Just Started Using Linux.... So Overwhelming!!

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

I've just finished installing Mandrake 8.2. I put in pretty much everything during installation and I'm wondering what to do next. I've got a couple of problems...

1. I've got no sound. I'm using onboard sound for my off my Shuttle AK31. Where can I go for sound/video drivers ect?

2. Is it possible to network my Linux machine and my Windows 98 machine so I can share my printer thats on the 98 machine?

3. What programs do you guys reccomend I download?

4. I'm trying to set up my e-mail account but I'm not having much luck. I'm using Ximian Evolution 1,0,2. Good program?

Its rather complicated b/c I need to login as one user (we'll say bob) and then I have an alias as another (we'll say joe). So I log on to my ISP as bob@myisp.net but I check my e-mail as joe@myisp.net. When it tries to log on to my pop server it sais "logging on as bob@myisp.net@pop.myisp.net and then it sais log in failed, user not recognized

I'm using Gnome desktop and Galeon to surf the web, thats about as far as I've gotten thus far.

[Floppyman]

Try logging on as root and open up a terminal window and type in "sndconfig" at the prompt, you might be able to set up your sound that way, what kind of sound does your board have? As for sharing, take a look at Samba. Hope this helps.

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

My board has onboard sound... what more can I say? It's a VIA chipset and it supports 5.1 surround sound. The specs of it are: Onboard VIA AC97 Sound Card according to Shuttleonline.com I'm assuming I need some kind of Linux drivers for it?

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

Originally posted by Floppyman Try logging on as root and open up a terminal window and type in "sndconfig" at the prompt, you might be able to set up your sound that way

I get the message:

bash: sndconfig: command not found

[OOPS!]

Hi! Evil,

OK, sndconfig is not installed by default anymore. I think it is on disk 1 though. But first, let's try some easy stuff first.

First thing to do is check to see if sound volumes are turned up. For some reason once in a while Mandy will set your volume to zero the first time it runs.

If still no joy, go to System-ControlCenter- MultiMedia- Sound and make sure to check that that "Enable SoundServer at Startup" is checked and Sound for Events. Gnome often has those off by default. Do the same for your windowmanager. Then try to play a sound to test.

Still no joy? Ok, let's log in as root. repeat the above steps to be sure the sound is enabled and has volume. If root has sound, then we just need to give the users permisson to use sound (remember, anything NOT specifically permitted is forbidden in *nix). You can do this one of two ways. You can run UserDrake to add your users to the audio group (and what ever other groups you want), or you can open a termial and issue a " chmod 666 /dev/snd " (without quotes, personally I prefer using chmod). Log out, restart X, and give it a try.

Now, if all that fails. Then we can install sndconfig and run that. I recommend running it from the root,
It should pick up your soundcard and get it going. I believe that chipset is well supported.

Sorry about the long post,
OOPS!

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

None of that seemed to work, I found some Linux drivers for my sound card but I have no idea how to go about installing them. This is the readme:

Please follow the instructions listed below to install the driver :

A) Login as a super user.

B) Change directory according to the Linux version, e.g..

# mcd a:/linux/redhat

for RedHat

C) Copy compressed file according to the Linux version to a certain
directory, e.g..

# mkdir ./viaudio
# mcopy a:74audio.rht72.gz ./viaudio

for RedHat 7.2

D) Uncompress the compressed file by using tar command, e.g.

# tar xzvf 74audio.rht72.gz

for RedHat 7.2 and


E) Change directory to the relative directory to do the installation.

# ./vinstall
or
# sh vinstall

For RedHat 7.2, this program will copy some files, e.g.

/lib/modules/2.4.7-10/sound/viaudio.o

and backup the original files as the following :

/etc/modules.conf to /etc/modules.conf.old
or
/etc/modules.conf to /etc/old.modules.conf

After the installation, the VIA Audio Linux driver could be
loaded on the RedHat 7.2.


* Please turn on the USB Host Controller and USB 2 Host Controller in
the BIOS setting first. Otherwise, the Audio function will not detect
by LINUX 2.2.5 kernel. It is the LINUX 2.2.5 kernels' bug.

Doesn't help much since I'm in Mandrake 8.2! I can't even change directories in the terminal... What command do I need to use for that? I tried /home but it sais "home is a directory" and cd home doesn't work, I'm trying this logged is as root from the main directory.

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

I got the e-mail working, it was just misconfigured

[OOPS!]

Ok,

Lets try this. Open a terminal and post the output of these commands.

cat /etc/modules.conf
cat /proc/modules
fuser -v /dev/dsp

OOPS!

Edit: Do you have any other desktops installed? Such as KDE or Enlightenment?

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

I've got GNOME installed

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

cat/etc/modules.conf:
alias usb-interface usb-uhci
probeall scsi_hostadapter ide-scsi
alias eth0 8139too
alias sound-slot-0 via82cxxx_audio

cat /proc/modules
ppp_deflate 42240 0 (autoclean)
bsd_comp 4544 0 (autoclean)
ppp_async 6560 1 (autoclean)
ppp_generic 19880 3 (autoclean) [ppp_deflate bsd_comp ppp_async]
slhc 5056 0 (autoclean) [ppp_generic]
sr_mod 15160 0 (autoclean)
via82cxxx_audio 18144 0
uart401 6336 0 [via82cxxx_audio]
ac97_codec 9568 0 [via82cxxx_audio]
sound 57292 0 [via82cxxx_audio uart401]
soundcore 4068 4 [via82cxxx_audio sound]
parport_pc 22088 1 (autoclean)
lp 6464 0 (autoclean)
parport 23968 1 (autoclean) [parport_pc lp]
af_packet 12488 0 (autoclean)
ipchains 35816 0
usbkbd 3136 0 (unused)
keybdev 1856 0 (unused)
mousedev 4160 1
hid 18528 0 (unused)
usbmouse 1984 0 (unused)
input 3616 0 [usbkbd keybdev mousedev hid usbmouse]
usb-uhci 21668 0 (unused)
usbcore 59072 1 [usbkbd hid usbmouse usb-uhci]
8139too 14336 1 (autoclean)
mii 1360 0 (autoclean) [8139too]
nls_iso8859-15 3360 3 (autoclean)
nls_cp850 3584 3 (autoclean)
vfat 9788 3 (autoclean)
fat 31384 0 (autoclean) [vfat]
supermount 62180 3 (autoclean)
ide-scsi 8032 0
scsi_mod 92488 2 [sr_mod ide-scsi]
rtc 5912 0 (autoclean)

fuser -v /dev/dsp
CDs spin up, disk drive grinds but nothing shows up

[OOPS!]

Ok,

It shows that the module is loading: alias sound-slot-0 via82cxxx_audio in the module.config.
Plus you have in the /proc/modules:via82cxxx_audio 18144 0
uart401 6336 0 [via82cxxx_audio]
ac97_codec 9568 0 [via82cxxx_audio]
sound 57292 0 [via82cxxx_audio uart401]
soundcore 4068 4 [via82cxxx_audio sound.

So you don't need to install anything. Your card is detected and the modules are loaded. Did you get any errors or sounds when you ran sndconfig as root? I admit to being a bit puzzled at the moment. It should be working.

OOPS!

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

Actually I haven't run sound config yet, I'll do that ASAP (probably tomorrow after noon) and post my results, thanks for the help so far.

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

I ran sndconfig and it detected my onboard sound as
VIA Technologies|VT8233[AC97 Audio Controller]

Seems right to me. When I hit ok, it tells me that it will play a sound to test if the configuration is correct. I pressed okay and waited a while (maybe 15 minutes?) and nothing happened. Later on I tried again, this time I went and had lunch, came back and nothing. The console doesn't freeze, just doesn't do anything. I just closed it down normally.

[OOPS!]

Hmmm,

This is getting beyond me to be honest. Sndconfig should have at least returned an error. A couple of guesses to try here. What windowmanager are you using? Maybe try a different one. I use Enlightenment with Gnome myself. Which uses Esound. Or you can specify Gnome to use alsa or oss.

I think the trouble lies in the 5.1 surround sound. I'm not really sure though. I don't have any expirence with it.

I'm going to recommend that you ask these guys http://www.club-nihil.net/mub/. They're strictly Mandrake. At this point I think they might be your best bet for an answer.

Dang, I'm sorry that I can't be of more help to you. Just don't give up on the finding the answer. Your sound should be there.

OOPS!

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

Thanks for all the help OOPS! you've taught me quite a bit. I've been trying to get help at www.linuxnewbie.org too but I haven't been having much luck there either. I'll go try the other board you reccomended.

Thanks again for all the help

[Floppyman]

Did you play with the advanced options of soundconfig, ie. DMA, IO settings and so on? Maybe it's not configured correctly. I've used sndconfig once, and had to play with those settings to get my sound to work correcly. HTH

[Dswissmiss]

Holy S***
I was having similar problems, and was just reading this post to get some ideas, when just as I finished my cd started playing!?!? weird...
I'm also running Mandrake 8.2 with KDE, for now I'm just playing with the look of it (nice colors) but I'll soon take the online course, but I'm sure many posts will follow...

[Eric H.]

tip: type "su -" without the quotes if you're not logged in as root and you need to be while in the terminal. Just enter the password, and you're root.

[Floppyman]

I have question on that. Even though I "su" to root, I still can't write to directories only root can write to when I logged on as me (user). Using RH 7.3. Any ideas? Thanks.

[OOPS!]

Yeah, I've noticed that also with Mandy when trying to edit some configs myself. Not all of them behave that way, but once in a while. I don't really know why either. What I do then is log out, go to run level 3, log in as root, then edit the stupid file with *shudder* vi *shudder*.

OOPS!

[OOPS!]

Hey Evil Lab Monkey,

Were you able to get your sound working? Just curious.

OOPS!

[Computer Hobbyist]

I just read the thread and wonder why the sound isn't working. When I first loaded Mandrake, my sound wouldn't work, but I discovered the volume control was set to zero and when I turned up the volume it worked fine. I wonder if the speakers are properly plugged in. I think the problem has to be something that simple.

CH

[OOPS!]

Hi,

Actually, after doing some digging I've found that alsa doesn't always play nice with that sound chipset. I thnik an upgrade to the latest alsa drivers might help. Kinda a weird problem.

OOPS!

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

I'm planning on upgrading to a Sound Blaster card soon so I'm just gonna leave it. I've checked the volume in everything and I know the speakers are fine cuz they work when I boot in XP.

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

Sound is working!

Well sort of...

I got the CD Player working, Xmms doesn't want to tho, can someone reccomend another good MP3 player?

It would take a 500 word essay to explain how I fixed it and I'm not really all that sure how I did it. The important thing is that it works.

[Computer Hobbyist]

Originally posted by Evil-Lab-Monkey It would take a 500 word essay to explain how I fixed it and I'm not really all that sure how I did it. The important thing is that it works.

Welcome to Linux. Actually, after a while you will be able to explain things in fewer than 500 words. I am not always sure how I fixed things.

I just reloaded Linux (I broke the Kernel because I was impatient while horsing around, er, conducting an experiment, in root.) Part of the process involved reinstalling samba. The first time I loaded samba it took weeks of hard study, knashed teeth, bit lips and strong words. When I got it going the first time I wasn't sure how. This time I opened swat, made a few global entries, set up some shares, and established a few users and passwords. Done in 20 minutes.

CH

[Floppyman]

Hehe, I had a little screwup today as well. Wanted to get my mousewheel working. Changed some stuff in the XF86config-4 file, logged out, tried to restart the X server, no go. So I had to edit the file from the command line using pico and change things back to normal. After that it took some time to figure out the right settings (everytime I messed up I had to edit the file from the command line again), but I finally got it to work, and I appreciate having a working mouse wheel. I'm no linux expert by any means, but it seems to me patience is the key to learning it.