I also did the download of Elx. I did 2 installs with it, same machine
twice.
Machine....Via Apollo chipset, AMD K6 2-500, 256 megs ram, PCI
Riva TNT Graphics Card, Fijitsu 10 meg primary with Windows,
Western Dig 20 Gig blank secondary, Lite-on CD-RW, & Generic 56x
CD, Sylvania F74 monitor, MS Mouse, Sound Blaster 16 PCI.
First Install Custom
Went pretty much as Collins did except that I installed everything.
Just to see what would happen.
The Partitioning I think is a minor problem as I had the same
problem being unable to select which hard drive. However after
pressing tab and watching closely, eventually you could see a faint
highlight on the Drive section then use the down arrow to select hdb.
The rest of the install went pretty smooth and didn't have to do
much at all except indicate DHCP and root password.
After the reboot I entered KDE. Ran the config wizard that comes
up to set up KDE Desktop. All went well. The panel and menus are re-
done not standard KDE that we are all familiar with however its not that
big a deal. Actually makes more sense and does not have as much
duplication. The panel or taskbar at the bottom of the screen is totally
different offering a selection of icons that launch a button menu of
various programs. One such is the Internet button. Clicking it brings up
a window of icons with all the internet programs such as browsers,
messengers, email programs, download mgrs, etc, there is a 'help' or
description screen at the bottom of the window as you rollover each
button. In all there are about 6 of these icons in the panel. Desktop,
Internet, Office, Development, Configuration, My Computer.
Oh yeah....On the main desktop is an Icon for My Computer, very
similiar in function to Windows my Computer, and also an Icon for
Network Neighborhood, also similiar to Windows.
I had 3 problems with the custom install, ELX did not configure my
sound card correctly, nor did it configure the CD-RW or CD-R properly
so that I could pop in a cd and browse. And finally while it did find not
only the Windows hard drive on the machine, and 2 other machines
that were also on the network. I could not browse or mount them for
browsing.
Because of the above problems, I decided to try a reinstall, so I deleted
the partitions and did a.........
Default Install
Almost is hands off install. had to select DHCP and root password,
also had the option of choosing pkgs and whether to make a boot disk.
Went well, it found and partitioned HDB and left alone the Windows
Drive. Everything else was about the same. Had the same problems
with the CD-RW and CD-R, Same Sound problems, Same no browsing
of Network Machines. However, I had to leave for awhile and shut down
the machine, when I came back and rebooted it, it went to Kudzu and
found the sound card and configured it correctly. Still could not browse
the CD-RW or the CD-R. I set up a new Icon for the desktop and
discovered the problem or at least part of it. FSTAB had both set as
CDROM not CDROM and CDROM1 also did not have the CDRW as a
SCSI device altho CDR-Toast did recognize it and allowed me to
configure it. I tried browsing, both but for some reason couldn't. I
looked in the file manager and there were locks placed on /mnt/cdrom,
/mnt/cdrom1, and /mnt/floppy. Why I haven't a clue at this point.
Still couldn't browse or mount the other networked machines.
Probably some simple configuration or other.
The Distro appears to be either Mandrake or RH based. Uses
RPM's. Default is Reiserfs. I felt a lot of thought and work has gone
into the menus and into the installation and probably would work ok
with only one CD-RW or CD-R. I also felt it would be a pretty good
distro for a Linux Newbie. As long as there was someone to help out
nearby if they ran into a problem.
Sorry this is not more technical, but I wanted to 'play dumb' and see if
it would do everything without any knowledge of Linux. As this is
actually a pre1 distro, I didn't really expect it to be foolproof yet.
One last thing, I was disappointed with the speed it operated on my
machine, altho it was a bit faster than Mandrake 8.1 it was much
slower than Libranet 1.9.1 all of which I have recently tried on this
machine. Oh well, its sold for Xmas and I had to clean it off so don't
have to worry about it anyway. hahaha
Merry Xmas to all
Ray Plummer
Ray & Nancy Plummer
Copper, Elektra & WOK
http://www.nanray.cjb.net/gsdped/gsdbintro.html
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