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I vote for AI's. Was gonna vote for it anyway, just for the "look", but when I saw War Pigs on the playlist, that sealed it... a classic !!

Yeah I did reboot probably a couple of times, and shutdown a few times too. Last night, the last time I tried shutting down - when the prompt came up asking what I wanted to boot to (whatever kernel - I have about 5 listed) - I moved down to the prior one, instead of the latest one. Anyway, that worked great - everything works fine again with my old monitor. Does that make sense...? edit: yes I guess it does make sense. I found out that when you install the nvidia module, it will be in just whatever kernel you were running at the time. If I knew that back when I had the LCD TV hooked to FC2, x may have worked fine if I just rebooted to the prior kernel, which had the nvidia module installed in it. On a side note, when I said before that I may want to make my win2k machine a dual-boot - does the newest mandrake have anything over on FC2, I mean is it any better for such things as setting up new hardware, or whatever... ?

another update: I reconnected my original CRT back to my FC2 box, thinking everything would work fine (since I did not mess with xorg.conf at all when I had my LCD connected). Well, x still won't start. I get the same errors. "failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module" I don't see what could be wrong. Just cuz I connected an LCD, then disconnected it the next day... seems my original CRT should still work ok... I mean, I DID NOT change anything in xorg.conf.

just an update: I disconnected everything and moved the LCD TV over to my win2k box and connected it up to that. To make a long story short, it is working great. I'm using Firefox and my LCD on win2k and its great. It is definately a new experience to use a computer with a 23" widescreen monitor... Unfortunately, I don't really like my win2k box anymore. Its decent, but a few years old. My FC2 box is what I use daily. Guess I'll just use put my old 19" CRT back on my FC2 machine. Anyway, its working great now, although on winblows. I'm gonna leave things as they are. However, i still want to get it working with linux sometime. Since I don't use my win2k box much anymore, I'm tempted to install a linux distro, like the newest mandrake, and make it a dual-boot. That way I can play around with getting the LCD to work under linux, without having to disconnect it a move it around.

I could live with that. This new LCD TV is the only monitor I am using on my FC2 box though. Yeah - the CLI displays fine on it, but X won't work. My FX5200 video card didn't come with a booklet, just a small "quick start" card. It does have a TV out connector on it. The LCD TV is connected to the FC2 box with a normal, 15-pin monitor cable though. My xorg.conf has this in Monitor section: Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Monitor Vendor" ModelName "Action Monitor CX-1566" DisplaySize 260 200 HorizSync 30.0 - 66.0 VertRefresh 50.0 - 120.0 Option "dpms" My old monitor was the Action monitor, so the xorg.conf file is still the same as before. Can you update it automatically? or do you have to manually screw with it?

thanks. I'll look over my TV manual tonight after work. I'll probably post here what my xorg.conf has under the Monitor section, and also post what my TV manual says about Horiz & Vert stuff. I'll back up my xorg.conf file before messing with it, or at least I'll jot down whatever I add or change so I can go back if necessary.

Just brought home a new JVC 23" LCD TV. It has an input for a monitor cable so it can be used as a computer monitor. I hooked up my cableTV cable to the TV, connected my FC2 box to the TV with a monitor cable, and then plugged the TV in. The TV works great. However, when I started up my linux box, it went thru the normal boot steps, but when it tried to load X, it just gave me errors, and finally just booted to the cli localhost login: Hopefully X can be easily made to work, but I'm not sure what needs to be done.... Something need to be edited in xorg.conf ? Thanks for any info.

guess most of the good ones are 'must buy" cybr - which of the 2 free ones you mentioned do you think is more playable, more fun, or whatever...? I'm not much of a gamer, I mostly like the FPS's like old doom - shoot everything that moves. Not too interested in RPG's... I may buy doom 3 for linux when it comes out, if my linux machine has enough guts to handle it... it said Yes

I haven't played anything since Doom 1 & 2 back in the 90s on windoze. Now that I have a decent FC2 machine, I'd like to try some of the newer games out there. I'd like to try a few that are simple & straight-forward to install and work under linux with no probs (no emulation...). I've never even seen UT or HL or any of the other "post Doom" games, even on windoze. My FC2 rig has 512Mb RAM, an FX-5200 128Mb video card 128Mb, but no joystick. I guess thats not too bad for most games. By simple & straight-forward to install, I mean like that I'd be really happy if I could do a yum install whatever-game and have it work perfectly...

Haven't been around for a while. This place sure is getting big - look at all the members - was just hitting 5,000 when I disappeared for awhile. I'm still farting around on FC2, which I like for the most part. However, I'm thinking about coming back to mandrake - version 10.1 official whenever its ready. I still have a win2k box, but I have pretty much cleaned if off and moved everything to my /home on my FC2 machine. Don't use winblows much anymore at all. A few disappointments with FC2 (or maybe its me...) are that printing features I just can't get available. I have a HP 5550 and it prints just fine, but under windoze, I have alot of choices such as Draft Quality, Everday Quality, etc. Also I can print 2-sided - flip the pages around and stick them back in the tray. I can't get any choices under linux. As I said, maybe its me, or maybe its unecessarily complicated with my distro. Another disappointment is that FC2 (released in 2004) has mysql 3.23 (way old). Version 4 has been out for 2 years or so hasn't it? I just got the email from mandrakesoft regarding the 10.1 community release and they say that it has mysql 4, and that printing features are super easy to setup (I'll believe that when it see it). The times I've installed different distros, I've always done a clean install - without backing up any data first (I've never had anything important on my linux machines). However, this time I have all my important stuff on my FC2 box - Excel spreadsheets & OOo stuff, tons of mp3s, financial stuff (MoneyDance), and other stuff. Soooooo.... this time, when I install another distro on top of FC2 - I will be worried about keeping my important stuff unharmed... Seems I never can get the partitions right when I install a distro. I usually let it do its "default" choice, and its puts /home under root, instead of separate - like most of you prefer. Anyway, glad to be back.

I want to delete the startup script that you gave me back up in post # 2 of this thread. I copied & pasted it. After doing yum install mysql-server, the server starts ok. So I tried to delete your startup script, just like deleting a file, but it would not let me. Maybe I wasn't root, I can't remember. It's been awhile.

didn't notice any diff after I did it. My firefox was dog-slow at first, but a while back pmpatrick told me what to do to make it faster. After doing what he said, it is definately way faster. Maybe thats why I don't notice an improvement after doing these things...? Here's where pmpatrick told me what to do: http://www.mandrakeusers.org/index.php?sho...1&st=&p=entry

I think I'm gonna move my linux box, which I just alot of money for, out of the way and put my win2k box back on my desk. I'm not in love with win2k, but at least I can sit down and use it every day. Hell of a lot better than win95/98 which are both total crap. And at least I do not use IE on it or MS office. I use Firefox and open office instead. Even though my linux box is a better machine - hardware-wise that is - I don't want to install win2k on it. I will just wait another 6 months or so to see if linux becomes more usable. I have tried linux off & on for the last 2 years. Each time I try it again, it is alot better than the previous time. This time I was hoping it could become my daily main machine. Almost, but not quite. bye, and thanks for the previous help

yes it does have that line in it. It's the last line.

says Modprobe: command not found I checked where modprobe is and its in /sbin/modprobe so then I did as root: /sbin/modprobe nvidia and it says: FATAL: Module nvidia not found

sorry, should have mentioned that this is an FC2 machine, so it can't be Mandrake's fault. Should I still try that anyway ? Whenever I mention "FC2" in my questions, a mod always moves it to "Other Linux Distros" - which I understand. However, sometimes that forum is like Death Valley - takes longer to get help....

My linux box has been working fine for a few weeks now. I don't believe I have shutdown in a couple of weeks. I do Log Off when I am through however. Anyway, I was using my computer this afternoon with no problems, then I logged off and ran a few errands. When I came back and logged on, it gives me an error about not being able to start x. I don't know why it worked fine all the other times I logged off and back on in the past couple weeks. So when I choose Yes to show the error output, the last line shows: NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module ! Last week I did the new nvidia driver install. Unfortunatly, I guess I screwed up something. So here I am back on my win2k machine looking for help. :sad:

ok, will do cannon. But it's late now and I've had enough. Will mess around with it tomorrow. One thing I did just find out was that there is no such thing as "mplayer-plugin", it is called "mplayerplug-in". Dumb way to spell it. Anyway, I did a yum install mplayerplug-in which resulted in a Success ! message. However, I still get the above error about no such file as codecs.conf. So I'll check out the instructions as you say.

I did a yum install mplayer on my FC2 machine last week. Just now tried to see if it would open up. Nothing happens. When run from the c.l. I get this: Can't open '/etc/mplayer/codecs.conf': No such file or directory guess I need some codecs. You would think that yum install mplayer would result in a working mplayer, but seems not. Is there such a thing as yum install mplayer-codecs ? I googled it, but no hits. Question # 2: When I am on a website that has audio samples, which are almost always Windoze Media or else Real Player, what do linux people use ? Is mplayer used for these audio samples? How do you get the plugin into firefox? Make a link I suppose? [moved from Software by spinynorman]

ok, thread died quick. Had to figure it out myself... :unsure: I googled and found a helpful site quickly: http://www.siliconvalleyccie.com/linux-adv/mysql.htm Found out that even though you do a yum install mysql then you ALSO have to do a yum install mysql-server I still can't get the server starting at bootup, but I can start the server by: /etc/init.d/mysqld start and then after entering "mysql" I am greeted with the mysql> prompt. another problemo solved... B) PS: how do I delete the startup script that I copied & pasted into /etc/rc.d/init.d/ ? See 4 posts above this one.

just got through with a yum update, and now grip once again grips. I did a Rip Only to a wav file and it worked fine, then I tried a Rip & Encode to an ogg file and it also worked great. easy to break, luckily easy to fix

Last night I logged on to gnome under root, and tried out ripping with grip. Since I was root, the settings & configs were still the same as when FC2 was originally installed. It worked fine. someone else asked me (since I am using yum) when was the last time I ran yum update, and yum upgrade. I'm not sure when, but it was probably a couple weeks ago. I think I added a yum repository to yum.conf last week, and did a yum install mplayer. Guess I should do yum update, and then yum upgrade later when I get home.

Like Rodney Dangerfield - I've gone Back To School. I'm taking a few courses now, on my way to an IT degree, which is more light-weight than an CS degree. IT degrees have a couple basic programming courses but that's usually it. I'm wondering now if I should have entered the CS program. I took a required VB course last year, which to me was very easy. Actually, I think that course was the only required course with any programming. Of course, I can use my electives for more programming courses if I want. The college offers advanced VB, one Java course, and quite a few C courses - intro to advanced, including C++. Also, it has several web programming & design courses - which I was gonna use up all my electives taking. However, now I am considering just taking a couple of web courses and using 2 electives for programming - maybe intro to C++, and Java. On my FC2 machine, I've installed java and mysql. Also, I think when I did the initial installation, I picked python (or maybe it installed by default). How do I know if I have python correctly installed and working? Also, what editor should I start using for, say, learning python (or java). I installed eclipse on my win2k machine and played around with it. It seems great, but with a full-featured IDE, you need to use some of your brain power to learn the IDE and the new language at the same time. I'd rather use a very simple editor, so that my limited brain power can concentrate on learning just the language at first. I have dumped my win2k machine, and am now using FC2 only. I haven't installed any IDEs on it yet. What does it come with by default? I read an article in a recent linux mag about kdevelop being a good editor. I don't think I have it on my machine though.

I mentioned a few times before that I used to program in COBOL and a few other langs, before OO became the New Way... We've talked about java or python... I bought a few books on Java, including one which really goes into OO thinking (Eckels - Thinking in Java, 3rd ed.) My brain is having trouble thinking in a non-procedural way, so I don't know if anything will come of my desire to learn OO. Lately I've been reading about python, and many authors (including Bruce Eckels) think it is preferable to java. 1. they say its easier to learn 2. they say you can work with it in an OO way, or in a non-OO way if OOP is not needed for what you are doing 3. they say that python progs are smaller and less bloated than the same program in java However, one of my best buddies, a senior manager at a huge corporation, who is in charge of many programming projects, tells me that java would be preferable to know at least in the job market. I also want to learn mySQL. I know a little about oracle/sql from a class I took last year. Some python books I am considering: Python: Visual Quickstart Guide Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner most reviewers on amazon.com say both books are excellent. At least I can get a feel if I want to continue with python, and maybe buy one of the more complete books if I want. some mysql books I am considering: MySQL: Your visual blueprint for creating open source databases (Moncur) MySQL Tutorial (Welling) I know there's alot of info on both subjects on the web, but I like to have one or two good books also. I read an interesting fact somewhere recently: approx only 3 out of 10 procedural programmers successfully moved into OOP are there any older people here, who formerly programmed in the non-OO languages, and are now programming in OO ?

yay ! Tux races downhill fast again ! Thanks Ix & bvc.