[Menai-LUG] Firefox & Mandrake installation

[Kevin Donnelly]

On Friday 04 Mar 2005 08:46, Llywelyn Owen wrote:
> I've been away working for a few days so hope you don't think I had lost
> interest by not replying. My progress so far is thus, I have Mandrake 9.0
> up and running and seeing the internet but not other computers. I'm hoping
> to have a play around with it this weekend and maybe download other
> suggested distros such as Xandros, Debian etc to play with those.

If I were you, I would pick one distro, and stick with it for 6 months, 
learning about how it does things.  Only then would I start comparing other 
distros - as it stands, you have no criteria to compare them against, and 
looking at several will (a) be confusing, and (b) take away time from 
actually using Linux, as opposed to looking at it.  

This month's Linux Magazine had a Ubuntu DVD on the front, and this month's 
Linux Format had a SUSE 9.2 on the front.  Both of these are more recent than 
Mandrake 9, and I would urge you to move up to the most recent distro you can 
get.  If you want to stick to Mandrake, 10.1 was on a covermount at 
Christmas, and if you like I can send you that.

Debian is good, but you do need to spend a bit of time finding your way around 
it, and it can sometimes require a bit of low-level work.  Xandros (which I 
have never managed to get installed, since it likes none of my video cards) 
looks easy to get to grips with, especially for a Windows refugee, but you 
will pay for that later - much of the KDE desktop has been specially hacked, 
and it may not work properly with non-Xandros stuff.

> Other evaluation distros I've used give me instant access to Windows
> networks, how do I set this up on Mandrake? I think I have Samba installed,
> control panel has a LISa setup option under LAN browsing which suggests in
> a dialogue that Samba or an equivalent is running. I usually try to keep
> 192.168.0.1-10 (255.255.255.0) available for house computers/network
> printer/adsl router(with hardware firewall). After running the Guided LISa
> setup nothing seems to have changed/appeared that would give me access.

I don't really have any MicrosoftWindows machines I need to connect to any 
more, but when I did (several years ago now) I could never get LISa to work - 
all it did was eat CPU cycles until you killed it.  I eventually did get 
browsing working with LinNeighbourhood, but I'm not sure that that's being 
developed any more.

Paul Finegan posted a rather nice little howto for Samba on the Northwales LUG 
list:
http://www.fineogs.co.uk/linux_samba_setup.pdf
You might go through that just to ensure your setup is OK.  Also, do not 
underestimate the fragility of MicrosoftWindows networking.  One of my most 
embarassing moments was at a MenaiLUG meeting two years ago, where I was 
demonstrating Samba.  I set it all up here, tested MicrosoftWindows->Linux, 
and vice versa, and all was working fine.  I took the machines in, set them 
up, and MicrosoftWindows took a hissy fit and wouldn't work - I could ping 
the MicrosoftWindows box, and vice versa, but higher-level networking was 
just kaputt.  This is one of the issues with MicrosoftWindows networking in 
an office environment - it will sometimes cease working for inscrutable 
reasons.

Mind you, if all you need to do is transfer files to and from the 
MicrosoftWindows box, you could use FTP, or set up an SSH server on 
MicrosoftWindows (eg http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html).  
Recent KDE releases have the fish protocol built in, whereby all you do is 
open Konqueror, type fish://<ip address> into the location bar, enter your 
SSH password, and there you are. (Remember that writing to an NTFS drive is 
not recommended as yet - it would be better to use a FAT partition on the 
MicrosoftWindows box as a staging area.)

> As an aside the CymruX evaluation CD is great at accessing data on Windows
> partitions when they go belly-up and is now my sole emergency boot disk for
> windows. I've been asked for copies simply for this reason alone...

Great!  There is a new version half-done, but it may be discarded in favour of 
one based on SUSE instead of Knoppix.  (See what happens when your Debian 
influence is no longer around, Thorben?)

> As for Firefox and browsers in general, I use sync2it.com to automatically
> synchronise/store/backup bookmarks via the web, and have done so for a few
> years. The latest addon works well with IE and Firefox but only on Windows.
> Does anyone know of a product (doesn't have to be free) which will do the
> same between Linux and Windows Firefox installations?

I'm afraid I don't (though others may).  The big thing I have about bookmarks 
is that they don't really allow you to give any context, so if you have 10 
pages from The Register, for instance, you can't usually guess what they're 
individually about unless you visit them.  I therefore tend to use a wiki or 
something similar, preferably on one machine in the LAN or on a website, 
mainly because it can be accessed from anywhere, and I can add a snippet from 
the page itself to give some idea of content.  But that is not as "click and 
go" as you want, I suspect.

-- 

Pob hwyl / Best wishes

Kevin Donnelly

www.kyfieithu.co.uk - Meddalwedd Rhydd yn Gymraeg
www.cymrux.org.uk - Linux Cymraeg ar un CD!