[Nottingham] Any help for a newbie?

[NIGEL Black]

Hi All,

Thanks for the welcome into your group at The Olde Trip to Jerusalem.  Much of the technical stuff was outside my experience at present but your pointer to the bash scripting guides on the Linux Format disks is a useful start.  A big step forward, however, is that since the meeting I've been trying various 64 bit distros.  Why is that a step forward? Well...

I'm playing with a Packard Bell desktop from around 2007 that originally ran Windows XP.  It has an Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13 GHz processor, MSI MS (Cuba) motherboard with 3 Gb RAM and NVIDIA GeForce 6200 LE graphics.

The processor has i686 architecture but I've only been able to boot i486 distros and even then with restrictions, such as not being able to run or update the full library of packages.  As a result of the NLUG meeting I've had more success with X86-64 distros so long as I can access and boot from a safe mode.  So...

1). How can I control boot messages so they give me time to read the failures and warnings?

2). Why can I only boot some distros in a safe mode and does it really matter?  I'm not interested in playing games.

3). What prevents full i686 functionality?  What can I do about it?

Any polite suggestions gratefully received.

Regards,

Nigel
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