Baslinux mailing list

[ljones <ljones AT lineone.net>]

Hi everyone!,

I just finished downloading and installing basiclinux on my system. Now 
while I'm not a 100% linux "newbie" ( I have Mandrake 9.1 on my newer 
systems )  I have only been using linux properly since about the end of 
last year. So there's plenty I know but plenty I have no idea about 
(such as trying to fix nasty RPM dependencies, libraries or how to fix 
downloaded C soruce code that fails to compile). Normally...I have to 
hope it all works out!

I'm running basiclinux on a bit of an odd laptop, it is an old Commodore 
Pentium 75 Mhz (upgraded to 133Mhz) laptop. I've updated its hard drive 
to 4GB, the only thing that remains the same is its ram, which is stuck 
on 8MB as I am unable to find the memory for it (I believe this laptop 
is really a rebadged Featron FT6000E).

I just had a few questions about basiclinux/linux in general, as I don't 
know how to do these at all!

Firstly, I'm having to use a PCMCIA based cdrom with my laptop as it 
does not have a cdrom built in. Right now I don't know how to setup a 
PCMCIA cdrom in linux so I'm having to load the DOS drivers for the 
PCMCIA cdrom first. Which works, but it dosen't work very well ;( I get 
lots of "hdc - lost interrupt" style messages and sometimes CDs will not 
read at all (the cdrom works fine in freedos with its drivers). Linux 
told me that the laptop uses a cirrus chipset for the PCMCIA port (I 
forget its model number). But I don't know how to setup this properly 
from linux (to stop using the dos driver), I have seen files (such as) 
/etc/pcmcia but I don't know if I'm even looking at the right files or 
what I'm supposed to do.

Secondly the same laptop has onboard sound, the sound chip is a Vibra 
16. From memory this too had dos-based drivers to set the card up; how 
would a vibra 16 be set up from within basiclinux? There are no options 
or controls for the vibra16 in the laptop's bios.

Finally....I'd like to say X Windows installed fine and I got a 256 
colour video driver to work with it too :) ; icewm works fine! But there 
are a few other programs I'd like to install but can't work out how. I'd 
like to put on a small web browser, mp3 player and some sort of simple 
text editor or WP and a "file manager" type program.

The programs I had in mind (all X) are "dillo" for web browsing ( 
http://www.dillo.org/ ) - though it dosen't do Java or Javascript it is 
newer than Netscape 3 and more likely (and less resource intensive?) 
than Netscape. For text editiing, I'd like to use Ted ( 
http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/index.html ) - it is quite a large program but 
it seems that its requirements might not be too high given its user 
interface. I'm not sure about an mp3 player yet, I'm guessing xmms would 
run but it'd be too resource intensive. For a file manager I'd like to 
use xwc (x windows commander) I think its homepage is here ( 
http://xwc.sourceforge.net/ ) the RPM can be found all over the net ( 
http://www.hklpg.org/RPM/conectiva/8/i386/RPMS.main/xwc-0.91.4-1cl.i386.html 
) .

The problem is that all these different programs although simple all 
need different libraries, I tried to copy the files from my mandrake 9.1 
install into basiclinux noting down where they came from (/lib) or 
(/usr/lib) noting down the names of the libraries that were needed but 
it didn't work :( .

Any infos or help greatly appreciated, thank you!

ljones
ljones AT lineone.net