Advice for newbie

[Hugh Jass]

Hi.

I orded Mandrake 7.2 on Cd at around the end of April I think, but they sent me Mandrake 8.0.

I created partitions from Windows 98 SE with Partition Magic and then installed from disk, everything went fine(I think) except that everytihng runs very slowly. I can't even play an mp3.

I even found Linux files on my Windows partition, did this happen because i mounted my Window partion? I'm pretty sure I didn't select that Linux4win thing as there is space being used on the linux parition.

Was this just a botched install? Or Mandrake 8.0? When I reinstall should I let the Mandrake installer make the partitions or should I use Partition MAgic again?

I'm going to reformat my hard drive again soon and start from scratch and I want to know if you guys think that the installion just went wrong or something.

What would be a good window manager to use which would allow plenty of things to be done without going into a termanl, for a not very confident newbie. Yet isn't allot like Windows.

Also, when I logged in with Enlightment as my window manager it looked allot different from how I've seen in other peoples desktop. They had things like a bar on he side of the screen with stastics etc. Mine didn't. Was this because they had Enlighenment grouped with Gnome or something else or was it just a setting somewhere.

Thanks you for your time,

Shane AKA Hugh Jass

[j.harrison]

when you reinstall, just let DrakX handle
all of the partition work. It will read your partitions and you just tell it where you want Mandrake installed. Very easy stuff.

If you're going to dual boot Drake 8, load Windows first, then Linux. After Mandrake is dual booted, it automatically creates /mnt/windows (a place to access your windows partition from Linux), then you can use the Wine app to run some Windows programs while you're still in Linux.

The KDE GUI will be very familiar to you, but the best way to learn Linux is in the Command Line. You can move easily between them both, either by clicking on the terminal icon on your desktop, or by using CTRL-ALT-F1, F2, F3 - F7 to cycle through full screen terminals, returning again to the GUI with F7.

Mandrake 8 is a great place to learn Linux.

Have fun! :)

:cool: Mandrake :cool:


BTW: The reason Drake 8 is so slow is that in order for it to be hyper-user friendly, it had to be a heavy load. More RAM will fix that for now (128Megs would be good), later on, as you learn what you need and what you don't, many default services can be disabled for better performance. ;)

[ 07 August 2001: Message edited by: j.harrison ]

[Hugh Jass]

I do have 128mb of Ram and a Intel PIII 7000mhz processor.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed Drake 8.0 runs faster this time.

[Necro Lin]

I've used Mandrake 8.0 a bit and it's pretty cool. Something must have totally gotten screwed up during your install. You were asking whether or not it runs fast. It ran just fine on my computer. It shouldn't have installed anything on your windows partition though, that's probably what slowed it down. Mandrake will automatically mount your windows partition for you. This will allow you to access your whole hard drive from Linux. I only wish that I could do the same from Windows...that would be cool.

In any case do a new install, everything should be OK. Good Luck.

[Derango]

Originally posted by Hugh Jass:
<STRONG>I do have 128mb of Ram and a Intel PIII 7000mhz processor.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed Drake 8.0 runs faster this time.</STRONG>

I'm guessing you meant 700mhz. don't know of any commercial CPU that goes that fast ;)

Anyway, from my experience, 128MB of ram can make things move a bit sluggish, espicaly in mandrake which loves to have everything and the kitchen sink running by default. If you happen to upgrade to 256MB of ram you will definitly notice an improvement. However, you still should be able to play an MP3 file...odd..

[Derango]

Originally posted by Necro Lin:
<STRONG>I've used Mandrake 8.0 a bit and it's pretty cool. Something must have totally gotten screwed up during your install. You were asking whether or not it runs fast. It ran just fine on my computer. It shouldn't have installed anything on your windows partition though, that's probably what slowed it down. Mandrake will automatically mount your windows partition for you. This will allow you to access your whole hard drive from Linux. I only wish that I could do the same from Windows...that would be cool.

In any case do a new install, everything should be OK. Good Luck.</STRONG>


Microsoft?? Supporting a linux filesystem? Never going to happen ;)

[TacKat]

I run 'Drake 8 with 64 megs of RAM and I have no trouble with slowdown. In fact, I have about 2 megs free at all times. You just have to know how much your system is capable of. I don't even have KDE installed because the speed of it is just unacceptable. WMaker is a much smaller and faster alternative.

[Thanatos]

IceWM is a great window manager, and fast too. for something different (but still fast) Windowmaker Rocks!!!

[danrees]

I've run Mandrake 8.0 on a 1GHz Athlon with 128mb RAM, and I'm now running SuSE 7.2.

IME, KDE was much faster than GNOME in Mandrake, but vice versa in SuSE. SuSE seems to be faster overall though (except YaST).

If you're going to install any of the major graphical distributions (Mandrake, SuSE, RedHat), then go for a big swap partition. All of the old documentation stating that a swap partion should be twice the size of RAM is out of date. The gurus in the uk.comp.os.linux newsgroup seem to think that anything up to 1Gb would be good (if you can spare it).

This would help speed things up for the 2.4 kernel series.