I easily found the latest version, 8.0, and the files to download, but I found that once the downloads started they slowed down to a pace that suggested it would take about a week to download them. I found several of the ISO images on Kazaa (a completely proper use of Kazaa), but only one of the images ever made it through. Then my son referred me to the mirror site which you can find for yourself by typing 'redhat linux download mirror sites' into most search engines. Yahoo.com gave me http://www.redhat.com/download/mirror.html, but that may change over time.
I was not surprised that Redhat does not really focus on making the free downloads easy (after all, they would prefer you buy the packaged CDs), but the mirror sites work great. I chose a local university and was able to get the remaining four CD images in about four hours (with an AT&T cable modem which was just flying). To test the images, I made a copy of each of them on my hard drive (make sure it was a good write and that all files were readable). However, you may want to skip this step as the first CD image is bootable and then gives you the option of testing all five CD images (presumably testing a check sum for each file). It takes a while and the machine can't do anything else, so plan on a time(s) when you have other stuff to do and you do not need to use your PC.
Also, you should consider making two partitions for Linux, one for the kernel files and one for the swap file. To be cautious you might make the root (or kernel) partition the first primary partition and the swap file partition the last logical partition. The reason for this is that it appears that Linux identifies partitions by number so that the boot process could get screwed up if you add or delete another primary partition or logical partition in the middle. The swap file partition is easy to recreate (I assume though I haven't given my Linux installation one as I didn't plan well enough) so there is no reason to waste one of your limited number of primary partitions on it.
It is important that while running the installation program for Red Hat Linux 8.0 (anaconda) that you use DiskDruid to define a mount point for every partition you want to be able to access under Linux. The basic install should go into a Linux native partition (mount point of '/' which makes it the root) while any other partitions should be given short mount points like '/win98' or '/data' as you will always need to use that name to refer to the partition when running Linux.
As best I can tell you can not run DiskDruid, fdisk, or any of the other fdisk alternatives after the installation (they are not installed even if you say to install all packages). fdisk and its variants (not DiskDruid) seem to be available as gz files so you might be able to manually install them but the only method I found to run DiskDruid was to do another full install of Red Hat Linux 8.0. Yikes!
Once you finish the install, all the Windows (Fat32) partitions will be visible under the root as '/win98', '/data' or whatever mount point you chose. However, they will be read only to everything except the root (which may not be desirable). So I suggest that you become the root (using the su command) and alter the file /etc/fstab so that a line like:
/dev/hda5 /data vfat defaults 0 0instead is:
/dev/hda5 /data vfat user,exec,umask=000 0 0i.e. replace the defaults with user,exec,umask=000. That will give read/write access to all users of that particular windows Fat32 partitiion.
While you are editting your fstab file, you probably also want to add the user option to your floppy and cd-rom drive so that you access these devices without switching to root access. For example:
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0could become
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,user,kudzu 0 0
'vi' is an OK editor to use for this until you can get a nice editor like jedit to work. 'vimtutor' is helpful to learn the basics of vi, but the critical knowledge is that ':wq' will write the current image (after you have updated it). ':' is the command prefix and 'w' is for write and 'q' is for quit.
While I am covering some basics, I would suggest that you start using control-c for copy marked text (Windows control-insert) and control-v for insert clipboard text (Windows shift-insert). Sometimes the Windows keys will work, but just often enough to leave you wondering why the text you thought you put into the clipboard isn't there.
The problem was that the original java included with Red Hat linux was a GNU implementation that did not support the extensions I required to run jEdit; the Sun installation process did not put any of its binaries in the PATH (use env command to display the environment variables including PATH) and so was never accessed. Argh! I altered the system startup command file /etc/profile (requires root access to alter it, you can get root access via the su command) with another pathmunge entry to put the java binary directory into the PATH. My java binary directory was /usr/local/j2re1.4.1_01/bin as I installed the package in /usr/local. You can use the GUI search utility to find this directory by finding the directory entry containing the file named ControlPanel.
This resolved the problem of not being able to use java and so then I could run the jedit installation program (same one I used under windows). However, Mozilla 1.01 was not recognizing the latest Sun run time. To get it to work I used the 'ln' command to create a symbolic link in the Mozilla plug in directory of /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins to the file /usr/local/j2re1.4.1_01/plugin/ns610/libjavaplugin_oji.so I then needed to run the program ControlPanel with the register option (-r) to the scheme 'ns610' with a browser path (-c) of /usr/bin/mozilla and a java path (-j) of /usr/local/j2re1.4.1_01. Once I had done both, java was working fine all around. It could be that the registering was sufficient, but I didn't try registering without first creating the link. I also had to stop all invocations of Mozilla to be able to access the new java plugin.
title Windows 98
hide (hd0,2)
unhide (hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot
to hide the Windows XP partition (third primary partition) and make
the Windows 98 parition (first primary partition) active. There was
a similar entry for Windows XP.Also, this file is useful as every time that Red Hat sends out and installs a new kernel, you get a new entry in your grub.conf file. When it get too long, you can delete the older entries (and also delete the compressed kernel files that they reference).
At the top of the shell file add a line with '#/bin/sh' to clearly define that it is a shell script.
The arguments in DOS are '%n' and need to be changed to '$n'.
The DOS 'del' command is similar to Linux 'rm' command but the 'rename' command is substantially different with three parameters (two does nothing).
Use '&' at the end of the command line to have the command run in a separate process (similar to start command in Windows NT/2000/XP). ';' separates commands on the same line. 'read ans < /dev/tty' is a useful way to map delays like the DOS/Windows 'pause' command.
Linux FTP supports the traditional scripting functions including using automatic logins via the .netrc located at /home/brian/.netrc in my case. Further, to include passwords in the file, read access must be denied to all other users through the usage of the 'chmod 600 .netrc' command to deny external read access. You can use macros or have the rest of the input piped in for the normal FTP scripting tasks.
The system startup files are mostly in /etc/rc.d with the first file being rc.sysinit and the second file of interest as rc.local. rc.sysinit had a reference to /proc/isapnp which was not installed on my system (even though I had asked that all packages be installed). It also referred to /sbin/sndconfig which I ran manually from a terminal session (needed to have root access via the su command to run it successfully). It was able to identify and configure the device automatically (no problems) and the test sound worked. It also altered the configuration files (after my approval). After rebooting the sound card was working fine.
The change it made was in the file /etc/modules.conf it added the follwowing entries:
alias sound-slot-0 i810_audio post-install sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -L >/dev/null 2>&1 || : pre-remove sound-slot-0 /bin/aumix-minimal -f /etc/.aumixrc -S >/dev/null 2>&1 || :
With later updates of the kernel, I needed to modify the /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit to explicitly invoke '/sbin/sndconfig --mungepnp' without any call to /proc/isapnp.
Another related glitch was that the built in audio player, xmms, would not play MP3 files. Strange! I simply visited http://www.xmms.org/ and saw at the top a reference to the fact that with Red Hat Linux 8.0 they had included xmms, but left out the MP3 plugin (reasons unknown). There was a link to http://staff.xmms.org/priv/redhat8/ which had just the file to download, xmms-mpg123-1.2.7-13.i386.rpm. I ran rpm from a terminal session with the install option (-i) followed by the name of the package (I believe root access was required to get it to work). Then everything worked great. Go figure!
I then ran the text version a few times trying different options for the video out, '-vo x11' worked with my SIS 305 on-board graphics card. It does not appear that there are any drivers with take advantage of the hardware accelerators for that card, but with my Athlon XP 2000+ it doesn't seem to be necessary.
. Next I modified the Mozilla plugger configuration file, '/etc/pluggerrc' so that mplayer was invoked with the correct video out option (-vo x11). After that, I commented out all the existing lines and put in 'ignore_errors exits:gmplayer -vo x11 "$file" >/dev/null 2>/dev/null plugger.tst' to create a simple text file for viewing separately.
For better performance (utilizing the 3DNow instruction of my Athlon since my graphics card's accelerators are not supported) I recompiled mplayer. Having downloaded the source and decompressed it into my home directory, I ran 'configure --enable-gui --enable-xmms --enable-menu --prefix=/usr --confdir=/etc/mplayer' to detect my systems capabilities. I added the --prefix option later to match the prefix used by the RPM version. Then I ran 'make' (using default Makefile) to recompile the application. Next I ran 'make install' (same makefile, Makefile, but with install option) to install the compiled package.
As I was using the --enable-gui option, the resulting run file was called mplayer, but was actually the gui program. However, for the program to run as the gui program, you needed to rename the binary to gmplayer (other options may have been available). Once I had it working as desired, I copied the compiled program into /usr/bin (having gotten root access via the su command of course).
An interesting command to the text version of mplayer is:
mplayer -vop rotate=1,scale=320:240 -vo x11 -nosound /fat32Data/brian/personal/portland/mvc-805v.mpg mencoder -vop rotate=3,scale=320:240 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=45 /fat32Data/brian/personal/florida/mvc-459v.mpg -o /home/brian/test.mpgThe second command writes a new vidoe image that is resized and rotated 90 degrees. Cool!
In installing the ISO fonts, I had to use 'bzip2 -d' and then 'tar -xf' to decompress and then extract the files I downloaded which had extensions of '.tar.bz2'.
When I ran the 'make install' command it installed the GUI version in a different location. To find what RPM a file was installed by, use 'rpm -qf /full/name/offile'. The '-e' option can then delete the package (use name returned from -qf). This is useful for getting rid of old versions of the kernel which accumulate in the boot menu (source in the /boot directory). You can also find out what files will be installed by an RPM with 'rpm -qpi filename.rpm'. In this case the package_name was mplayer-gui-0.90rc4-2. It listed an installation as /usr/bin/gmplayer while the make file used /usr/local/bin/gmplayer
I also altered etc/rc.d/init.d/ypbind to only try twice to identify an NIS domain server (none on local net) and then not log the failure.
Also, I suggest that you make a copy of the shared windows 'c' drive from /usr/share/wine-c to your home directory like /home/brian/wine-c (using the cp command as root from the su command) and then alter the main wine configuration file /home/brian/.wine/config so that the 'c' drive is the copy. That way your windows programs can alter windows configuration without having root access. You can also make copies of it (when everything is working) and move it back t the shared directory in case you run an application that screws everything up.
I found a similar how-to page at http://www.ualberta.ca/~jbh/puter/kazaa-wine/. The first step was to get an up-to-date version of wine, but I had had wine installed initially and applied all updates initially and as they came up. When I checked, I had an up to date version of wine.
As root (using su command) I copied the following files from my Win98 directory (accessed as /win98/windows/system into my wines directory of /usr/share/wine-c/windows/system:
"commctrl" = "native, builtin" "comctl32" = "native, builtin" "comdlg32" = "native, builtin" "msvcrt" = "native, builtin" "shdoclc" = "native, builtin" "shdocvw" = "native, builtin" "shlwapi" = "native, builtin" "urlmon" = "native, builtin" "wininet" = "native, builtin"I put these entries with the other dll definitions, but if they conflicted with other definitions, you could make them specific to kazaa by putting in their own seciton after '[AppDefaults\\kazaa.exe\\DllOverrides]'
While I was modifying the config file, I also made a duplicate of the C drive entry and created a D drive entry that accessed the D drive as /fat32Data and with win98 as the file system. The remaining drive letters were adjuested as necessary to swap make the cdrom drive as 'f:'. There seemed to be configuration files elsewhere in wine that assumed that the temp drive was 'e:' even if you change the path in the configuration file. Previously I had loaded a KazaaLite zip file from www.kazaalite.com. So I extracted the two directories into /home/brian/kazaa using the built in Gnome file browser (file rollier). I then changed to the 'first stage' directory with the command:
cd 'first stage'there I ran:
wine kazaa_lite_202_english.exe
I got the error that 'This programs requires Windows Version 4.1 or higher'. I investigated that error via yahoo! and found out that I needed to add the following into my /home/brian/.wine/config file:
[Version] "Windows"="win98"I completed the installation by installing the HOSTS file and second stage kazaa.exe file as described in the readme file. The only problems I have with it now are that it starts with the status bar hung and flashing until I press alt-esc and switch to the kazaa-lite screen and it often hangs when I try to update my options under Linux.
Later Redhat recommended the installation of an enhanced glibc (gnu c library) to fix security issues. However, this version caused wine to fail with on the lstat of the sockets file. A later version of glibc fixed the problem.
I ran that program from a terminal session and got an error of missing crypt32.dll, msoss.dll (file there, no entry) , wininet.dll (0 length original). I copied that file from my win98 installation (hidden c: drive made visible as /win98) from '/win98/windows/system/crypt32.dll' into /usr/share/wine-c/windows/system and added an entry in the DLL section in /home/brian/.wine/config like:
"crypt32" = "native, builtin"The following source can get you ie5, but it wouldn't work for me
http://download.microsoft.com/download/ie501sp2/Install/5.01_SP2/WIN98/EN-US/ie5setup.exeA better way to get IE6 on CD (so that you don't have to have all the internet sockets just right) is to pick up an AOL CD from the post office or wherever (they are everywhere it seems). The recommended options to run the result are:
wine --dll shlwapi,rpcrt4,ole32,shdocvw,wininet,shfolder,shell32,shell,comctl32=n iexplore.exe
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.winex.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/winex login
Hit Enter when prompted for a password
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.winex.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/winex co wine
This downloads the source code for wine. To recompile it, run the commands:./configure make depend makeThe final command of make failed if run in a Dos Fat32 partition because cp was unable to preserve the date and time information. However, simply restarting the make allowed it to pick up where it had left off (without the date and time of the copied file being preserved.
Current directories in font path: 1: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/korean 2: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc:unscaled 3: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled 4: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled 5: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc 6: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 7: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo 8: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic 9: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF 10: /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1 11: 12: /usr/lib/openoffice/share/fonts/truetype 13: /usr/share/fonts/zh_CN/TrueType 14: /usr/share/fonts/zh_TW/TrueType 15: /usr/share/fonts/KOI8-R/misc:unscaled 16: /usr/share/fonts/KOI8-R/75dpi:unscaled 17: /usr/share/fonts/KOI8-R/100dpi:unscaled 18: /usr/share/fonts/KOI8-R/misc 19: /usr/share/fonts/KOI8-R/75dpi 20: /usr/share/fonts/KOI8-R/100dpi 21: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2/misc:unscaled 22: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2/75dpi:unscaled 23: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2/100dpi:unscaled 24: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2/misc 25: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2/75dpi 26: /usr/share/fonts/ISO8859-2/100dpi 27: /usr/share/fonts/ja/misc:unscaled 28: /usr/share/fonts/ja/misc 29: /usr/share/fonts/ja/TrueType 30: /usr/share/fonts/ko/TrueType 31: /usr/share/AbiSuite/fontsI then used the chkfontpath command with different options to delete the korean and blank font entry. You can add True Type Fonts from windows into X Windows by just copying them into the correct directory and then using xfontsel will show that the new fonts are available after restarting the system.
Later I had a problem with it hanging in the 'starting sendmail' step, but just disabled sendmail by renaming the file /etc/init.d/sendmail (I am not using sendmail at this time). You can do this by booting from the Linux CD number 1, invoking the rescue option (which runs anaconda to give you read/write access to your boot partition by default), and then changing the directory to '/mnt/sysmount/...' to get to where the updates are. I used 'rename sendmail sendmail.old sendmail' to rename the sendmail file.
Later, a newer version of the kernel fixed the need for the 'bigmem' verison, but the problem persisted with newer versions of sendmail.
However, the default of LPRng printer spoolers did not have the drivers I wanted for LaserJet and shared printers, so I went into the Gnu Start menu under 'Extras' and then 'System Settings' and selected 'Printer System Switcher'. There I switched to the Common Unix Printing Systems or 'CUPS'. That required a system restart to take effect.
The old 'Systems Settings' and 'Printing' option was still there, but it did nothing (set up configuration for LPrng only). To configure you use the web interface via 'http://localhost:631/'. When creating a new printer it asked for UserID and password, where I gave it 'root' and the root's password. Then I could very easily add the printers I wanted.
To print from OpenOffice, I went to the program directory of '/usr/lib/openoffice' and ran the command './spadmin'. All the options were for postscript printers. However, just printing to the generic printer worked fine under CUPS.
mount /mnt/cdrom diff -q -r --ignore-file-name-case /mnt/cdrom .However, the diff command and --ignore-file-name-case does not work well on Fat32 drives. The following commnad is useful for copying the CD contents onto a regular drive:
cp -r /mnt/cdrom .
The problem was that my BIOS setting were toast. Windows XP would boot fine but the system clock was all screwy. Couldn't keep right time even after I set it. That caused me to reset my BIOS setting to 'best performance' settings, reset the date and time (three days off), set the bus speed to 133, turn on SMART hard drive capabilities, .... Then the system works great. Cool.
Then, continuing to follow the directions in the INSTALL file, I ran 'make check'. That worked fine but I needed to switch to root access with the SU command before I could run the 'make install' command.
To start GAIM on system boot/user login, select the RedHat/Start button (bottom left corner with Gnome), then Extras, Preferences, Sessions. Then press the add button and enter the application location ('/usr/local/bin/gaim') in the command field.
Maven complained that JAVA_HOME was not defined, so I issued the command
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/j2re1.4.1_01
Once this was corrected,
Maven complained that it couldn't find tools.jar (but then I didn't have
the java SDK either). So, I downloaded the SDK from:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html.
The java SDK binary was a Linux run file which I executed from a terminal session.
Unlike previous Sun Linux installations, this install was nicely automated, very
similar to a Windows installation. Has Sun resolved its love/hate relationship
with Linux? I installed the J2EE SDK in /fat32Data/j2esdk14. I updated the
path in the /etc/profile as above to use the new java tools
(/fat32Data/j2esdk14/jdk/bin) as well as /fat32Data/maven/bin. I also added the
'export JAVA_HOME=/fat32Data/j2esdk14/jdk' as well as
'export JAVA_HOME=/fat32Data/maven' to '/home/brian/.bashrc'.
http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlashI expanded the file into my home directory, switched to root privileges (used SU command), switched to the expanded directory and ran flashplayer-installer from the command line. As the installation directory for Mozilla, I provided '/usr/lib/mozilla-1.0.2'. A system rebott was required to get it to actually work (hung system with just Mozilla stopped and restarted). Still causes system hangs with most uses.
http://hpoj.sourceforge.net/download.shtmlI expanded the file into my home directory, switched to the expanded directory and docs sub-directory. There index.html gave some directions for the install. I ran usbview (to see if psc2175 connected properly) and http://localhost:631/ (to activate CUPS). To compile the driver, cd into the source-code directory and enter the following commands at the shell prompt:
./configure # Watch closely for missing dependencies. make # Use "gmake" instead for FreeBSD. su # When prompted, enter the root password. make install # Watch closely for post-installation steps.As installation results I got:
Setting /etc/init.d/ptal-init symlink. Setting /usr/lib/cups/backend/ptal symlink. Setting libsane-hpoj.so symlink. Adding hpoj entry to /etc/sane.d/dll.conf. Adding /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf.I rebooted the system to get the new path and ran 'ptal-init setup'. It created the device mlc:usb:PSC_2170_Series. I restarted cups daemon with '/etc/init.d/cups restart'. Then in a new web page I viewed http://localhost:631/ to access CUPS. I clicked on manage printers (the user was root with the root password. I deleted the old HP LaserJet definitions and added a HP2175 printer using the device PTAL....
The scanner was not found by scanimage including 'scanimage --list-devices' or 'scanimage -d hpoj:mlc:usb:PSC_2170_Series --test'
The download of the SUSE bootable CD was most straight forward. Their main site readily directs you to mirrors which give very good access. The bootable CD worked fine but I wasn't able to boot the SUSE Live CD. The CD image for SUSE Live 9.1 was more than would fit on a regular 74 minute CD. When I wrote it to an 80 minute CD, the write appeared to work fine, but the CD image could not be read back (but the boot process or Windows XP). The really large file gave read errors. The problem could be that my DVD RW drive may not support non-standard CD's (longer than 74 minute).
When I first attempted installation from the bootable CD via the FTP protocol I was told that the network connection was not functioning. I did further research and made sure that I had the IP address of my selected mirror (tracert converted ftp.oregonstate.edu to 128.193.0.3). I also used FTP to access their site using anonymous login and found the precise path to the 9.1 directory. It was '/pub/suse/suse/i386/9.1'. The next time I attempted an FTP installation it also failed, but I was able to get into a recovery menu which allowed me to add device drivers. Under network drivers I selected the SIS 900 driver with no parameters. There did seem to be a driver for my D-Link wireless card, but I didn't want to bother with setting up the encryption (or stopping the encryption on the network for the period of the download).
I chose to update existing installation with the Reiser FS. However, that failed as it didn't like entries in the Linspire fstab. So, I switched to a new installation which ran flawlessly (took several hours over a broadband connection). A better approach might have been to make a local copy of the entire mirror image and then do local FTP to the local machine with the image.
YaST, the Suse 9.1 installation utility, allowed me to name the two Fat32 partitions so I named them /Data (it created a clone, /data) and Win98 (presumably there is a clone /win98). However, it did not add the execute option for the fat32 partitions, so I added that manually in the /etc/fstab (as root via SU command) using VI to add the ,exec option as above.
Suse 9.1 also recognized my two Windows boot partitions and added them to the Grub boot menu as Windows1 and Windows2.
Resolution of 1280x916 with 24 bit color seems to work best for me with the 3dfx Voodoo4 card. Suse Linux 9.1 allowed me to name my three fat32 partitions
To get the wireless card to actually work, I needed to run YaST (start, system) and select network devices and network card. There I pressed the change button under the D-Link DWL-520+ entry and chose edit. I chose Advanced and Hardware Details to specify the wireless set up (managed, network name, hexadecimal, enter first key, press multiple keys, then specify the key length and enter the other keys).
While Linspire/Lindows came with Mozilla as the default browser and a different program (not used) as the default e-mail program, Suse 9.1 had Konqueror as the default browser as well as a different e-mail program. Since I have standardized on Mozilla, I visited www.mozilla.org and downloaded mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-1.7-installer.tar.gz. Konqueror recognized it fine and I copied it the contents into /home/brian. I then opened the new directory it created. mozilla-installer and it automatically started the installer. However, I was not root so needed to go to the start button (bottom right) and selected run. I went into options and selected the 'run as root' option with the root password and then ran 'Konqueror'. It installed just fine as root and installed mozilla in /usr/local/mozilla (the default location which required root access).
In order to run java programs such as the jEdit installation program you have to set up the classpath so that the invocation would look like:
java -classpath /data/j2esdk14/winxp/jdk/lib/tools.jar -jar jedit41install.jar
This page was last updated on August 14, 2004.
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