Rob Wood wrote:
Hello CLUG,
Rob Wood (Woodsey) here. I attended the meeting on 04December (introduced myself as marine engineer), it was great to meet everyone for the first time. I was amazed how helpful and welcoming everyone was, thanks for that. Sorry I had to leave early, but found both presentations very interesting. Rik's site "infohelp" is a fantastic utility.
I probably won't be able to attend again as I have to move to Auckland due to my girlfriends job, but before I go, would you guys mind if I ask a few questions?
Well I'll ask them anyway.
I have tried several Linux distributions in the past couple of years and got to various stages of success. My most successful was with Mandrake 9 with which I actually got online and managed to print something. That was just before coming to New Zealand from the UK. I still consider myself a raw beginner so I am going back to basics.
I presently have Smoothwall 2 as a firewall which connects to an ADSL router. Since receiving e-mails from the group, I have heard talk of IPCop. Is this a similar thing? Is it better or worse? On Smoothwall, I can't get the DMZ pinhole to work with my server so the server has to connect straight to the router. It's probably my fault but would IPCop do this better?
Even with a DMZ, the server will have to connect directly to the router... just through a separate subnet ( in the simplest case, a separate ethernet cable on a separate port ). The idea of a DMZ is to separate this server from the rest of your servers behind the firewall - usually allowing public access to the dmz, but keeping your personal details private.
I have Ubuntu on my laptop (kindly given out at the meeting), dual booting with WinXP but it doesn't like my laptop pnp BIOS and only boots every other time with lots of fatal error messages. I can't find a way to disable the pnp BIOS. Is there any other workaroud?
Which lappie is it? Google will usually point at the correct incantation/relevant gods to sacrifice to.
Can anyone reccomend a distro well suited for use on a home run web server to run Apache2. My hardware is primitive so I envisage a small distribution without any "whistles and bells" I'm running on Win2000 at present but I'm not happy with it.
The problem is that linux has now bloated a bit. This means that if you want to have pretty graphical interface to your machine, and use an up-to-date distribution, then you really need GHz+ processor speed, and 256MB memory. It'll work on less, sure, but not really usefully. If you've got that, then I recommend that you use the same distro as someone who will be nearby and doesn't mind helping you out until you've really found your feet. All have pluses and minuses, and in the end it really doesn't make much difference. With really primitive hardware, I recommend that you use a text-based distro, and there Debian is king IMHO.
I downloaded Xfree window package for my experimental/learning linux box (486 with TINY Linux) and have a file that looks like a zip file under windows but has the name XTinyBin.tar What do I do with this now? (polite answers only please)
tar files are extracted using 'tar'. Sometimes linux is obvious, though not often (: man tar will telp, but 'tar option filename' is how it works.
tar tf XTinyBin.tar will 'Tabulate' the contents, and tar xf XTinyBin.tar will 'eXtract' the archive. You should find a file called README in the archive which will tell you what to do with the files now you've got them.
Any help with these questions would be welcome.
Cheers ~ Woodsey
hth,
Steve
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