[aclug-L] Re: setting up new computer

[John Alexander <john.alexander@xxxxxxxx>]

Tom Said:

> There is a sound configuration program under Mandrake (a RH relative)
> that detects the sound card as well.  You can use this after the system
> is stabilized.
Redhat (most versions) has sndconfig, which may be the utility about which
Tom is thinking. You can use this to set up the sound card, as long as it is
supported by the OSS sound modules (I haven't seen one yet that couldn't be
tweaked to work). Then, when you are experienced enough to take on the
subject of kernel compilation, you can add the driver directly into the
kernel.
>
>       /      = basically the whole OS
>       swap   = your swap partition (often 128M)
>       /home  = your user home directories.
>
> You could get fancier with seperate /var, /tmp, / , /usr, /home, and
> swap if you like, but for home users, it is probably not needed.  If you
> seperate /home onto its own partition, it makes backups easier.  You
> need not back up the OS or installed programs (they can come from your
> CDs again, if needed), but the user files are important.
IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP: Having a separate /home partition also makes it really
easy to rebuild your machine after you nuke it trying out experimental code
:). Another suggestion, if you are an experimenter, is to have a separate
/usr/src/ to contain and protect the kernel source code to which you may
have added patches. I have 550MB reserved for that purpose, but am only
using about 73MB.

> P.S. Cable modems work well with LINUX, if you have dchp set up
> correctly.
> The LINUX machine will get it's TCP/IP address automatically from the
> cable modem.
Yes, they do, and yes, they rock. I have noticed that when pulling similar
downloads, comparisons between my 300MHz PII running '98, my 166MHz Alpha
AXP running 6.0, and my AMD K6-2 350 running Mandrake 6.1, the Linux boxes
typically get 3-4 TIMES the download speed of the '98 box. I even verified
the difference between OSs by carving out a small partition on the PII and
installing Mandrake 6.0 on it and got similar results.

ja