[Klug-general] Book for total newbie?

[George Prowse]

Chris Wigzell wrote:

> Hi!
> I am Chris Wigzell, a retired person.  I am mainly a lurker on this 
> newsgroup, and have not yet managed to get Linux running fully on my 
> computer. I have SuSe 9.1 (a free DVD), but need to install a driver 
> for my modem.  I have the driver, but have failed to work out how to 
> install it.  Can anyone recommend a small, simple (and cheap, I am a 
> pensioner) book that will help me to do the kind of things you lot 
> seem to be able to do without any effort at all?
> I will try to come to the next meeting (Where is it? Maidstone?) and 
> bring my computer, but I would prefer to learn how to do things myself.
> Regards,
> Chris
>
>
If you get "Linux for Dummies" It comes with a Fedora dvd and starts you 
off  at the very beginning, tarballs, tum, rpm, deb etc etc. I bought 
mine from Waterstones in Maidstone and it was £20, it comes in handy all 
the times.

Installing things from source can be trickier than imagines (ask anyone 
who used slackware before swaret) because you run into whats commonly 
known as "dependency hell", what that is is when the program you 
installed needs another to run, and that program needs another, and that 
one...... and so on and so on, I use Gentoo and its package management  
"Portage" (which is based on BSD's  "ports"  reguarly  downloads 4 or 5 
programs when i just wanted one, these are the dependencies.

To install tarballs (*.tar.gz and *.tgz are gzipped tarballs and 
*.tar.bz2 is a bzipped tarball) all you to is download the tarball 
(obviously) open a terminal, navigate to where you downloaded it to 
(which is normally /home/<whatever user you created> and type (for bzip) 
"tar -xvjpf  NameOfTarball.tar.bz2" or if its a .gz type "tar -xvzf  
NameOfTarball.tar.gz. Both of these have similar options associated with 
them:

        "tar" is the name of the program to use,
        "x" is extract,
        "v" is for verbose output (not really needed but nice),
        "f" make it operate on a specific file,
        "j" tells it to use bzip2,
        "z" tells it to use gzip,
        "p" tell it not to store relative path name but instead to store 
absoloute path names

After it is all extracted navigate to the folder it made and run these:

./configure
make
make install

or if you are feeling adventurous add them all in one command: 
"./configure && make && make install"

Or if you are feeling more adventurous add some gcc optimisations in 
with it, for example: CLAGS="-O2 -fomit-frame-pointer pipe" ./configure 
&& make && make install

I can suggest a few other things though, i'd join the Linux Junior forum 
http://www.linuxjunior.org/ and ask some questions in there, it is full 
of people who are having trouble at the start and is very friendly, they 
also have an off-topic forum and plain english tutorials.

By far the best site i have come across for linux beginners is 
http://www.tuxfiles.org/ and she there goes into more depth on the 
installing that i showed above 
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/softinstall.html

Sites:
http://www.linux.ie/newusers/beginners-linux-guide/
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Beginners/ (also has a forum)
http://www.linuxorbit.com/ (also has a forum)

Forums
http://www.linuxquestions.org/
http://forums.gentoo.org/