drivers? good luck. hopefully someone will come along with more definite info :)

if you are running mdk 9.1, you can find 3.1.4 from somewhere mirroring texstar's old rpms. they are probably here at mandrakeusers.org from the download link up top. in 9.2 i haven't seen either. i think people are waiting for kde 3.2. if i had a clue what i was doing i'd try to install from source, but i'm a bit afraid to.

boot the rescue disc and get to a shell, then see if you can edit the lilo.conf. i had the same problem once, i can't remember exactly what happened, but somehow everything in lilo got off by one partition. i'm sure there are faqs here that will help. once you're in there, you should also be able to mount your partitions and see what's in there, make sure that your files still exist :)