[ale] Need help on RH5.2

[Vernard Martin]

> nice although it took a long time. (Several hours, most of that for
> formatting). My impressions with RH now are not too good. I don't like

Some observations:

Formatting the disk only takes a long time if you tell it to check for bad
blocks and its a large hard drive. Having a slow machines such as a 486-66 will
also slow things down considerably as well.

I have found that Slackware has more of a BSD style of setup whereas RedHat is
closer to the standard Sys V r4 stuff. They are more different than better.
I suspect that its a matter of religion more than anything else.

KDE being slow has everything to do with the speed of the machine and KDE
itself and nothing to do with the distribution.

> 1. I don't like RH's prompt. Is there anyway to change it to look like
> Slackwares?

Prompts are based on the shell. You are mostly likely using bash as your
defualt shell. You can change the default prompts by edition your local
.profile file or the /etc/profile file which is the global settings for bash.

> 2. When I move windows in KDE, the leave trails, so I continually have to
> R-click and refresh the screen. Is there any way to fix that?

This is a bug in your video chipset. You need to locate the readme file four
chipset so that you can learn what extra settings you have to add to your
XF86Config file to disable these errors. If you don't know what chipset is used
on your video card then you can usually find out by running the SuperProbe
command as root.

> 3. I can't shutdown from kdm. I tell it to and it won't shutdown. I try
> going into a wm and getting an xterm up and trying it there, and that
> doesn't work, I tried telinit 6, and that doesn't work. The first time, I
> had to use the switch, and the second time, I kept trying to make it
> work, and then it said no more processes in this runlevel and rebooted.
> How can I fix this so that I can tell it to reboot and it actually do it?

Were you logged in as root when you were trying all of this? only root should
be able to do those things.

> 4. How do I set up dial-up for internet? In Slack there is a pppsetup,
> but I can't find it in RH.

You can launche the "netcfg" tool and it is a gui for setting up networking in
general including PPP. You can also check the docs in /usr/doc/ppp*. 

> 5. Is there any way to see all of the installed packages? (Like pkgtool
> can do)

There is no canonical rpm tool such as pkgtool. However, there are several ones
available. I believe that RedHAt 6.0 came with "gnorpm" which should do what
you need.

> Do any of the other distributions look and feel like Slackware, but stay
> updated, use a real package manager, and are libc6? Unless I get a lot of
> help to make this feel right, I will be trying another soon.

Slackware is the only full featured distribution that has its feel. I'm afraid
its your best bet.

hope this helps

V
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Darkness has a hunger that's insatiable   Vernard Martin (vernard at cc.gatech.edu)
Lightness has a call that's hard to hear  http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vernard/