[Wylug-help] extreme novice-chaos!!!

[Dave Fisher]

Wow! Even for novice users that kind of experience has been pretty rare
for many years.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I think your best move at this
stage would be to back off for a bit, and calmly think through exactly
what you are doing at each stage.

Even if (for some unaccountable reason) you have an extremely buggy
installation distro, it should never be necessary to re-install in order
to get a Linux system working, nor is re-installation likely to do you
much good until you figure out what precisely is going wrong.

You won't figure that out until you are able to deal with one problem
at a time (in isolation), rather than thrashing about trying all
the options that present themselves to you.

Personally, I'm not convinced that you have been well advised or that
your experience thus far will have taught you very much at all about how
Linux actually works.

For example, if you think about it for a minute or two the apparently
perplexing shutdown messages are quite logical: the system is probably failing
to shut down services like postfix, because it never started them in the first
place (and once you have learned a bit more you'll recognise that network
services often refuse to start if they don't know their host/domain name, IP
address, Internet routing settings, current status, etc. and/or have
conflicting information about them.)

Your inability to get your modem working may or may not be related to the other
problems your are having with networking generally.  You may never find out
unless you deal with one issue at a time.

It's very hard to help you without knowing a great deal more about your
system's hardware and its detailed software configuration.  For example, in
most cases, experienced users would advise novices to simply give up trying to
operate a builtin winmodem and buy a proper external modem instead (exactly the
same rule applies to dialup and adsl modems).

I get the impression that you need to make one of two strategic choices at this point:

1. Take the path of least resistence and get a distribution that just installs
and configures itself properly, without the need much in the way of
intervention on your part.

  Assuming that your ISP does dynamic IP address allocation, the only network
  configs you should really have to determine are the connection method (dialup
  and/or always-on) and the correct IP addresses of the services you get from the
  ISP (e.g. gateway, DNS, mail, etc.)

  Knoppix is the most consistent distro I've seen when it comes to hardware
  detection and hardware configuration.  Xandros has been flawless for me, but
  I've only installed it on a couple of machines.

2. Decide an order of priority for fixing your current problems, then send us:

   a) Details of the configs you are setting (minus private stuff like
      passwords) for the highest priority service.

   b) Details of any error messages you are getting which relate specifically
      to that service.  The command dmesg and the log files /var/log/messages and
      /var/log/syslog are among the first to look at.

   c) Details of relevant hardware (i.e. don't tell us about your mouse if you
      want us to help diagnose problems with the modem and vice versa).

I hope that helps, or at least gives you a few options to consider.

Best wishes,

Dave

On Sun, Sep 26, 2004 at 11:29:52PM +0100, Geoff Fielding wrote:
> I've used RiscPCs using RiscOS for many years so normal PCs are a
> mystery to me. I have now opted for a Linux system and was persuaded
> that I should load my own as "I would learn far more than having it
> preloaded". An understatement!
>
> I now have a new machine with an Athlon xp 2800 processor and have
> loaded onto it mandrake v10 i586 installation cds. The problems started
> slowly but because of my inexperience any problem that caused me to be
> unable to use the GUI resulted in me having to reinstall. I've lost
> count of the number of times!! On one occasion the install disc
> automatically followed an update path but otherwise it has overwritten
> everything on disc. It won't even allow the use of existing partitions
> - the error message being "An error has occurred, Oops no root
> partition" - this despite the partitions being allocated automatically
> each time I have installed. The partitions recognised are hda1 and hda6.
>
> I have spent hours looking for DrakConnect but it is nowhere to be
> found.
>
> When going in to the Control Centre Manage Connections to ensure that my
> modem is configured I always find that it is showing eth0, despite me
> having set up my modem during install. I change to modem and press
> "apply" then "back". I try to check that "modem" is in fact configured
> but when I try to reentre Manage Connections the Control Centre hangs.
> After this happens no other programme will load either!! Some create the
> error message "KLauncher could not be reached via DCOP".
>
> On shutting the system down I get the messages:
> stopping postfix, shutting down postfix     failed   failed
>
> and
>
> starting killall, shutting down postfix      failed   failed
>
>
> On booting I get:
> Determining IP information for ethO          failed
>
> and
>
> Warning: Could not add loopback device to routing table, CUPS may not
> work properly.
>
> Incidentally, a point I haven't mentioned is that now most times I load,
> the mouse won't move the cursor, ie the cursor is immobile. This seems
> to have become progressively worse over the last five days I have been
> trying to get the system going.
>
> Any offers? please!
>
> --
> Geoff
>
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--
DAVE FISHER, Marketing Director
GBdirect Consultancy and Training, Leeds Innovation Centre
103 Clarendon Road, Leeds,  LS2 9DF, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom (UK)
http://www.gbdirect.co.uk