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Re: Install problem



On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, Charles O. Hartman wrote:
 
> But I can't get (for example) the man command to get installed. When I
> got back to dselect to try to get it by hand, dselect shows it marked
> for installation; but no matter how many times I put in one and the
> other CD, it never does get installed. There are other things not going
> on (I don't have an exhaustive list) -- but for a beginner, this one's critical!
> 

Ok, I'm still a newbie to Linux so hopefully I'm giving good advice and
not stating crap (please correct me if I am).  I had the same problem with
dselect not installing programs I marked as install.  I have the
additional problem of possessing a 2x CDROM so installing from CD
is painfully slow as dselects checks over every single file's flag (even
if the prog was never installed and has never been changed).  I found the
dpkg program (dselect is a front-end to this program) to be much quicker
and more useful.  Dpkg -i package-name.deb is the correct syntax.
You should be able to copy the man packages from the CD or from the net
and install from a local directory.
 
> =============== REALLY newbie problems ========================
> 
> In case somebody's got a moment's patience for simplicities, I have
> three really basic questions about using Linux (which man might be able
> to answer if I could get at it!):
> 
> 1) How do I access other devices (for example the CD), such as to use ls
> to find out what's on them?

You can mount the devices using mount /dev/devicename
/mount_point. On my box I use mount /dev/sbpcd /cdrom (SoundBlaster Pro
CD interface) to access my CDROM. Umount is the command to unmount.
 
> 2) If I add another piece of equipment (such as an extra hard drive),
> how do I go about acquainting the system with that fact? Do I re-run
> install? But that's a DOS command and DOS has gone away now . . .

I've been wondering the same thing.

> 3) What's the proper way to shut down the system? I can reboot (which
> does an orderly shutdown) and kill the power during the reboot, but that
> seems crude.

If you type shutdown alone, it'll give you a list of options.  "Shutdown
-h now" (without the quotes) will halt the system.


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