Print command
Could anyone tell a newbie the command to print a text file or a man page item, like a file named "vi.1.gz" on a dot matrix printer? I have installed the 'base' system from D/Led floppies (used the 'rescue' disk and installed the drivers disk and the five 'base' disks). During the install, I did install the 'lp' module for the parallel ports. At this point, the 'man' program is either not available or not on the disk. I have been reading some of the man pages using zmore but I don't know how to print or do very much else. I don't have any docs except for what was installed. I'm having a very rough time trying learn how to do things in Debian, I'm good in DOS and Win95 but just beginning to learn Linux. Apparently I have a lot to read and learn before I can get my install to the point I can log onto the web and upgrade to a full system. The few commands I can use I have learned by reading this ng. So far Debian seems to be a great OS with a lot more power than anything I've used in the past, including OS/2 Warp. But the docs are difficult to find and read for a newbie that doesn't have any Unix experience. You could say that Debian is my Unix experience. Is there a list of basic commands for navigation and operations available on the web? The "Howto" pages are great for an in depth explanation of lilo and fips but get a little bit tedious when all I want to do is look at the current fstab or ppp.conf or list a dir. Also, using the 'ls' command, man6 dir doesn't exist and man7 is empty. Is this normal? A Debian geek wannabe is anxious to learn. Thank you.
Debian Kills Disks
Hello Debian Geeks: Before you get upset let me declare that I'm a Linux/Debian newbie geek wannabe. I've only recently (a month ago) became interested in Linux. I've spent most of the time reading everything I could find. I have d/led a few distros to get a feel of Linux. I have two computers, a 486DX50 VLB and a 386DX40. The 486 is running PC DOS 7.0 and Win95, 40x CD and SB 16 Pro that is my main box for doing almost everything including surfing the net. The 386 is my test box that I'm trying to get Linux to run on but it doesn't have a CD or modem. Consequently, I have obtained everything I have for Linux on the Win95 box and transferred to the 386 via floppy. I've made the floppies (Rescue, Drivers, 5 base disks for Debian) following the instructions in the .txt files and Howto's on the 486 in DOS using Rawrite for them and used the disks to install Debian several times as I would learn more and realize I had left something out or wanted to try something different. These seem to be the most stable floppies I have made in Debian. Needless to say, Debian would succeed more times than any of the other distros, including RedHat. Obviously, I spent most of my time working/learning Debian. However, after using a floppy two or three times, it became unusable in any OS. This I attributed to normal attrition, even though the attrition rate was a lot higher than in any of the other OS's. Now the hard drive in the 386 has become unusable. Even Debian is refusing to install properly on it, the last semi successful install attempt resulted in a Read Only partial install that won't boot from the hard disk and a floppy boot won't access the hard disk. I believe that Debian has signed the boot partition in some way to make the disk(s) unusable. In other words, a software flag or partition id was written to the disk in a way that was not completely correct. How can I correct this? Is there a Hex editor I could use to clear the boot sector of the disk so a new install would work correctly? Thanks.
Disk-Disk
Hello Debians: I've got a little problem. I've got two computers, one has Win95, AWE32, NEC 40x, 32 meg ram. The other has ... 8 meg ram and Debian. Ok, gotta get Debian up and running before it gets the goodies. Anyway, I pulled the HD from the other and put it in the one so I could boot Debian and log onto the web and ftp some pkg's. Didn't work. I removed the HD from one, installed the HD from the other, setup the BIOS on boot, reboot, get errors. During boot I can read the HD stats as the boot accesses the HD but after, I guess when the floppy is supposed to hand over control, it says hda busy, hda1 not ready, hda not available. Ok, this usually tells me to check into what I've set wrong. I check several times and nothing is set wrong. But, both HD's were in the one computer running together with DOS. So it should not be having a problem. Install the HD back into the other computer and Debian boots sweet from the HD. Anybody got any ideas what is wrong? Quick summary: two HD's are in the same computer working fine. One HD is removed and installed in another computer, Debian is installed from floppies. the HD is then reinstalled into the original computer by itself, alone, no other HD's, and it won't work. Won't boot on the HD, boot from floppy, can't access HD. I'd really appreciate any help I can get. I really want to get Debian running so I can solve a lot of my MS problems. Thanks.
Debian who?
Hello People: I'm a Brand Spankin' Shinning Newbe with a Brand Spankin Shinning New Debian install using floppies, all seven of them D/Led from Debian.org, so now what? The man pages don't work. Nothing will install because of dependency errors except for joe (works great but there must be something better). Can't get the computer on the internet because that machine isn't connected and doesn't have the software, yet. Games won't install either. Really wanted to get it up and running to learn Linux, C, C++ and a few other things. Besides, I'd like to replace WinDoze95 with something I can depend on and understand how it works and maybe even tweak a little. So, what do I do now? Actually, I've spent over a month reading How-to's and Install.txt and anything else I could find. Problem is, nothing seems to work, even though I've tried installing several times, manually configuring things, and asking everyone that seemed to maybe know something. The install seems to boot from the hard disk ok, I get about three and a half screens of report between Loading Lilo ... and Login. Everything looks fine and seems to terminate successfully except for one itty bitty thing: Mounting local file systems ... not mounted anything Ok, that's probably a biggie but I did install vfat so I could read floppies made on the Win95 machine. Does anybody have an idea of what I did wrong? What should I do now? Thank you.
