Kitz ADSL Broadband Information
adsl spacer  
Support this site
Home Broadband ISPs Tech Routers Wiki Forum
 
     
   Compare ISP   Rate your ISP
   Glossary   Glossary
 
Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Pages: 1 [2]

Author Topic: Pc Linux 2007  (Read 14046 times)

guest

  • Guest
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #15 on: January 18, 2008, 01:37:49 PM »

OK there IS an install icon on the desktop, so I think we can safely say that your problems stem from a dodgy CD burn tickmike.

I deliberately trashed the MBR and partition tables on this disk prior to install but the installer ran into problems as somehow it still saw an old ext3 partition. Dealt with that by recovering the partition and then deleting it. So I thought let's reboot and run from scratch. For most people this won't happen as you won't have old disks with various filesystems lying about :D Anyway - onwards.

Rebooted. Prompted to set the keyboard - set to UK; chose GMT and the UK ntp pool for time sync; chose ethernet for connection and selected the relevant network adaptor; chose automatic IP and then clicked through the next three screens without changing the defaults.

Login as guest and double click the "Install PCLinuxOS" icon. Enter the root password and then clicked through all the rest of the screens without changing the defaults. Wait for files copying. Click through the bootloader options without making changes and enter a new root password. Create a couple of users. Reboot and log into user account.

Use Synaptic package manager to "Reload" and then "Mark All Upgrades". Set it going and wait for the 606MB of updates to download/install. That's where I am now.

The only things I've had to really do are change the keyboard locale to UK, set the time zone and select the UK ntp pool. Everything else was just the default settings.

Looks like the updates are nearly complete - back in a bit.
Logged

guest

  • Guest
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #16 on: January 18, 2008, 01:59:15 PM »

I now have a DVD playing in MPlayer with sound:thumbs:

However.....

Kaffeine claims I don't have sufficient rights to play the disk or it may be damaged.

KMPlayer plays the mandatory BBC copyright notice and "jingle" with sound then stops playing. Trying to open any of the titles just results in the copyright/jingle playing again.

Any ideas Eric?
Logged

roseway

  • Administrator
  • Senior Kitizen
  • *
  • Posts: 43467
  • Penguins CAN fly
    • DSLstats
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #17 on: January 18, 2008, 03:24:20 PM »

Not really I'm afraid. I don't have any commercial DVDs to try, but I just tried a few samplers that came with The Times, and they all play perfectly with Kaffeine. I'm using a different distro (Debian Testing) so that doesn't prove anything except that Kaffeine works.

The only thing which seems likely is that it's to do with regional coding, as you said before. I suppose you haven't got a US DVD player in your PC have you? I seem to recall reading somewhere about some PC DVD players being locked to the wrong region.

I see that, in addition to libdvdcss2 I also have a package called libdvdread3 installed. I guess that it might be worth checking if there are any more dvd-related packages which you need to install.
Logged
  Eric

guest

  • Guest
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #18 on: January 18, 2008, 03:54:48 PM »

Sorted.

It IS to do with the DVD drive region coding. The DVD drive (in common with many PC DVD drives) doesn't actually have region coding set - you could set it if you wished but most people don't as in Windows its on the properties sheet for the DVD drive which is under Device Manager. In short its well hidden. So most drives are never actually locked to a region.

What's required is to tell Kaffeine to "pretend" to be the correct region. Then it all works fine :)

KMPlayer was user incompetence :D

Just need to put VMWare on later and job done.
Logged

roseway

  • Administrator
  • Senior Kitizen
  • *
  • Posts: 43467
  • Penguins CAN fly
    • DSLstats
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #19 on: January 18, 2008, 04:05:53 PM »

>> KMPlayer was user incompetence

We're all allowed a bit of that (thank heavens) :D

I'm pleased you solved it anyway.

I use VMWare Server too. The Linux version works well. You'll have to install the kernel source (or at least the kernel headers if they are available as a separate package) because in most cases the VMWare installer has to build itself a kernel module on your system.
Logged
  Eric

guest

  • Guest
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #20 on: January 18, 2008, 04:40:54 PM »

I have to say I am extremely impressed. I've only found myself at the command line once - to install Acrobat. This is definitely ready for the average user - perhaps with the addition of a Cedega sub (£3/month IIRC) for gamesplayers.

This machine has everything from DVD/video authoring/ripping apps through MP3 player tools, Skype, torrent clients, home accounts package, OpenOffice, web authoring tools, media/TV players etc etc etc on it now.

I really can't get over how simple it all is to install and more importantly how easy it now is to add and remove software apps.

No need for a blood sacrifice to the god of dependencies now :D

Edit - really the only thing that (IMHO) needs doing is to somehow give newbies a bit more of a guide as to which apps to install, given that there's thousands of them in the package manager :)
« Last Edit: January 18, 2008, 04:43:24 PM by rizla »
Logged

roseway

  • Administrator
  • Senior Kitizen
  • *
  • Posts: 43467
  • Penguins CAN fly
    • DSLstats
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #21 on: January 18, 2008, 06:51:04 PM »

>>> Edit - really the only thing that (IMHO) needs doing is to somehow give newbies a bit more of a guide as to which
>>> apps to install, given that there's thousands of them in the package manager

That's a fair point. It would have to be a rather short list, because all of those thousands of packages have a purpose for someone. What some distros do is to have a wiki with this sort of information in the 'getting started' section, and many have specific advice for multimedia applications (for example). In some cases (e.g. Ubuntu) the sheer volume of information is a bit overwhelming to a newcomer, and the Linux mantra ("You always have a choice") can put off some people.
Logged
  Eric

guest

  • Guest
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #22 on: January 18, 2008, 10:20:35 PM »

I'd forgotten how good the Linux CPU scheduler was. This is SO much more responsive than WinXP its quite startling.

I'm sorely tempted to try it on a multi-core machine :)

Edit - the machine its on now is an old Athlon 3000+ with 1GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, built in GeForce(something) graphics. In fact everything is on the motherboard although I may try putting a Compro DVB-T300 TV card in there just to see if I can get it going :)
« Last Edit: January 18, 2008, 10:26:15 PM by rizla »
Logged

roseway

  • Administrator
  • Senior Kitizen
  • *
  • Posts: 43467
  • Penguins CAN fly
    • DSLstats
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #23 on: January 18, 2008, 10:44:35 PM »

You may have to do a bit of research to get that DVB card working. I've seen messages from people who have succeeded with it, so it's certainly possible. If it's one of the kind which load firmware files at boot time you'll have to trace the right file and copy it to /lib/firmware/. Kaffeine is the best program for viewing digital TV, apart from MythTV which is a pig to configure.
Logged
  Eric

guest

  • Guest
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #24 on: January 18, 2008, 10:47:37 PM »

There's Mandriva rpms for the card on the Compro site. Am I likely to run into problems installing those on PCLOS 2007?

Linky :

http://www.comprousa.com/New/en/download/tseries.html
Logged

roseway

  • Administrator
  • Senior Kitizen
  • *
  • Posts: 43467
  • Penguins CAN fly
    • DSLstats
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #25 on: January 19, 2008, 06:48:28 PM »

Sorry for delay in replying. Generally it's better to avoid Mandriva RPMs with PCLinuxOS, even though the one is derived from the other. But a driver is a standalone package which doesn't interact with other packages, so I would say it's worth a try. I can't see that it could break anything.
Logged
  Eric

guest

  • Guest
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #26 on: January 20, 2008, 02:49:41 PM »

Thanks Eric but I've had a rethink. As I'm giving the machine away I'm not going to put a perfectly serviceable TV card in it. Dunno what I was thinking really :)
Logged

roseway

  • Administrator
  • Senior Kitizen
  • *
  • Posts: 43467
  • Penguins CAN fly
    • DSLstats
Re: Pc Linux 2007
« Reply #27 on: January 20, 2008, 03:25:20 PM »

A fit of madness, obviously. I get those sometimes. ;D
Logged
  Eric
Pages: 1 [2]