mandrake 10.0 Operational questions

[Guest plankierman]

XP scene. I have the following questions after I explain my system parameters.

Athlon 1.6Ghz,512 MB RAM, 160G Western Digital, master, 20G Seagate ,slave,DRU-720A DVD burner.

Before installing Linux Mandrake 10 ,windows XP had been installed on the 20G as master together with all my data files. My 160G ,slavewas vitually empty

Rewired 160G as master and 20g as slave iwithout changing the contents.

Had no trouble installing Mandrake 10 from CD's and system is operating OK.

Question: Does Mandrake have a Control Panel similar as Windows? Could not find any info on my 2 harddrives in Mandrake.Where is that info visible?. When I turn my computer on,before loading Mandrake, the two hard drives,sizes and ID's are reflected

Tried to download Real-One audio software in order to listen to webradio,NPR audio etc,etc. however Mandrake will not save my downloads anywhere?

Could not find my DVD burner in Mandrake. I like to load my Nero 6 into Mandrake.

I am connected to Earthlink Broadband and have no problem getting on the Net. I am aware that I have to take it one step at a time . These for now are the most visible problems. Please Help,Thanks

[michaelcole]

Question: Does Mandrake have a Control Panel similar as Windows?

 

Could not find any info on my 2 harddrives in Mandrake.Where is that info visible?.

 

When I turn my computer on,before loading Mandrake, the two hard drives,sizes and ID's are reflected

Tried to download Real-One  audio software in order to listen to webradio,NPR audio etc,etc. however Mandrake will not save my downloads anywhere?

 

Could not find my DVD burner in Mandrake. I like to load my Nero 6 into Mandrake.

I am connected to Earthlink Broadband and have no problem getting on the Net. I am aware that I have to take it one step at a time . These for now are the most visible problems. Please Help,Thanks

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

First question mcc (Mandrake control center)

type mcc in the run command or find the menu item configure your computer

 

What browser are you using it should be saving the item but you just cant see it yet..

 

You could try this from the command line (Konsole) find -name *Logo* remember linux is case sensitive.. *Logo* is looking for the file called something Logo something

 

Lots of different Burners available go to mcc install software. select descriptions and type in burner, gives you a choice..

 

NEXT...

[Crashdamage]

Does Mandrake have a Control Panel similar as Windows?

As michaelcole said, Mandrake Control Center (aka MCC).

 

Could not find any info on my 2 harddrives in Mandrake.Where is that info visible?.

Look under Hardware in MCC.

 

...Mandrake will not save my downloads anywhere?

Again as michaelcole said, exactly what happens when you download something depends on your browser. But any common browser like Firefox, Opera, etc. should ask what you want to do with the downloaded file. When it does, tell it where you want it saved.

 

Could not find my DVD burner in Mandrake. I like to load my Nero 6 into Mandrake.

There are many good ones, including GCombust, k3b, XCDRoast, etc. You can't use your copy of Nero 6 under Linux, but I use Nero for Linux which is very good, available here:

 

http://www.nero.com/en/NeroLINUX.html

 

You can try a free trial of NeroLinux, good for I think 10 days. $19.95 to buy it.

[Guest plankierman]

Thanks very much,

To find files in the slave harddrive I ran into problems. Clicked on the Home Icon ,Clicked on Tools and selectedFind File.Nowhere in the Location did it mention the 20G hard drive. I typed in a file name and selected each of the listings for location and could not find anything.What do I need to type into the Find File Menu to get to my Slave Harddrive.

Thanks very Much

[scarecrow]

What do I need to type into the Find File Menu to get to my Slave Harddrive.

 

You need typing "kdesu mcc", providing the root password and then using the mount points section to set up a mount point (e.g. /mnt/slave or whatever you wish) for that drive. After that you can access it via explorer. Just care to set the permissions (read/write/access) you wish for that partition when using mcc.

[AussieJohn]

Your Linux burner program (if installed) is located in Menu.....System......Archiving and could be either Xcdroast or K3B.

 

To see and access the files in your other hard drive, from Linux, it needs to be mounted first. This is done using MCC.........Mount Points........Create, delete and resize hard disk partitions.

 

Cheers. John.

[Crashdamage]

To get a grasp of how the Linux filesystem is organized, you first have to realize there are no drive letters like A:, C:, D:, etc. in Linux. Everything is a file or directory, even entire drives, starting under the 'root' directory ( / ) which can be generally compared to 'My Computer' in Windows. Your /home directory is roughly equivilent to in Windows:

 

C:\Documents & Settings\yourusername

 

IOW, /home is where all your personal configuration files and documents are kept. When you clicked on the 'Home' icon and tried 'Find File' you were only searching within your /home directory. Since of course /home does not include the directory to your slave drive (any more than you would expect to find your D:\slave listed under C:\Document & Settings in Windows), you couldn't locate anything on the slave.

 

To give you some idea of how the Linux fileystem is arranged, here's my partitions:

 

$ df -H
Filesystem             Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5              818M   507M   270M  66% /
/dev/hdb1               99G    83G    11G  89% /data1
/dev/hdd1               61G    23G    36G  39% /data2
/dev/hda9               11G   8.2G   1.5G  85% /home
/dev/hda1              2.0G   811M   1.2G  41% /mnt/windows
/dev/hda7              4.2G   2.7G   1.3G  70% /usr
/dev/hda8              2.1G   1.3G   687M  65% /var

 

This is probably more complicated than your machine because I have several partitions on the primary system HD and 3 HDs altogether, but it works as an example. Listings with 'hda' in them are partitions on the primary drive, 'hdb' means the 2nd drive (/data1), 'hdd' means the 3rd drive (/data2).

 

To get access to the slave drive, you will need to mount it as scarecrow suggested if it's not already mounted in MCC > Partitions, then make sure you have your permissions on that drive set so you are allowed access. User file permissions are somewhat similar in concept in Linux as in Win2k-XP.

 

OK, now let's say you now have the slave drive mounted, and let's say for example you either put it under /mnt as: /mnt/slave1 or maybe directly under '/' as I did my /data1 and /data2 drives in the example above. You've set user permissions so you have read/write access to it. But for convience, you want to be able to access it directly from inside your /home directory i.e. as /home/slave1. With Linux, this can be done by creating a symlink pointing to /slave1 in your /home directory. Or you can make a desktop icon for /slave1 and access it directly from that.

[Guest plankierman]

Thanks Crah,Aussi and Scare for the info. I'll be studying it for know and understanding what is going on. An other question ...In the old OS hooked-up my camara to the USB port ,turned it on and clicked on "My Computer" to see the photos on my memory stick. Went to Home,Tools and search typed in ?hdc (that's my harddrive but could not find my picts'. Do I need to download software such as Kodak Easyshare or a photosoftware that is compatible with Mandrake?.

Thanks again,

Plugging Away

[scarecrow]

When plugging in your USB stick, "normally" you get an icon for it on your desktop which you can click+access.

On most distros it's autoplugged in a directory named /media (according to the OpenDesktop standards), while in Mandriva it's still autmounted under /mnt/USB_DISK (or something pretty close to that).

For browsing and manipulating your photos you can use plain Linux software, like gwenview. Digicams which support the usb_storage protocol are directly accessible as removable drives, while the ones who support the older PTP protocol can be served well via programs like Digikam and Gphoto2.

Edited November 23, 2005 by scarecrow

[Crashdamage]

Went to Home,Tools and search typed in ?hdc (that's my harddrive...

Seems you still don't have the concept of the Linux filesystem layout. Again, you tried to search for your slave drive in /home. As I said before, it's won't be there, same as in Windoze a 'D:' drive would not show up in 'C:\Documents & Settings\username'. And again, there's no drive letters in Linux, nor is there a directory named 'hdc' for your slave drive.

 

Please, read my last post again, and look again at the example of my system I posted. Keep in mind that if you're viewing the filesystem in a file manager (i.e. Windows Explorer) the 2 secondary HDs in my system would show up as '/data1' and '/data2', not 'hdb' and 'hdd'. The Windows partition shows up as '/mnt/windows', etc.

 

I could try to explain further, but in this case I don't think it would help much. Probably the easiest way to get an understanding is to open a file manager to get a visual representation of the file structure in front of you and do some poking around.

Konqueror kinda sucks but will do OK for this purpose. Open Konqueror, click on 'View' on the upper tool bar and set it for 'File Management' (or something like that, I don't have KDE installed to check). That will give Konqueror a look similar to M$ Windows Explorer. Or better, see if XFE is available in MCC for installation (I don't know if it's included on your discs) install it and try that - it's faster, just generally better file manager than Konqueror and looks almost exactly like Windows Explorer so you'll be comfortable with it right away. I always install XFE for new M$ converts.

 

Once you begin to understand how Linux is laid out, if you really want be able to get things done, try learing to use Midnight Commander...:-)

 

As for plugging in your camera, I really can't help there, I've always just used a USB card reader.