[Techtalk] What I did over the Christmas Holidays!

[Carla Schroder]

Hi jennifer,

KMail will import from OE. It runs fine in Gnome. Balsa is rather barebones 
for what you want to do.

the rest beats the heck outa me, I'm a Red Hattie/Mandraker.

Carla

On Friday 28 December 2001 12:32 am, Jennifer Davis wrote:
> Note: At the end, I troll for advice...sorry!
>
> After about a week or more of messing around with my closest friend's
> computer, I think I have finally got it converted over to linux from
> Windows ME.  Under Windows, it seemed to require a re-install every six
> months, and I was getting tired of doing it.  She is not a terribly
> experienced user.  She essentially uses her PC for the web, email, and
> some word processing.  To me, she seemed like a perfect candidate.  When
> she does master her PC, if she chooses to, it will not take her any effort
> at all to master Windows.  If she chooses not to, then I can administer
> her pc as I have been since 1996.
>
> I chose to install Slackware 8.0 as it is the distribution I am most
> familiar with.  I may switch it to one of the RPM distros , such as
> Mandrake, Redhat or SuSe if she decides she wants to learn about managing
> her pc.  In setting up the pc, I learned a lot.  The first problem I had
> with the installastion was video.  I could not get her on-board S3Virge to
> work.  I must have tried 20 configurations for X and nothing worked.
> Since the video card was only a 1MB card anyways, I spent $10 on a 4MB ATI
> Mach64.  It works brilliantly and ran on my first attempt to configure X.
> Her desktop is Gnome.  In retrospect, she might have done better with KDE,
> but on a Pentium 200, I find that KDE is just a little too sluggish.
> Sound was a little more difficult.  She had al old OPL-3ax card that I
> gave her years ago that was not working well, possibly due to a connection
> breaking in it.  I switched it over to a CS4232.  It seems to work okay,
> but I am having problems with /dev/dsp.  I have run chmod 777 /dev/ds* and
> playing mp3s is still not great.  Since I've used a PPPoE over ADSL since
> I started using linux, I had no experience with PPP dial-up.  I seemed to
> have problems like crazy.  The first one being the fact she had a
> winmodem.  I bought her a modem that I thought was a PCI hardware modem
> that I just could not configure, then I settled on giving her my old 56K
> external.  After using the external, everything went just fine.  For mail,
> I installed Balsa.  It's nice.  The only problem I am having here is
> getting her old email.  She used MS Outlook Express and I have not yet
> found a way to import her old mail.  The other problem I have run into is
> with games.  I cannot seem to get her gravis gamepad to work.  Finally, I
> have upgraded the kernel to 2.4.16 because I heard that the 2.4 kernels
> run a bit faster.  I haven't really noticed a difference.
>
> To summarise, I am very happy with the result, and she really hasn't
> noticed a difference.  I just have a few lingering problems that I would
> like to clear up and hopefully not have to work on this PC ever again.
> They are:
>
> 1.	I think that there is a conflict with the sound card and another
> device.  How do I check?  In windows, I would use the device manager
> control panel.
>
> 2.	What is trick for running the joystick module in Slackware with a
> 2.4.X kernel?
>
> 3.	What is the Slackware way of installing a printer?
>
> 4.	Is there good documentation for running the modem as a fax
> machine?  Is there a fax howto?  Is it relevant for Slack?
>
>
> 5.	Are there any tools/tricks for converting MS Outlook Express email
> boxes, files or whatever into standard linux mailboxes?  Sorry, jargon
> escapes me here.
>
> 6.	What is the secret for having the PC shut itself off?  I know it?s
> in the kernel configuration, but I just have never mastered the API
> thingee.
>
> Thanks for putting up with this long post, and for letting me beam and for
> offering solutions if you have any.  Take care...
>
>
> Jennifer Davis
>
>
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