Re: round 2

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

Peter Evans (peter@example.com) wrote:

> The installation routine has already used this, no? Worse, expert mode

It may just be that the installation routine had trouble with your
video hardware and keyboard layout (is this a non-standard keyboard
layout?  If it's not a really a jp106 you may yet have to use
xmodmap later), so I think you should, as was suggested earlier,
use xf86config to set up X, not that you have the packages installed.

Run /usr/X11R6/bin/xf86config.  If it's not there, use locate.
If that doesn't find it, you might have missed installing the package
that contains it.

The installer handles all standard video hardware quite well
(and as I recall, it does allow you to choose the video
hardware if you don't like what it detects; I have; I have
a Geforce2 MX in one of my machines, but it auto-detected it
as some other Geforce model, so I manually chose the correct
one from the list), so I'm not sure why you're not getting that
chance; you *are* doing a Custom Install, right?

> books for an editor and how to use it. pico sounds promising.)

Learn vi.  It's the only thing you're guaranteed to find in
every *nix around, and is more powerful and flexible than
pico.  Now if you just want something to use right now, you
can fire up pico without reading any instructions first, but
don't let that get in the way of learning vi later.  You'll
be glad you did.

> >> (note 3) say.  Why should 800x600 need 48.08 kHz -- or how might
> >> I tell X that it doesn't need this?

Higher resolutions require higher refresh rates.  You can't tell it
that it doesn't need that, because if it says it needs it, it does.

> Right-ho, a new adventure: How To Copy A File To Diskette. Volkerding
> and Reichard tell me that COPY is cp. But what's the floppy drive? Some
> other book tells me that the first one is /dev/fd0

It's usually mounted on /mnt/floppy, or maybe on /floppy.  If you
want to know what your system is using for the default mount point,
do cat /etc/fstab and look for the line with /dev/fd0 in it. 
Mine looks like this:

/dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy             auto    noauto,owner    0 0

The fields (left to right) are the device name, the mount point, the
file system type (auto means auto-detect it), do not automatically
mount it, and it belongs to the owner.  Do not fsck it boot.

If you don't have a line like this in /etc/fstab, add one.  
You may need to be root to mount the drive, unless your id is the owner
of /dev/fd0.  You can check with ls -l /dev/fd0.

> Is this difficult, or am I just thick?

You're not thick and it's not difficult, but the book you're using did
not give you the information you need.   Disks will have two "names"
on your system.  One is the actual device name, such as /dev/fd0 for
your first floppy drive, or /dev/hda for your first IDE drive or
/dev/sd0 for your first SCSI drive.  

For partitioned disks, there's yet a bit more.  Let's say you have
an IDE disk with 3 primary partitions and one extended partition
that contains 3 logical partions.  You will then have the following
device names associated to that disk (assuming here that it's your
first or only IDE disk, /dev/hda):

/dev/hda1		First primary partiion
/dev/hda2		Second primary partition
/dev/hda3		Third primary partition
/dev/hda5		Extended partition
/dev/hda6		First logical partition
/dev/hda7		Second logical partition
/dev/hda8		Third logical partition

Now, these all need mount points, so the system can 
read and write to them.  Let's make some up:

/dev/hda1		/
/dev/hda2		/usr
/dev/hda3		swap
/dev/hda6		/var
/dev/hda7		/usr/local
/dev/hda8		/home

Swap partitions don't have normal mount points, they are
just mounted as swap, no matter how many you have.  The
system deals with everything else concerning them.

Note: on your Red Hat system, you may have entries in 
your /etc/fstab that look like this:

LABEL=/usr/local        /usr/local              ext2    defaults        1 2

What they seem to be doing (somone correct if they're doing
this some other way) is putting the name of the mount point in the
actual disk label during the install and setting up fstab that way.
If you want to see what device is actually mounted where, do:

cat /etc/mtab

mtab is the list of which devices are currently mounted on which
mount points.

Also, anything your book contains
that is Slackware-specific is likely to be wrong for your Red Hat
distro, either because it's something invented for Slackware (fdmount
sounds like one of those, or at least something RH doesn't install)
or because Slackware puts it in a different place than Red Hat does.

HTH,

Jonathan