VeeDubb

About your modem, I believe it is possible to get it working though I'v enever successfully goten a winmodem working in linux. This is my best advice: Take that winmodem out of your computer and burn it. No realy, set the thin on fire. At first you will have a hard time getting the circuit board and IC's to actualy combust, but if you use a good accelerant, it can be done. You might try Automotive starting fluid. it's usualy made of ether, which is VERY flamable. If that doesn't work, you might try something slow burning like diesle, kerosine or lamp oil. Of course, you'll need a small quantity of gasoline or ethanol to get it going, but then you should be good to go. Once you've thouroughly destroyed your winmodem, go buy yourself an external serial modem. I use the Creative lab modemblaster external and I'm very happy with it. I'd avoid Winmodems and USB modems if you can. Even in windows, setting up a serial modem is VERY simple and requires no extra drivers. Also a hardware controlled modem will connect faster, have fewer errors and fewer dropped connections.

About gnome being faster, yes, for me, I have found that gnome requires less ram and less processing than kde. Perhaps that is a false impression, but it isthe impression I have gotten none the less. That aside, the point still remains that there ARE a number of very 'old system friendly' GUI's for linux such as XFCE and fluxbox. As for commands you should know, that's a big question, but I' will list the handfull I use more than anything else. cd Very similar to the DOS cd command, except you put a space after it directories use a / instead of a \ ls identicle to the dir command in DOS cp works just like the DOS command 'copy' so you enter 'cp filelocation filedestination' mv works just like the cp, but it moves the file intead of copying ln creates a link, lot's of different syntaxes depending on what you're doing. tar This is the command for extracting and createing tar and tar.gz archives. Example 'tar -zxvf example.tar.gz' would extract the file example.tar.gz to the current directory. But there is one command that is more important that any other linux command, and I'm certain about his. That command is 'man' If you want to know how to use a command, let's say you want to know why the heck I put -zxvf in that tar command example, you can open a console and enter the command 'man tar' and you will be presented with a manual for the tar command. Remember that command, and use it. I can't tell you how many time the man command helped me.

It's great to see things getting interesting. The whole MS game plan revolves around the fact that nearly everyone uses Windows. We have all known for some time now that the goal of MS is the death of the PC and the rise of the NC (If you don't know what an 'NC' is, it's a network computer. Or more acccuritely, a network terminal. A computer with a small HDD, or none at all that runs all of it's software except it's embeded OS remotely). NC's have allready reared their heads in a few places. The community college I started at has them in all of the counseling and administrative offices. This will give MS almost unlimited controll of what people have on their PC's. Instead of buying a program, you will subscribe to a program which is allready installed on a remote server and you would use it remotely. The problem is that this depends on a couple of things. 1. MS MUST maintain total/near total market control. This is a sucky system, and people will only use it if EVERYONE uses it. So growth of the linux market share will make this impossible. 2. They need time. The tech and broadband network infrastructure this would require simply doesn't exist. So every year that goes by with MS moving towards this, the rest of the world is moving away from the monolithic MS platform. What scares them more is the speed with which they are doing it. When IBM was first sold on the idea of DOS, it was the only game in town, and even at that, i took many years to get to where it is now. Linux, which is many years younger, is equal to what windows could do 2 years ago in most areas and far excedes it in all the others. Even though it's some 10 years younger.

I'm glad to hear it. You know it's an intersting state we live in. On one hand we have linux slowly but steadly taking over the corporate world and quietly stealing a small portion of home users, but at the same time it si dissapearing from store shelves and the number of major distros is shrinking. MAndrake almost went under, RH pulled out of the non-commercial market entirely and several of the young upstarts like lycoris have totaly failed to gain any real share. Any thoughts?

another suggestion, I get the impression w're not talking about your main computer, but a toy you bought to learn linux on. If that's the case, you might look into a distro called 'linux from scratch' It's VERY hard core, but there is no better way on this earth to learn about linux than to set up a linux from scratch desktop.

300mhz actualy will run mandrake just fine. Your big issue is going to be RAM. If you can get 128mb on that motherboard you can run basiacly any flavor of linux you want. 256 and you can do it well. It's not realy important what distro you use. What matter more is how you use it. Some of this is a litle pedantic, so if you know this allready, forgive me. Linux is a command line OS. IT's NOT a graphical OS. With a project called XFree86, we can use all the graphical p[rograms we want and all of the nice pretty graphical desktop window managers we want, but they all run ON TOP OF THE OS. What that means for you with your old computer is that if you boot up mandrake and find that it is too sluggish with kde, you can switch to gnome, and if that's still too sluggish, you can switch to Windomaker, XFCE or even a plain x server and console with no pretty window manager. Just X and a console app runs amazingly fast on a system like what you have, though as I said, if you can get 128 or 256mb of ram, you can run whatever you want.

I think you are unlikely to find sucha thing for linux. These software apps don't usualy work very well on Windows, and the demand is small and ever shrinking with the increase in broadband useage. You can always check sourceforge and rpmfind and search for realy generic things like call and modem

That's a pretty tough one. You might check some other sites, or maybe check the return policy where ever you were going to buy and just take one home and try it, return it if you can't get it going.

I have to go another way. I vote ksirc. It's a kde app, so if you're using gnome ymmv. I find that it is the easiest and most straight forward option.

most of the X11 zaurus stuff is only for the c7xx models. They are clamshell devices with VGA screens. There was a debian on zaurus project some time ago, but X sucks ass on the sl5500 and 5600. If you ahve the dough, a c760 or 860 is a GREAT way to go. You can install your choice of the cack x11 rom or the gentoo for zaurus rom. If you want a 5500, go with OpenZaurus. If you do go with one of the clamshell devices, you will have to have it imported from japan as they don't sell them in this county. Check with http://www.thekompany.com comes with a translated ROM,. but all the docs are in japanese. Also, most of the software you will want will need to be compiled for the Xscale cpu.

I've been getting over 1900fps with the new driver

I'm sure I just missed it, but does anybody know what version the Americas Army CD from gentoo games is? AA is up to version 2.0.0a now, and I'd hate to take the time to download the gentoo version just to find out it's an older version. Thanks.

What do you mean by "The lucky country"? You can always buy them on ebay and many people will ship anywhere if you ask. Remember, get the sl-5500, NOT the 5600. The 5600 only has a fster CPU. but it performs slower, and has loess total memory.

Bullshit!You can sync WinCE devices with Linux using synce: http://synce.sourceforge.net/synce/ Anyway, Palm is best supported and devices running Familiar Linux with Opie are highly recommended. I find that most of the newer mobile phones do everything that a PDA was traditionally used for, and most of them are 'free' with a contract. The Sony-Ericsson's are awesome. I have a SE T610, I sync it with Evolution using Multisync with the IrMC plugin, an Epox Bluetooth dongle and I transfer files with Gnome-Obex-Server (bluetooth). For the record, I have tried with two different PPC's to get even basic sync functionality with a total of 80 or 90 hours at my keyboard, and totaly failed. The project is still in early beta and for most people it requires a HUGE amount of work, including a custom kernal to get it to work at all, and I never did. On the other hand, the total time required to install a custom rom for the sharp Zaurus sl-5500 and set up a complete USBnetworking connection and set up desktop sync software for linux and set up Unison for File sync is a Total of about 15 minutes.

I will try IRfanview with my fiance's laptop if I can stay online long enough to downlaod it. (My ISP has been ULTRA-flakey) If not, I'll try and email it to a couple of you. Thank you for the replies, it means a lot to me. The thing that gets me is that the litle preview icon in kde has no error..

Let me cast my vote here. Get a sharp Zaurus sl-5500, NOT the 5600, the 5500 is better. Get it, install the openZaurus ROM, probably version 3.3.5, and install the 64/0 memory split version and get a good 128mb or 256mb SD card for storage. You'll be happier and they're realy cheap on ebay. Of course, if you didn't know, they run linux.

having trouble attatching it, if you think you can help let me know and I'll email it to you.

i REALY need the assistance of someone with some serious GIMP/photoshop skills to help me. I have a picture from a recent "once in a lifetime" trip to Disney Land and i took my digital camera. One the trip I got a phot of my fiance (girlfriend at the time) with Eyor, who is her favorite character. The pictures got dumped on my harddrive a while back with the intention of printing the good ones later and burning the, to CD for back-up, but I never got around to it. Today I went to print and burn and found that several of the pictures, including the one with eyor, were correupted and I desperately need to fix them, especialy that one. When I look at the preview icons in kde, they look fine, but when i open the pictures with gimp, or kuickshow or anything else, they are corrupted, the bottum half is the wrong colors. I will attatch the important one and if anyone can fix it I will be eternaly greatfull to you.

Glad to see a new user. I have some decentexperience with linux now, though I was in your situation about 2 years ago. I cn now install Mandrake and all the software I want/need in about 1 hour and have my system just the way I want it. First things first. In my experience, setting up a winmodem is prohibitively complicated unless you are one of the lucky few who have one that mandrake recognizes out of the box. The verybest hing you can do, is go down to BestBuy or Fry's and buy and external modem that conencts to your serial port. They run about $50.00 unless you catcha good sale or an open box like the one i bought. I personaly Use the Creative labs Modem-blaster Serial. Wroks like a champ, and requires no drivers for Linux OR Windows. The reason these work without error is that they are hardware controlled, where the Winmodem you're working on is software controlled. You can find hardware controlled modems for your PCI slots if you search real hard, ut the external ons are easier to configure. USB modems are okay, but still harder to configure than serial ones. Since you allready have a USb modem, lets talk about that. it's unclear what your problem is. Are you having trouble opening the readme, or are youhaving troble figureing out where to enterthe commands? Tell us what the real problem is and i'm sure we can help, setting up the modem shouldn't be hard. Of course, and serial port modem WILL work. I've never seen one that wouldn't and then all you have to do is launch kppp and tell it which serial port you conncted it to.

Glad to hear it, but is it works great, tell folks what printer you're using so if they have the same printer, they can know they should upgrade.

Side note, I use an HP psc1210, and it prints WAY better with 1.5, and it was good before

This is actualy slightly old news, but i haven't seen anyone talk about it here, and it may be important for some. If you run an HP InkJet printer, i runs the HPIJS (HP InkJet Server). the hpijs with mandrake 9.1 is 1.3, and the version with 9.2 is 1.4.1, but hpijs is out ow up to 1.5, with a number of bug fixes and improvements plus filters for more specific modelstan what's listed in the mandrake version of 1.4.1, so if your HP inkjet doesn't do everything the way it's supposed to or doesn't play nice with some images, go to http://www. linuxprinting.org and search for hpijs. It's a small download and easy to install. Not sure what hpijs you're running? open a console and enter hpijs -h

For me, kppp has NEVER instaled on it's own in 9.2 You have to install it from the MCC sotware section first, then do what they are telling you. And to answer your question directly... K>network>remoteaccess>kppp

THe underlying question here that I don't see anyone answering is this "Since none of my winodws software works anyway, what's the damn point?" If that is your real question, here's my answer. The first thing tokeep inmind, is that as several people have pointed out, wine is beta at best. It only works for a very small percentage of software. The commercial versions of wineX and crossover are both better, but that's a whole seperate open vs. closed source debate. The problem is that what you need wine for and what wine IS for are two different things. Because there is no way the wine project could ge even half of the windows apps working, they must pick their battles carefully. So they make sure it's as compatible as possible with the programs that the greated number of peopl find criticle and can't be done natively. What's criticle to you or I however, may not be wortha hill of beans to the average joe. Perfect example - There does not exist a native linux ap for making CD labels. There's lot's of apps, like cdlabelgen that will make jewel case labels and there's an OO template for memorex CD labels and many graphics programs that will do the job with a litle work, but not one of them are good solid dedicated CD label programs. While a good label maker is REALLY important to me, none of the good ones work under wine, so I'm s.o.l. Versions of Word, up to 200 are known to work quitoe well, maple works (though there'sa native version of it that is fantastic) And a few of my old DOS/Win95 games play in GL wine. About 15% of the windows games I own from my pre-linux days are 'playable' under wineX, and Crosover playes VERY nic with my coppy of Office 2000 (well, it plays nice with Word and Excell anyway) but I can't afford the registered version, so my demo is spent.

Bump?