hiya, i'll answer what i can :) On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 09:21:05AM -0500, Wathen, Metherion wrote: > Hi and thanks for any help I receive in response to the following: > > 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.) to remove installed packages, my mode of choice is apt-get remove packagename alternatively, if you know you're never going to need it again and you don't care about keeping your configuration files (which are kept by default) you can do apt-get --purge remove packagename > 2.) How do I modify swap partiton size without having to reinstall > everything all over again? that's tough... you probably would have to resize your other partitions and then move them over, and then resize your swap partition. if you really want to do this, you'll probably want to look up some info on the gpart package. honestly though, you might spend more time doing that than just re-installing (though it'd be much more informative, i'm sure..) > 3.) How do I change the clock time to the correct time? you can use the date command as root to do it manually (man date), though if you're sharing this computer with certain other os's that don't store the date in GMT, you might find that it changes back. also, you should make sure that your kernel supports the realtime clock on your system (for me it's a module called rtc), otherwise it might not save the time back to the hardware clock when you restart. also, there's a package called ntpdate which can be used to sync up your computer with the time on computers elsewhere on the internet, which you might find useful. > 4.) Is it possible to have the cdrom and floopy drives automatically mount > without recompiling the kernel? i'm sure you could do this with the cdrom drive (i've seen it done in redhat, anyways, but i don't know how it's done), though i imagine that you can't with the floppy, since the computer has no way of knowing when you put one in. > 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?) does xmms play other things, like mp3/ogg files? look for some random sound files (.wav/.au/.mp3/.ogg) on your system and see if xmms will play them. > 6.) Where is there a mp3 plugin for XMMS? - do it need one? it should just play mp3's out of the box. there's a plugin for it that ships by default, because some people use xmms to play other things and it makes sense to modularize the input part of the program. > 7.) Is there a GUI file manager for X, WindowMaker, Debian? there are plenty, though i'm not sure about windowmaker specific. to get something along the lines of a list, do apt-cache search "file manager" | less (the | less is because it'll produce a lot of entries, some of them not to relevant to your search) > 8.) Where should I put tarballs I've downloaded before running "gzip -dc"? > Can I gzip from a cd to my harddrive? If so, how? i don't think it really matters all that much, i prefer to put them in my home directory, and extract them with tar xvfz filename.tgz instead of gzip directly. also you can do this from your cdrom to harddrive by cd ~ tar xvfz /cdrom/path/to/tarball.tgz > 9.) How do I switch between color depths on the fly? "Ctl + Alt + +" seems > to only switch resolutions. no idea, i just stick with 24 :) > 10.) Do I need all 7 cd's to upgrade from potato to woody? Or can I just d/l > the first cd? you don't need any cd's! just change the entries in your sources.list to point to woody instead of potatoe, and then do apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade expect to spend a while downloading. i've heard from folks who have done this with the only complications being non-official packages that they had installed themselves not upgrading gracefully > If someone could tell me of a website that helps people migrate from Windows > to Linux, I would greatly appreciate it. don't know of any off the top of my head, but i'd be interested in what others have to offer, since i'm hoping to convert my mom one of these days :) hth --sean
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