Well I knew it... I was going to stop using this journal almost the moment I started.

Well a few months down the line and I'm a whole lot more competitent in Linux. Of course having my main winXP box stolen out my house and having to wait a month before getting a replacement certainly helped. Nothing like having no options to force one to learn stuff.

It still gets me on occasion. I have yet to get samba and winXP(SP2) to be friends, anyone out there who knows how please post links to good tutorials. :)

Well, despite the fact that this linux box is going to be used mostly as a media player, there are times that work will need to be done on it.

Its low on memory, so I need a lean WM.

So, I decided to install samba and xfce. samba to allow the box to connect to my XP box's shares and of course xfce as the lean mean fast WM.

I decided to use yum to install these so that the rpm dependencies could be taken care of. Samba first. Except yum kept failing on downloading the latest kernel headers. So I decided I might as well update my kernel. Up2date did that fine, except now the nvidia drivers freaked. So I reinstalled them, they needed to recompile stuff for the new kernel, they seemed to do that fine. Then back to installing samba.

Now it didn't need the latest kernel header anymore, but it still failed to successfully download many of the larger headers multiple times and took well over 3 hours to install (on 512kbps adsl). After that I installed xfce, also via yum. It took so long that I went to bed. At about 4 in the morning I woke up, it was still going. I went back to sleep and by 7 it was finished. I restarted the box, and after some configuration had xfce as the default WM. All appeared to be fine.

That evening I loaded up xine, put in full metal jacket and pressed play. No sound. huh?

Restart the box, load up gnome, still no sound, start up the sound card detection, play test sound, hiss crackle. Huh?

Now I sit here wondering how the hell to get the sound detection back. What broke it? Kernel (my money is on that), nvidia drivers, samba, or xfce?

Typically the moment I try to use up2date to update all the other fedora standard programs, my adsl stops working. Phone telkom adsl faults, they have a recorded message, the whole province is out. *sigh*

So now I have a media box with no sound. Great.

ADSL back up today, started the up2date. Hopefully things will work this evening when I get home. Hopefully.

Re:command line is bad?

My experience with FC2

Well I figure if I'm ever going to use this journal, documenting my experiences with Linux would be about the most appropriate thing to put here.

I am a linux newbie. I know nothing. But to start lets put a bit of background info about my computing experience.

I started on a ZX Spectrum 48k as a kid. Programmed it bit, mostly copying out of one of those code your own game books and then modifying slightly.

My first pc was an XT with dos 3.3 installed. I picked it up quite quickly and since then I have worked on and coded applications for every MS Windows from 95 up (with the one exception of ME).
I have a BTech degree in Information Technology.

So, I'm not a normal clueless end user. I do understand how computers work, and yes, installing linux has on occasion confused the hell out of me. ;)