8 Newbie Questions
I just installed debian about three days ago and have several questions
about navigating within debian and about accessing devices. If you can help
me with one or more of these questions it would be greatly appreciated as I
am growing a bit frustrated with not knowing what I am doing :)
1) How do I move from one partitioned drive to another? How do I know the
drive letters to use too?
2) How do I copy files from my floppy drive to my partitioned debian drive?
3) Why does debian say 'only the root can do that' when I type the line below:
$ mount /dev/fd0 (or any other floppy drive)
I can't cd /dev/fd0 nor can I figure out how to access it.
4) How can i get a network connection or simulated network connection
between my win95 pc & debin pc via serial or via their modems? Windows
allows direct connect with other windows pc, what can I use with debian?
5) How determine hardware which is functioning properly and how determine
which kernels need to be removed or changed? I know with windows I had
device manager and msd.exe. What do I have with debian?
6) How change kernels once I know the above? I'd like to remove the devices
that I installed to the kernels during inital installation of debian but
don't actually have in my system yet. I also want to add a new serial card
since I never set one up when I installed debian. The new serial card is
now in the pc. I don't know how to do this after the fact. I type
'setserial' and a bunch of stuff scrolls by that doesn't make sense to me yet.
7) Why can't I access my floppy after booting from it? I have /floppy on
my system. I can see it by cd / and then typing ls. When I cd to /floppy
and then try to write to it I get 'permission denied'. I read from it
without error messages, it appears to be an empty directory. I can't
access either of my physical floppy drives attached to my system when I
read from it with ls commands and /dev/fd(x).
8) Do I have to regularly compile my own linux software? Aren't binaries
available like with dos and windows? So much linux software on
the net that I've seen isn't in binary format, it's rpm or plain source
format. Is this standard for linux software? Can I use these with debian 2.1?
* I hope you don't think I just posted without looking for the answers
online. I've visited over 500 sites online, I've downloaded 40+ apps but
can't use them because they are stuck on my win95 system or floppies, tried
to access 'man man' to read the manual (but get an error "can't open the
manpath configuration file /etc/manpath.config"), I've read the help menu
by typing 'help' and then hitting CONTROL-Z to stop it from scrolling off
the screen and then type each command to see if I can figure out what they
do, and still haven't found the answers to my questions.
I hope you can help. Thanks in advance!
Andre
p.s. I've already downloaded mtools but since I can't copy the mtools files
from the floppy to my partitioned debian drive, I'm stuck!!!
My debian pc seems to be up and running just fine, I just can't do this or
any other commands to the floppy:
$ ls -a /dev/fp0
The floppy disk drive light doesn't even light up on when entering
commands. This indicates that maybe the drive is not mounted properly in my
linux system (I'm guessing), though I boot into my linux system from floppy
just fine. :(
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