arctic Posted January 29, 2006 Report Share Posted January 29, 2006 Hehehe... two posts at exactly the same time. Well done, daniewicz. :lol: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daniewicz Posted January 29, 2006 Report Share Posted January 29, 2006 Now that's MUB service! Not sure why you are ahead of me when we both submitted at the same time though. Maybe because you have more penguins than me? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wakish Posted January 29, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 29, 2006 Thank you so much arctic and daniewicz!!! Btw is the linux built-in firewall susficient, or is there the need to have a personal firewall? Yeah daniewicz, i'm also having "look-at" at several threads. Btw, i have tried many liveCds of different distros and even the recent ubuntu. But, i feel that my choice for mandriva has been good! Mandriva really offers a nice and pleasing interface(which is something important for me) amongst others. And something i want to stress, is the mandriva forum like this one, is really really good, active and effective than the others. I would sincerely like to say a big GOOD JOB people!!! Keep it up!! Regards! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted January 30, 2006 Report Share Posted January 30, 2006 The built in firewall in Mandriva is more than sufficient. It is a very effective piece if software. In the MCC, you can fine tune the Firewall (define which services should be available for outsiders). You can even go into expert mode and define certain ports to be opened or closed. The procedure in setting up firewalls is basically the same with every firewall. They open and close ports. For maximum security, you should also stop all unnecessary services (like nfs or ssh which are not needed by everyone). If you are completely paranoid, you can of course set up the firewall on your computer, then connect to a second computer that is set up as an additional firewall and then add a router with firewall capabilities, but that is overkill. :D PS: Daniewicz, I guess I was some ten seconds faster than you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted January 30, 2006 Report Share Posted January 30, 2006 iptables is a highly tested and reliable firewall, and most of its frontends are good. However, you MUST get used to it, since its philosophy is completely different from the one in Windows personal firewalls. But if under windows you have used at some time Winroute or Visnetic/8Signs firewall solutions, you will immediately feel at home... All these expensive and highly respected solutions are effectively an iptables implementation for windoze systems. Most routers with firewall do nothing more than implementing a Linux kernel with iptables, and the difference between them is the kernel-version and the web interface UI. If you have a good router with a complete/functional web interface you can use just its firewall, and set nothing at all on your Linux machine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wakish Posted January 30, 2006 Author Report Share Posted January 30, 2006 (edited) ok, thanks! Uumm, i have some questions: 1) Setup urpmi (see the Easy-Urpmi link at the top of the MUB Forums Main page). After this is configured, go to Mandriva Control Center (MCC) -> Software Management -> Look for Avalable Updates.... Can anyone, tell me more about this. When i go on that page, i see a lot of sources, distribution, packages..etc..i don't know what they are meant for and what to choose.. 2) What is the difference between FreeBSD and Linux distros? 3) Is the partition which will be the "common partition seen by every OSes", called or partitioned as the "extended partiton" ? 4) Can anyone help me in understanding "linux nativ" partition & "linux swap" partition and their purposes? Some analogies with windows/dos partitions will be helpful too. 5) Should linux be installed on a primary partition or an extended partiton? And which that partition should be what file system? Thanks! Edited January 30, 2006 by wakish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted February 1, 2006 Report Share Posted February 1, 2006 1. When you want to set up easyurpmi, you need to know three things: Which distribution you are running, which processor you have and which software-packager you (want to) use. THe first one is quite obvious. When you boot up your system, it will tell you, if you are running 10.1, LE2005 or 2006. If you have Mandriva 2006, then select 2006. If you have LE2005, then select LE2005. Now you need to know hwat kind of computer you are running. i586 is the normal Mandriva that runs on almost every PC. ix86-64 is only for newer 64 bit machines, like an Athlon-64. PPC is for Apple computers (G3, G4, G5 processors). The normal software packager is urpmi. There is an alternative one, called SMART, but I suggest you start with urpmi for now. Once you have selected these three things, click "proceed to step 2" then select a mirror which is relatively near to your box and check the boxes for the sources you want to add (I always add all types, main, updates, jpackage, plf,...). Now click on "proceed to step 3". Open a terminal on your computer (the little black monitor icon) and type "su" in order to log in as root. Now paste the contents the easyurpmi site tells you to copy into your terminal. Once that is finished, you can open the MCC and browse several thousand software packages. 2. Free BSD is another Operating system. The core of FreeBSD is afaik quite different from Linux systems, although the startup-scripts are quite similar. Both Operating systems allow you to run e.g. KDE, Gnome and all the other Open-source solutions. However, Free-BSD has a worse hardware-detection than Linux from what I heard and read. And BSD is used as the core for Apples OSX system. 3. All partitions, be them logical or primary ones, can be seen by any operating system. It depends which filesystem you format them with. Linux filesystems like ext3, reiserfs and others are usually not deteced by Windows systems out of the box (You need 3rd party tools for that). Linux and BSD on the other hand can see and use (to a certain degree) fat16, fat32 and NTFS partitions. Apple partitions are another topic alltogether. You have to decide yourself, how you want to set up your harddisk-partitions. You can go with only primary partitions or you can go with primary and logical partitions (usually the better solution). You need at least one primary partition and can have up to four on one harddisk. The number of logical partitions can be e.g. as much as ten on one harddisk. The shared partition is in most cases a logical fat32 partition. 4. Linux native partitions are those where you install your operating systems files = the /root filesystem (much like c:\windows). This native partition is in many cases an ext3 partition. The Linux swap partition is a partition that works like a virtual RAM on your harddisk. It is recommended to use 2x your RAM size for the swap file. If you have 256 MB RAM, the swap will work best with 512 MB RAM. The swap file will be used if you run many, many aplications that need a lot of RAM and act as a temporary storage file for your computer, much like RAM. Swap files are however slower than RAM, so once swap is needed, the system will slow down a bit, but using swap saves you from the blue screen of death (bsod) that many Windows users know. The bsod is usually caused by applications eating up more RAM than the system can provide. The system will then become unresponsive as it is unable to free up RAM and finally crash. 5. It doesn't matter if you install Linux on a primary or logical partition. Linux simply doesn't care about it. It will work from any partition on your harddisk. Windows wants to reside on the first partition on your harddisk (= primary partition), but Linux can be installed e.g on logical partition 9 (= hda13) if needed. The questions about partition types is rather tricky as every user has his/her personal preferences. I usually stick to ext3 filesystems for /root and /boot and sometimes use reiserfs for /home for my desktop machines. Others will say that Xfs or Reiser4 is better for their specific purposes and they will be right in most cases. It really depends on what you expect/want your system to do. Server-administrators will most-likely prefer other partition formats and partition layouts than home-users. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wakish Posted February 2, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 2, 2006 Thank you arctic! Your explanations were nice! Btw, one more thing: when i install linux, do i have to manually create a swap partition? or does linux create its nativ and swap by itself? (i guess i have to manually do it since you said "It is recommended to use 2x your RAM size for the swap file" ;) ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted February 2, 2006 Report Share Posted February 2, 2006 If you use the auto-partitioning option when you install Mandriva, it will set up those automatically for you. However, I prefer the manual partitioner. I feel more in control of things then and can customize my setup. I prefer to place my /swap near the beginning of my harddisk in order to maximize the speed for swap, in case it will be used (The partition that is at the beginning will have the fastest read/write access). Others will prefer to place /home or /root at the beginning, so once again it's a matter of tastes. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wakish Posted February 2, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 2, 2006 ok... hopefully, i will put things into practice now ;) , that is i will be installing the "Mini-CD of Mandriva 2006" :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted February 3, 2006 Report Share Posted February 3, 2006 Good luck :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wakish Posted February 3, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 3, 2006 (edited) hi there! i spent my whole day with installing, multi-booting..etc..today lol I have come across some frustrations: 1) The miniCD of Mandriva 2006 is really not nice it's just the OS itself without any softwares..etc...all were really nice in the LIVEcD...but MiniCD was frustrating for me :( The interface and desktop was totally different from the beautiful one of the LiveCD! 2) When i dual-boot win xp and madriva 2006, i saw that none of win xp or mandriva could detect my usb - 'pen-drive'! why is this? (i used the rpm as the partitioner and boot-manager...i finally understood how to use it by myself..lol ;) 3) I also tried to install the ubuntu distro. Well its bootloaders could NEVER get installed! I don't know what the problem was, i tried everything, but each time it's bootloaders fail to install - both LILO and GRUB. But, as i said, viewing both livecds of each distro, that of maddriva fascinated me a lot! i really really liked the interface of mandriva from the liveCd! But on the whole it was a really nice experience for me, it was the first time i did that. :D I think i should download the iso with the 3CDs of mandriva 2006. right?? Regards! Edited February 3, 2006 by wakish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted February 3, 2006 Report Share Posted February 3, 2006 The 3-CD set would be a useful approach. :D The mini-CD only has IceWm afaik. IceWM is a window manager(wm), not a desktop manager (dm) (That is why there were no cute icons etc). From the mini-cd you should basically be able to set up some online software mirrors and then download e.g. KDE or GNome, but I recommend to download the 3-CD set as you are new to linux and if you break your system, reinstalling with the full set is way nicer than with the mini-iso. I guess you simply didn't see the USB-pen on your desktop and thus thought it ain't mounted. If you insert the pen, check if a medium like sda1 can be found in your /mnt folder. (e.g. open a terminal and type "ls /mnt") If sda1 gets displayed you have found your usb-pen. In Gnome and KDE, an icon should pop up on your desktop when you insert it. But not on wm's like IceWM. I don't know exactly what problems you encountered with the bootloader...coudl you explain a bit more on what you did? Basically you tell the bootloader to install to the Masterbootrecord (MBR) or your primary harddisk and you are done. If you use a third party bootmanager, things will get more difficult, of course. Tip: In case the bootmanager gets messed up on your box, you can use the 1st Mandriva -CD for reinstalling the bootloader or to restore the Windows bootloader. Hit "F1" for rescue mode and go to the advanced options. Keep us informed on how you progress. If things don't work at once, don't get frustrated. We have all been there once and we are still alive. :) And if we deal with your problems you will seen that you will learn more and more about linux. ;) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wakish Posted February 4, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 4, 2006 arctic thank you so much!!! Yeah, i'm downloading the 3CDs..well, this will take me almost 2days :( but, yeah better have them! For the USB, in Windows Xp i don't see it..it does not detect the usb to my gr8 surprise! I don't know why..but it's unusal since xp detects my usb instantly in my normal 1 OS installations. For the bootloaders, yeah i tried all the possibilities, like saving to the different locations that the cd gave me...i tried for both LILO and GRUB, but it failed. But, with mandriva, it worked fine!!! Yeah, i won't get down with frustratoons..i will continue, don't worry!! I will surely "Keep us informed on how you progress" ;) like i'm doing since the beginning.. We have all been there once and we are still alive. And if we deal with your problems you will seen that you will learn more and more about linux. yeah, i will - Thanks man!!!!!!!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wakish Posted February 6, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 6, 2006 (edited) i'm almost done with downloading the 3rd Cd ;) 1) How can i set my ADSL connection? With windows, i just put in the CD for the ADSL and install the required software. Is it the same procedure with mandriva? When i first came here, i saw a post on this question, but i cannot find it anymore :( PLease can anyone help. Thanks! Edited February 6, 2006 by wakish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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