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  • From: ljones <ljones AT lineone.net>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [BL] About basiclinux
  • Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 11:59:07 +0000

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





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