Re: A foot on the ladder

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Neil Foster wrote:

> How do I get started with linux please. It's refusing to recognise 
> myhardare. The boot up messages say it's spotted teh network card and 
> scsi card so all well and good but it's not having any of the modem, 
> and I can't mount a dos disk.
>  
> Where do I go to find out the information please?


A good place to go is the Debian Mailing List archives, where you can 
search for specific words like "mount; dos".

> I'm trying to get a starting point on how to setup and config linux on 
> a very basic hardare leve. Being a newbie to linux I have no idea 
> hwere to find such things as what devices it can see or not and so.
>  
> The sort of equivlent of windows device manager and suchlike.


Different distros have different tools. Debian is decidedly less 
"friendly" for those who are looking to do things the "Windows" way 
than, say, Mandrake. A lot of users get started in these other distros, 
and then migrate eventually to Debian, which by then is the last distro 
they need (because it's The Best (tm) after you know what you're doing a 
bit more).

Some tools:
   "lspci" (or "lspci -v" for verbose mode) to see what's on the PCI bus
   "wvdial" or "pppconfig" to autodetect real modems
   "pnpdump" to gather info on PnP ISA devices (glad we're getting away 
from that mess)
   "usbview" to see what's on your usb bus (but I always have to 
manually do a mount command to get anywhere with this)

>   Many thanks for your help The firs thing is the modem!

Try "pppconfig".

> then the network card!

I thought you said all was well and good with the network card. 
"ifconfig" should show you what devices are configured (generally eth0 
for the first NIC and lo for the local loopback). You may need to take a 
look at /etc/networking/interfaces to configure the NIC. Will you be 
using a static IP? DHCP?

> There are failry basic thigns It's not a winmodem a normal modem 
> hanign off com2 ie. ttys2


As Martin mentioned, ttyS2 is not COM2; it's COM3. What you want is 
ttyS1 (the count starts at 0 in Linux; 1 in DOS).

> . But linxu won't see it.
>  
> how do I start problem solving?
>  
> Best Regards
> Neil Foster
>