Originally Posted by
Mac the Knife
Finally, it does strike me as odd that Keef, despite his apparently massive Linux experience (..Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, Mepis, Ubuntu, Slackware, SuSe and a couple of others...says I had to (re)learn a load of batch command language to make, configure, install etc various bits. Poking modules into the core was part of the fun. because Linux uses scripts (rather than DOS' very limited batch language) and nobody calls the kernel the core. And you load kernel modules, not poke them in .
Xore, Qernel, middle bit, heart of the system, wha'ever. Load, poke in, likewise. I think I recall a word something like "modprobe" which sounds a bit like "poke" but let's not worry. Somebody DOES call the kernel the core - Keef does. As Humpty Dumpty said... QED. My kernels are also highly-strung devices - I am well familiar with the expression "kernel panic". Me, I don't panic. The "batch" I refer to is not DOS (that Johnny-come-lately), but stuff from the 1970s and 1980s when I was doing stuff with a Honeywell 6060 . That, too, required one to learn mumbo-jumbo. Sadly, I then used up my free brain cell for something else (I forget what). The Honeywell has gone to the museum now, and the manuals for the wondrous QX and other batch processing commands presumably went with it.
It must be ages since I have compiled my own packages with stuff like:
# tar xvzf package.tar.gz (or tar xvjf package.tar.bz2)
# cd package
# ./configure
# make
# make install
(and maybe make clean)
(./configure comes before make BTW Keef....)
Yes, thassa one. You've been there too, eh? I've typed that lot too many times in the past couple of years - and other similar stuff. Say what you like about Windows 7, it doesn't require me to remember that - or what order it goes in. OK, I have it all written down in one or more of my Linux notebooks (which is how I remember what I did, so that I can do the same again if I need to).
Now as to the awful graphics problems - it would certainly make a modicum of sense when buying a new card to make sure that it has some degree of support by Linux. Buying one at random may well lead to tears - having said that, most of the Nvidia and ATI cards are well supported by open drivers and certainly have proprietary drivers.
BUYING a NEW card? Well, maybe acquiring a new-to-me card. The offending PC has one of those newfangled AGP slots, for which cards don't seem to be made any more. When I started the offending machine (with its replacement graphics card) in Windows, there was a brief moment of activity, and it worked. When I started it in the various Linux distros, it sat and looked at me for a while, then provided half a screenful of error messages. Except with Fedora - that worked. I'm sure there is a simple string of commands (batch or otherwise) that will modprobe out the offending wrong graphics driver(s), and modprobe in the correct one(s), and tell Xorg all about it. I don't happen to know the sequence for the various distros and cards involved. Some day...
I have various bitches about Linux but they're more to do with things like setting up Samba users than Keef style problems.
Yep, I too have done the -smbd -this +that /the other (and nmbd ditto) thing till smoke came out of my ears. Wonderful, innit! I actually got all the distros to work Samba with the other machines on the network, so I'm obviously not as incapable as I feared. {Yes, I did format all that stuff up there into paragraphs, but it got squished. Trying again to make it format correctly...}