GNOME,KDE , HELP!

[Greg Pfeffer]

I have Mandrake 8 and It comes with KDE, GNOME ,Sawdust and Windowmaker. Whats the diffrence?Whats the best one to use for a newbie? and can anyone tell me where to find a Guide or FAQ on how to download, install and install downloaded software in REALLY REALLY REALLY easy to understand newbie terms? Thanks a Bunch :eek:

[posterboy]

Not an easy question, because what we are tlaking about here is personal, subjective taste. All of these you list, (isn't that sawfish?) will provide a productive desktop, you just have see where you are comfortable. Easy to do, though, from X, open a terminal, and type switchdesk, and choose one for a week or two. On the second item, RPM's are just super easy to install, usually, it's just rpm -i whatever.rpm. When it doesn't work, there may be dependency issues, but these can be solved in the same way. Just hang in there and keep playing, there's no substitute for experience with all this.
Good Luck, and remember, it's supposed to be a fun learning experience.
Ray

[Greg Pfeffer]

Thanks a bunch. But I didnt download rpms, i belive there bz2s and tar, whats that? :confused:

[Choozo]

Gaahhh ...... some people just download anything without knowing what it is. It's just amazing ..... ?

The *.bz2 is a compression algorithm, just like *.gz, *.zip, and so on.
These files are usually packed in a *.tar (Tape ARchive) format before they are compressed with either bzip2 (*.bz2), gzip (*.gz).

Cheers :)

[Greg Pfeffer]

Well for your information, My sound card wasnt supported and I went to the Website and that is what they said to download, so I didnt have a choice, so please dont critize, this is linuxnewbie, not 10yearsupercomputerlinuxvetern :p

[PimpHolic]

to compile a tar.gz file:
first download it to any folder you please
then use the cd command into the directory that contains the file
then run the following commands:
tar xvzf xxx.tar.gz
cd /xxx
./configure
make
make install (must be root to run this, use the su command to become root)

you can also read the NHF on compiling software, which will explain the process

[ 20 September 2001: Message edited by: PimpHolic ]

[ 20 September 2001: Message edited by: PimpHolic ]