BY the advice of Digisan i install REdhat 9 today, but theres a few little problems bugging me.



1. It had no driver for my onboard audio, no problem i think i know where i can download a linux driver for it, but that brings us to number 2.



2. I cant use the internet for some reason. I cant find any network/internet settings to tweak. Maybe it didnt find a driver for my onboard lan either?

linux is such a bitch to deal with. If I installed any distro is would be mandrake, because it sets so much up for you when you install it.



Have you dealed with linux before, everytime I set up an internet connection I always need the isp's IP address or DNS or some lame address. Its why I switched over from 98 to linux to XP

I used mandrake and everything was cool for a bit. Except I couldnt get sounds to play right.

Anyway I didnt use it for a while and it wouldnt start up. So I just tryed to reinstall it and got an input error or something, so install wont work. So I say F it untill I get a red hat distro.



Related topic: How can I delete my linux partitions? From windows?

what kind of internet connection are you using? if you want to see if your ethernet card is working at all, go to a shell and run '/sbin/ifconfig eth0'



if it says:

eth0: error fetching interface information: Device not found



then it hasnt loaded the module for your ethernet card, or it has and it didnt work out for some reason.



If you see something like:

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:E0:29:07:AC:3B

inet addr:192.168.0.17 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:5986577 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:5620391 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:100

RX bytes:3688835438 (3.4 GiB) TX bytes:803385748 (766.1 MiB)

Interrupt:4 Base address:0xd000



then it has been found and theres a module loaded and it's working, now you just need to configure the tcp/ip settings so you can get out on the big bad internet... find out if eth0 works first then we can go from there. I'll try hit you up on AIM.

I'm not sure if other Linux guru's have responed yet, or not... but for anyone else who is having trouble with Linux with their machines... it boils down to recompiling the kernel for your specifc machine. I run Slackware(aka linux for extreme computer geeks) 8 and 9 and I had to compile the Kernel for my network card, my SCSI card/etc to run the way I wanted. There's no specific kernel you can install that will cover every bit hardware... without getting to the whole M$ scheme of bloatware..



But before you winderz guys point this out as a flaw or weakness of Linux... yeah our software(depending on which distro) doesn't always detect everything, nor does the base Kernel support every bit of hardware per se. But odds are you can recompile your kernel to run your specific hardware, and settings..



Unless it's something that's brand new in the PC world there is some way Linux shouldl support it... We're not all running Alpha, SGI, or Sun boxes running their own versions of *nix... Linux has always prided itself on being opensource, and developed by enthusiasts... a lot of the software to run y hardware, or z hardware is someone's DIY project... since there are many companies who won't give out info on theiir hardware...



A lot of Linux is is very DIY, and there are people who run it that are helpful provided you give them proper info(in your case what soundcard you were using). The Linux community is very much like the RX-7 comunity... we can't help you unless you give us some details...



Hopefully I haven't overstepped my bounds(this is directed to the other Linux/Unix guys here), but I figured I'd set things straight. And if anyone here has basic problems with Linux you can always look at www.linuxquestions.org for help. It's a fairly knowledgable forum on general Linux problems or issuess...