Lisa Lorenzin wrote:
> hi there!
>
> i just gave my father his first linux box. and then ducked. :)
Good for you!
> the good news is the box is running red hat 7.1 and has 32 meg of RAM; the
> bad news is that it's a dell optiplex from 1995 with 4 gig of hd, a
> non-pnp isa ethernet nic, and an ibm 8515 monitor. (mike, our household
> magician, actually managed to convince x to run at 1024x768 on that
> dinosaur!).
ouch...
> can anyone recommend a good newbie book that won't insult his
> intelligence? he IS a computer geek - it's just that he's a dos/windows
> computer geek, so a lot of the commands and concepts in linux are new to
> him. (he found linuxnewbie.com already, but is looking for a book because
> it's easier to read large amounts of information in hardcopy.)
Get Running Linux (or the more newbie-oriented Linux in a
Nutshell) from:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/runux3/
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxnut3/
> can anyone tell me how to use rpm (the command) to determine what rpm
> (package) contains the library i need, when the rpms (packages) are on the
> cd, rather than installed? specifically, i want the moral equivalent of
> rpm -qp --whatprovides libfoo.so.1, but when i try that, it tells me i can
> only do one type of query at a time. (sigh.)
for i in *.rpm
do
n=`rpm -qlp $i | grep libfoo | wc -l`
if [ $n -ne 0 ]; then
echo $i
fi
done
> if you don't install a windowing environment at the beginning, is there
> any less painful way to install kde than installing each kde rpm one at a
> time and going fishing back through the rest of the rpms to figure out
> which rpm provides the library it says it requires? (yes, that's how the
> previous question came about.)
There must be a better way, but I don't know it off the top of my
head... sorry...
> more generally, is there any way to tell rpm "install this RPM, and if it
> has any dependencies, install the things it depends on, too?" (similar to
> the way CPAN handles installs - if you try to install a bundle that
> depends on modules that you haven't installed yet, you can tell it just to
> install all the modules it needs and then install the bundle...)
again, dunno...
> and, last but definitely not least - can anybody provide pointers on how
> to get a NON-pnp isa card working under 7.2? *wry grin*
oh, yuk... uh, search the net for someone else who got it working?
> thanks in advance for any advice you guys can offer. situations like this
> make me realize how much i DON'T know about linux yet... i feel like the
> blind leading the blind.
You'd have a much nicer experience on newer hw. Boxes are so cheap.
Perhaps it would be worth your time (and your dad's) to get a new box?
hth,
Ed
--
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
Post-Doctoral Researcher | Emails: <ed at eh3.com>, <ehill at mines.edu>
Division of ESE | URL: http://www.eh3.com
Colorado School of Mines | Phone: 303-273-3483
Golden, CO 80401 | Fax: 303-273-3311