Re: New SUSE/Linux user, several key questions

From: David Wright (david_c_wright_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 09/09/04 

Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 10:47:06 +0200

Lizard wrote:

> Greetings!
>
> I've finally decided to try Linux - or retry, my last go was in 1998, and
> I've heard there's been some improvements since then...IAE, some
> questions.
>
> a)Most of the files I want to share between Windows and Linux are on my
> external USB drive - which Linux isn't seeing or mounting by default.
> Suggestions?

What sort of errors are you getting when you try and mount the drive?

 My camera and USB sticks (both treated as mass storage devices) seem to
work fine, although the stick needs to sometimes be inserted a couple of
times before it is recognised (saying that, some Windows machines won't
find it at all, so it could be something funny with the sticks firmware).

> b)My sound card is not working; I have gone through the setup several
> times and there seems to be an issue with the driver. I am using a SONY
> Vaio desktop with whatever sound card it came with.

Has it installed a "default" driver, or is no driver configured? You will
need to know what sound card is installed, as you will need to make sure it
has loaded the correct device driver. Check your manuals or check the Sony
web-site, if they don't have a technical specification section, they should
have a driver download section, even if it is just for Windows, where you
should be able to locate what type of card you have.

Without knowing which card you have, there is no way of checking whether you
have the correct driver installed. If there is a default driver installed,
try using alsamixer (command line tool) or KAmixer (should be on your KDE
menu) to see if the volumes are muted (or redirected to digital whilst
using analog, or vice-versa).

> c)I am interested in upgrading to KDE 3.3. What is the best way to do
> this? (I went to the site and found the SUSE binaries, however, the README
> basically said "Don't do this!". So I didn't. Is that a warning which
> should be heeded?)

See res's answer, but remember, if you upgrade to 3.3, you won't get any
more security patches for KDE from SuSE and if it breaks anything, you will
be "on your own" as it isn't a supported version under 9.1 for updates or
technical support.

If it doesn't contain a "must have" feature, then I would wait for the next
official release of SuSE, which should contain KDE 3.3 and Gnome 2.6 (I
would hope). Especially if you are just starting on the Linux path, I
wouldn't try breaking the distribution until you understand enough about it
to recover it if you break it...

> d)Konqueror is incompatible with gmail. :( Suggestions?

Konqueror isn't on the list of compatible web browsers for gmail. SuSE comes
with Firefox and Mozilla too, try one of those. Firefox is my default
choice for a browser these days, the only thing which doesn't seem to work
with Firefox is hotmail, which uses too many redirections for Firefox to
consider it safe, Konqueror works fine with it, just displaying a warning
message.

Dave

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