[TriLUG] good newbie book

[Bob Wieman]

I like "A Practical Guide to Linux".  It doesn't have a lot of space
dedicated to installation, which after I've installed successfully doesn't
do me a lot of good.  It covers shells and shell scripts in great detail,
and covers some of the cool stuff that comes "for free" with linux:
compilers, debuggers, revision control systems... I didn't feel that it
talked down to me.  It made me realize why Linux is a good OS: if you want
to pop the hood and see how it works, this book will give you a little
start.  (If you've popped the hood of Windows and see how it works,
you've spent more money than I've got.)

I hesitate to offer advice on rpm, but I'll merely comment that I've
managed to do similar stuff to what you're asking for by playing with
--queryformat (a la Maximum RPM) and piping through grep.  It was a cat
and mouse game: find what was required, do an rpm -qp <slick queryformat>
* | grep <what you need>, install that one, try to install the package you
want, repeat.  Mebbe a little shell script could do the "install the
thing, and whatever it needs".

Lastly, I felt that installing a non-pnp ISA card (which I haven't done in
a while) was a LOT like installing in Windows or DOS, before PnP was big.
Find the driver, and edit somewhere (modules.conf, config.sys, device
manager,...) to tell it what the settings are: io=0x300, irq=4, dma=11,
stuff like that.  Assuming the jumpers are set right, and you've told the
BIOS not to screw with that irq/io/whatever, it _should_ work.  I did need
to tell the BIOS to leave some resources to Legacy/ISA and not make them
available for PnP.

Good Luck, and good for your dad for looking at "the competition."

Bob

______________________________________________________________________
Bob Wieman
rewieman at eos.ncsu.edu
Office: Harrelson 381