RE: LINUX Workstations

On Thursday 02 October 2003 22:21, Joe Pluta wrote:
> > From: James Rich
> >
> > For a
> > single user who runs his own machine it will be easy and intuitive.
>
> Okay, I'll take you up on this.  I have a RedHat 7.3 system running (in
> character mode), and I am barely literate.  I can run "up2date -u", and
> was recently able to scout through enough stuff to get the system
> running after the SSL keys crapped out.  This involved FTP and RPM.
>
> Other than that, I don't have a clue.  I can wander around a Linux
> machine with the best of them; cd and ls are my friends.  I actually
> use Cygwin on occasion to do heavy text manipulation on Windows.  But
> in order to really use Linux, I'll need a desktop.
>
> And herein lies the rub.  I don't know how to start or configure my
> desktop.  I'm not really sure what hardware I have on the system; when
> I bought it, it came with Windows installed.  I have messed with X in
> the past and have managed to get it to work reasonably well.  I have
> also entirely locked up my machine to the point of reinstall.  I'd
> prefer not to do that again, since the Linux box is my mail server and
> is probably the weakest link in my chain.

One easy way to try out a Linux desktop is to get a copy of Knoppix -
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-old-en.html - It's a run from CD 
distro with hardware autodetection & configuration. Great for testing 
hardware compatibility with Linux. By default it will boot you into a 
full graphical desktop (KDE) with nearly 2Gb of applications 
(decompressed on the fly as you access them). There is an option to 
install it to your hard drive if you like it enough, though you can run 
it just from the CD (storing config data on a floppy or USB mass storage 
device).

As far as finding out what hardware you have installed, from a Linux- 
eye-view, try the lspci (list PCI devices) command. On this box I get 
output like:

00:0d.0 Multimedia video controller: Zoran Corporation ZR36057PQC Video 
cutting chipset (rev 02)
00:0f.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1370 [AudioPCI] (rev 01)
00:11.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. 
RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
00:13.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Triones Technologies, Inc. 
HPT366/368/370/370A/372 (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA G400 AGP (rev 
82)

which gives pointers to the modules required to get the hardware 
functional, if your distro of choice doesn't pick them up automagically. 
A companion command is lsmod - (list loaded modules) which picks up 
things like:

Module                  Size  Used by    Tainted: PF 
mga_vid                 8024   0
8139too                15496   1
mga                    95676   5
agpgart                29748   3

You could boot Knoppix and save the ouput of these commands to help in the 
set up of which ever distro you go for. I think all the recent ones - 
RedHat 9, SuSE 8.2 (9.0 due out in a few weeks), Mandrake 9.1 etc are all 
pretty savvy at setting up machines correctly these days.
 
> I also have a play machine and the RedHat 9.0 documentation, which I
> may also choose to make into my guinea pig.  All it needs is a disk
> drive, and I have a couple of those lying around.  Unfortunately the CD
> drive on that machine is flaky; I may need to go get a new one.
>
> So, given this, how do I get started?  What steps are required in order
> for me to get a machine up and running wherein things are "intuitive"?
> This s a real question, because I would like to get a CVS server up,
> and not CVSNT.

Don't know about the other distributions but on Debian it was just a quick
# apt-get install cvs cvsd
followed by a few on screen prompts. Needed it for a WSAD project we've 
started on and I didn't want CVSNT either ;) The cvsd package is a more 
secure way of setting up pserver based access, btw.

If this thread is going to continue, we might be better taking it to the 
Linux101 list, unless there is some heavy midrange bias we can bring back 
into it ;

Regards, Martin [who's getting a new toy to play with tomorrow; well, the 
company's new i825 arrives :)] 
-- 
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