[TriLUG] good newbie book

[Craig Duncan]

Everything you want in RPM is in Mandrakes software manager, have you
considered using Mandrake instead of Redhat? For me, learning Linux with
Mandrake was a better choice, the 8.1 distribution is very cool. Mandrake
also has some of the best tutorials online, check it out.

-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-admin at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-admin at trilug.org]On Behalf
Of Lisa Lorenzin
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2001 10:18 AM
To: Triangle Linux Users Group
Subject: [TriLUG] good newbie book



hi there!

i just gave my father his first linux box.  and then ducked. :)

dad has been using and hacking on computers since the apple II -
unfortunately, he now works for m$, which tends to influence his
expectations (for example, he's accustomed to windows just automagically
recognizing every piece of hardware that comes near the box).  he's
interested in learning more about linux, but so far has been very
frustrated by the gotchas that come with running linux on a piece of
hardware that would otherwise be a doorstop.

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!).

mike and i spent a good chunk of the thanksgiving holiday working on the
box with him, and came up with several questions:

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.)

does anyone know why the standard red hat 7.1 server installation doesn't
install linuxconf by default?  (this one really gets me.  i tend to think
that people running servers are MORE likely to need to reconfigure bits of
their system...  altho that may just be my bias, since i run my own
server.  i don't know whether it's installed by default on a workstation
install, either.)

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.)

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.)

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...)

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*

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.

							lisa

--
lisa lorenzin   |   lorenzin at 1000plus.com   |
http://www.1000plus.com/lisa/
# find / -user your -name base -print0 | xargs -0 chown us


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