Re: A few Newbie Questions
> 1.) How do you uninstall packages, so that you get more "free" space on your
> harddrive?
> (exp. I used 'df -h' and seen that I had 200 mb free, I used dpkg to
> uninstall some programs, ran df again and still only had 200 mb free.)
man apt-get (esp. the 'remove' section)
> 2.) How do I modify swap partiton size without having to reinstall
> everything all over again?
I think you might be stuck here.
> 3.) How do I change the clock time to the correct time?
man date
> 4.) Is it possible to have the cdrom and floopy drives automatically mount
> without recompiling the kernel?
man amd
> 5.) How do I check if my sound card/drivers are working?
> (exp. I have WindowMaker installed and sound events turned on but I get
> no sound. I installed XMMS and it plays .cda, so how come no other sounds?)
Hard to say. We'd probably need more information.
> 6.) Where is there a mp3 plugin for XMMS? - do it need one?
No, it don't.
> 7.) Is there a GUI file manager for X, WindowMaker, Debian?
There are several. If you use GNOME, then Nautilus is probably the
most popular. (apt-get install nautilus).
> 8.) Where should I put tarballs I've downloaded before running "gzip -dc"?
Anywhere you want. Just make sure you have read/write permissions in
that directory.
> Can I gzip from a cd to my harddrive? If so, how?
I'm not sure what you mean here. If you have .gz files on your cd
(which is mounted on /cdrom), you can just do
gzip -dc /cdrom/file.gz > ~/file
This, of course, assumes you're running bash. If you're running tcsh
(which you shouldn't be), you'll have to find out how to redirect
the standard output stream in tcsh.
> 9.) How do I switch between color depths on the fly? "Ctl + Alt + +" seems
> to only switch resolutions.
CTL-ALT-+ will cycle through all resolutions/color depths that you have
defined in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. The dirty little secret is that most
of us (unless we're working with photographs taken on a high-end
digital camera) can't tell the difference between the color depths
unless you start getting really low (like below 16 bpp).
> 10.) Do I need all 7 cd's to upgrade from potato to woody? Or can I just d/l
> the first cd?
Better yet: 'apt-get dist-upgrade'
> If someone could tell me of a website that helps people migrate from Windows
> to Linux, I would greatly appreciate it.
Well, you've made a good first step by subscribing to this list. I
know it's high volume, but there's a lot of good stuff that comes
across. Other places you might find helpful are:
http://www.debianplanet.org
http://www.debianhelp.org,
http://www.linuxnewbie.org
and don't forget:
http://groups.google.com
http://www.google.com
Enjoy.
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Stephen W. Juranich sjuranic@ee.washington.edu
Electrical Engineering http://students.washington.edu/sjuranic
University of Washington http://ssli.ee.washington.edu/ssli
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