Thank you for your responses. It's nice to get a little support, both
technical and in the form of a little encouragement.
Some specific responses.
Was this as clean install?
I would define it as "clean", yes. I did not upgrade of take over any
older versions of Linux. I created a new partition and installed fresh.
The machine dual boots with WinXP, which I hate and would like to stop
using. But can I...?
You can mount them but cannot copy from them!!?
So it would seem. Experimentation has taught me that I can put a CD-ROM
in and it will read fine. And I can burn both DVDs and CD-ROMs. But, if
I put a DVD in any of my internal drives, it spins and spins and usually
just gets stuck in there. Sometimes I have to force an eject by
inserting a pin into the small manual eject hole. Other times it comes
up, but if I copy things, it goes super slow (the copy window says over
an hour to copy) and then fail.
The external driver always mounts DVDs just fine. But it has the same
slow down then die problem if I actually try to copy data from it.
config-system-packages? Very strange. What error are you getting?
Someone else on this thread said that config-system-package shouldn't
work after the first install. And other people said it's just fine. In
any case, I'm not sure if we're talking about config-system-packages.
I'm talking about the Add/Remove Packages that is available in the
Desktop menu, and has a GUI. Surely *that* should work after the first
install. Otherwise why have a GUI for it?
Does the sound card otherwise work?
I have an external USB Kenwood stereo system that works great. I can
play MP3s, AVIs in Xine, and system sounds come up fine. The only place
I have noticed sound not happening is when something gets launched from
Firefox, mainly Flash.
Which app?
Gnome Pilot. I have to admit, I didn't have high hopes for getting my
Palm Pilot to work under Linux, so I didn't crack my head against this
problem too long. I'm more concerned about getting my DVD drives working
and my Tablet configured.
How did you add ntfs support?
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/fedora4.html
Worked great when I first installed, and for the first few reboots. In
fact, it was the one RPM that went completely problem free and as the
installation instructions said it would.
And then one day I notice the NTFS partition didn't mount, and no longer
auto-mounts at boot, despite me not having configured anything...
What were you running before? How about trying a multi-boot environment
with a more stable version such as FC3 or CentOS4, and leave the FC4
stuff to age a bit before giving up entirely.
In another thread I was lead to understand that there was "no downgrade
path" to FC3. I would assume that switching to any other Linux distro at
this point would mean wiping things out and a new fresh install. This
may sound like I'm just whining, but at this point if I have to wipe
things out, back them up, and do the whole thing over again, I think
I'll probably just give the partition back over to Windows. I mean, I'm
really rooting for Linux here, but I'm not sure if I'm rooting for it
enough to keep installing the OS until I get it right. Is that
unreasonable of me?
That is an oxymoron. Hard core computer users are not deterred by new
software distributions. They live for the challenge of breaking in a
new distro.
I think you misread me. That's exactly what I mean. I am *not* a hard
core computer user. I'm sort of "medium-core". So therefore I do not
want to break in new distros. I'm contemplating throwing in the towel
and leaving the new distros for people who have cores that are more hard
than mine.
On the other hand, a rational computer user would install FC3. There
is less anguish. You benefit from the suffering of other early
adopters. And with the delayed release of FC5 there is the added
bonus of getting Fedora Core software support for a longer time span
than any of the releases to date.
This is the part that threw me. I don't get this system of numbering for
FC releases. People talk about this like it's normal or something, and
maybe it is and it's the way software companies like Adobe and MS that
are doing it wrong, but I would have thought that version 4 would
replace and be better than version 3, which would be better than version
2... By "better" I just mean bugs and issues in the previous release are
fixed, and if there are new bugs, they are a part of new features. If
FC4 had the words "beta" or something to indicate that it was *less*
stable than FC3, I would have gone with FC3. How was I supposed to know
that FC4 was the least stable version? As I wrote this, I rechecked the
web site, and I didn't see anything that clearly states "this is less
stable than FC3". It seems to indicate that FC4 is a wonderful thing and
it's the one you want if you're making a fresh install of FC.
Dave
