Installing Linux Question
 

I'm installing SuSE 10.0 today with gnome. Which doesn't mean much to me yet, but I figure it might help in explaining what I'm doing.

Basically I have 3 harddrives, two 250gb HDDs and one 300gb HDD. Basically I want to install Linux on the 300gb Hard Drive, but still have Linux recognize the other two drives. Is that possible to do?

If so, how would I do it?

Would the easiest thing to do be to unplug my two other harddrives and then install linux and then replug the two in later?

When I was installing it the first time when it did a system summary it mentioned compressing the Windows partition to 112gb and then it made mention of my c and d drives (D had Windows on it, C is storage. They're both 250gb) So from that I'm not sure if it was trying to install it on the 300gb and was going to recognize the other two drives or what.

So, from that confusing post, where should I start now to install Linux?

I'm not an expert, but I think Linux should be able to see your other two drives if they use a file system it recognizes (FAT32 should work). Though I've never tried that myself...

Linux can read NTFS, but cannot write to it. It should recognize the drives and be able to read from them just fine, but won't be able to write to them if they are NTFS. If they are FAT32, you wont have a problem and Linux can read and write just fine.

There are actually some experimental drivers that let Linux write to NTFS, but they are experimental and run the risk of screwing up your NTFS drives. Don't try to install them unless you know what you are doing and are willing to take the risk.

Caution: I know next to nothing about Linux....but....
 

But none of that should matter if he's just starting the install...right? Once he gets it installed, then he'll have to worry about that whole can't write to NTFS thing.

I have only a passing familiarity with Linux and some Linux-guru (a Lurux?) will probably come along and slap me down pretty hard, but....

I wouldn't unplug the other two drives when installing SuSE because...well, I imagine that it's going to want to write to the MBR and it's better to introduce everyone now than try to get them all to play nice together later.

Wow...that sounded condescending. Believe me it wasn't. It's just when I run out of technical jargon, I like to break out the analogies. :)

I've installed a few different flavors of Linux of the last year or so and the install always recognized my drives just fine. Sometimes they were all jumbled up, but they were always there.

When I start messing with partitions, I get extra careful. I'd boot up windows and completely erase (No Fat32...no NTFS...just nothing) the 300GB drive via Administrative tools---->Disk management in the control panel. That way when the SuSE install reads all your disks, the 300GB should show up simply as free space and thus, easier to identify. I don't know if that'll work for you, but it helps me and I'm as thick as it comes concerning Linux and all its colors of the rainbow... ;)

I don't know about SuSe, but when I installed Mandrake, it let me pick how I would setup the drives. I have my 300 gig as Linux, and my 120 stayed as XP. It should be similar for you during setup. Just pick which drive will be Linux and it should leave the rest alone.

Nevermind. My harddrive questio njust got answered. I'll update again if I have another.

Alright, I'm in Disk Management, but from here I don't see how to completely erase the harddrive. My options are to format the drive to NTFS and that's it. I can delete the partition, but that basically takes it off of Window's seeing it, and nothing else.

I'd like to erase the whole thing and set it up so that 70gb or so is usable by Linux and the other 200 is usable by Windows.

Is this possible? And if so, how do I do this?

Alright, after a little trial and error and a bit of guesswork I was able to get Linux completely installed and I fooled around with it for a second, but at the moment I don't know how to get online. It says it found my two ethernet cards, but it can't find a connection.

I'm on a school network at the moment, and after rebooting I was able to get online with no problem through Windows, but getting hooked up with Linux isn't working yet.

Any suggestions? I'll do a google search, but I know there are several experiences users who may be able to help me out quicker than my googling.

SuSE.. I'm not too familiar with SuSE so bear with me here...

In YaST2 (the main SuSE configuration tool) somewhere, you can set up network connections. Make sure both are set up to use DHCP and that they both activate on boot. Also make sure (for now) that only one card is actually hooked up to an eithernet cable, so it doesn't get confused if there are two.

Lastly, go to a command prompt (shell) and type /sbin/ifconfig . Can you copy down the first two lines you see for each network connection. Each network connection is specified on the left (eth0, eth1, wlan0, wlan1, etc). It should look something like:

If you can tell us what values you have (I'm more interested in the second line) for each network connection, we may be able to go further with this.

I'm glad to see you're getting the kinks out.

I installed Ubuntu a couple of weeks ago. I've finally just about got everything where I want it, but, my god, has it taken some fancy finagling.

Although, I must admit...I've a definite sense of accomplishment.

Yeah, delete the partition. Windows will still see it just not as a formatted, ready-to-go drive. Most install programs will label as 'free space.'

I will find out my IP information the next time I sign onto Linux, but for now I've got another question to try to tackle before I get on to it again tonight.

I'd like to install my Motherboard drivers on Linux, but as I'm new to the whole system I'm not quite sure how. I was looking through the NF4_Drivers file on the CD that came with my motherboard, I found a file that told me this:

My question is, how do I run the installer binary under a shell with root privileges?

I figured out how to get to the shell with root privileges, but I don't know how to run the installer binary.

This is what showed up in the ifconfig

Usually running "sh filename.ext" will do it for you. I suggest going and getting the latest drivers off the website though, that's usually better to do. Especially since Linux drivers usually aren't as refined as Windows drivers are. Some major updates happen often.

Ok, so you have an IP.. so DHCP is working. Your network connection should "just work" at this point... but that doesn't seem to be the case (obviously). Do you have any proxies or anything that you have to go to to connect to the Internet?

Also, back in windows, go to a command prompt and do an "ipconfig /all" and paste it in here. I wanna see some of the other details (gateway IP, mainly.. but the other stuff to.

Windows IP Configuration

Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : appelt328
Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . :
Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Unknown
IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : Yes
WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No
DNS Suffix Search List. . . . . . : resnet.tamu.edu

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 6:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : resnet.tamu.edu
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-01-29-F5-E5-AF
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 128.194.20.246
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.254.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 128.194.20.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 128.194.177.199
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 128.194.254.3
128.194.254.1
128.194.254.2
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Tuesday, March 07, 2006 10:38:43 AM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Tuesday, March 07, 2006 6:38:43 PM

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 2:

Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Marvell Yukon 88E8001/8003/8010 PCI
Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-01-29-F5-9C-A3

Also, when I try to fix load the drivers, I am told that

NFORCE-Linux-x86_64-1.0-0310-pkg1.run

is a directory, not an executable, but when I go into it by "cd NFORCE-Linux-x86_64-1.0-0310-pkg1.run" there is nothing in there.

When I try to run .exe files I recieve this message "cannot execute binary file" even when I'm under superuser.

Assuming you're using AMD64 (I guessed from the Nvidia File name) these instructions might help:

http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-...r-HOWTO.html#4

Ah, the slightly sweet smell of slight success.

I managed to get sh nvidiafiles.run -q to work as super user, but after I agreed to the licesnsing agreements an error came up:

The kernel header file '/lib/modules/1.6.12-15-default/build/include/linux/kernel.h' does not exist.

And it cancels all the actions.

OK..

You have your DHCP. Try pinging the gateway. ( ping 128.194.20.1 ). If that succeeds, type "route add default gw 128.194.20.1". Then try pinging google ("ping www.google.com") and surfing the web. If that doesn't work, look at your /etc/resolv.conf. You should have, at the very least, a line that says:
that IP could end with .1 or .2 too. If it's not there, edit /etc/resolv.conf and make it say:

The file didn't have that in there, and I wasn't able to write in it, just read it, so I'm going to log back into Linux and fiddle around with it for a little while and see if I can change the permissions for that file so I can get it working. I guess we'll see in 15.

YES! YES! YES! YES! I'M ONLINE!!!!

Now all I have to do is setup my sound card which doesn't appear to be supported by Linux... Hm.

Sonuvabitch. It's not supported by Linux. That almost makes all of this a waste of time if I can't kick back, relax, and enjoy my music. Oye.

What kind of sound card is it? How sure are you that it isn't supported?

http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/ should be your definitive source for 'does my sound card work under linux?'

BTW, how did you get online? what'd you have to do?

I did the Name Server thing and it fixed it for me.

I have a Sound Blaster X-Fi which isn't supported in Linux yet (if ever).

Do you also have onboard sound? You could try that.

I do, but it would mean redoing the sound on the back of my computer and I don't want to do that right now.

I think I'll make this my 'ultimate linux help' thr ead to come to whenever I have a problem so that if some one needs help they may be able to find it based on the problems I'm having.

So now, I have a new question in regards to the sound card issue.

In my BIOS I've turned off my onboard sound so that I wouldn't have to physically uninstall it. That's the easiest plan I've found. Now that I can't use my good sound card in linux I'd like to be able to use onboard whenever I log into linux, and the SB sound card whenever I sign into Windows.

Of course the problem here is that the onboard might trip up Windows when I log on and it sees two sources of speakers. If the sound drivers for the onboard speakers are uninstalled in Windows do you think this would still be a problem?

My plan for the sound system is to try to find a splitter I suppose so that all of my speakers are ultimately plugged into both sound cards and it will just play through whatever sound card I have running.

Something like this:

http://rsk.imageg.net/graphics/produ...265274w345.jpg

Installing simple files in Linux -

Basically at the moment I'd like to install the latest version of firefox onto my system, but I don't actually know how to do that. I assumed it would just be ./run-mozilla.sh or something to that effect, but it told me it couldn't execute the file or something like that.

What should I do now? I don't entirely understand how to install and uninstall programs on Linux. I have a book, but I haven't found anything quite yet.

Edit - Wait, so all you have to do is unzip the file into whatever directory you want it in, and it runs itself?

Unzip it, then look at the readme and the Makefile. You're probably going to have to do a "make," then a "make install." You need to check those out and see what they say. The makefile will tell you what make commands you can use.

I'm not much of a linux user myself but its my understanding that linux user downloads firefox file that ends in ".tar.gz"

In the terminal window, head to the folder you downloaded it to and run the following command:

tar -xzvf firefox-1.5.tar.gz

Or whatever the filename is. And then run the executable.

It told me to use "tar -xzvf firefox-1.5.tar.gz" and it unzipped into the firefox directory, and it just... works... now. That was the extent of having to do anything.

I'm so used to the lengthy task of installing programs with windows that it's kind of confusing.

Congrads, you've just spotted the main differences between Windows and Linux.

Program installations for windows takes longer because of the registry, installation of files here, there, make some little changes to here and there. On the other hand, some variation of Linux (Sometimes Mac, I'm not too sure) just simply unzips the program and runs it from there.

Does Suse come with a package manager? Unless the repos are woefully behind in updates, or unless you need certain features that aren't compiled in normally, the package manager is usually the safest way to install software on a Linux system.

Woah woah woah.. we don't want him to put everything in via source. He's on SuSE 10, which keeps pretty current with packages. YaST2 has a package manager. It's a bit tough to use, but google around for help on it... it will do things like resolve dependencies (say firefox required some other program to be installed to run.. it'd install that program as well), update all your programs to the latest versions, and other things.. all from a simple menu. Saves a lot of having to download/untar/configure/make/make install... and keeps your system cleaner.