Hi,

If you are new to computers, Linux or Zenwalk this is the place for you. Here there are no "dumb" questions and lot's of friendly faces. Feel free to ask "anything" you need to help you succeed.

Also...

Remember that once you become more proficient to come back and help the next newcomer. Communities thrive on people helping others and we believe our community here is strong because of the people who help fellow Zenwalkers in time of need as well as those contributing to Zenwalk.

Oh, and Welcome to Zenwalk!



Michael

I am no stranger to computers, however I am for the first time trying to install linux.  So far it has given me fits.  I have an ancient Winbook XL w/ 128MB ram.
1.6 GB HD. Some how on every installation attempt something goes wrong : say it won't recognize my password, or something with R11, whatever that is comes up, I know it would probably help if I had a larger hard drive, but I am really a starving student in school to earn my A+ Certification.  Is it possible to provide me with a step by step?

i'm not sure if zenwalk will work on only 1,6 gb hd. minimum requierements are said to be 2gb. i'm on an almost fresh zenwalk install and my root partition uses about 1.4gb. maybe you should try zenwalk-core.

Hi,
i have IBM TP 600 (model no 2645510) with 4GB HDD and 128ram, screen 13,3". zenwalk 4.8 and 4.6 LIVE both give me max resolution 800x600, i'd prefer 1024x768. Besides some of the screen is black from the right and bottom - as if zen thinks it's only 13" screen. If you could solve this problem for me, i'd be thankful.

Best regards!

rbb

i'm just guessing but maybe you need to enter the correct refresh frequencies for your display in your xorg.conf. that means, if you can find them out.

Hi,
i have IBM TP 600 (model no 2645510) with 4GB HDD and 128ram, screen 13,3". zenwalk 4.8 and 4.6 LIVE both give me max resolution 800x600, i'd prefer 1024x768. Besides some of the screen is black from the right and bottom - as if zen thinks it's only 13" screen. If you could solve this problem for me, i'd be thankful.

Best regards!

hello again,
i've been busy with finding these right refresh frequencies, but i'm new to linux and i couldn't figure it out. could you give me some advice how to get it working properly

well, i don't know about the right frequencies for your display. i'm not even sure if that would make it work. maybe you can contact the manufacturer. in any case, i would NOT play with those frequencies. you might damage the display if you apply wrong frequencies to it.

btw: did, you try the new videoconfig? maybe you should do that. you can find the links in this thread.

Hello, I'm COMPLETELY new to Linux. So I have a few questions about it xD
If I install Zenwalk, will I lose the programs I had installed on Windows?
Also will I lose my files? :S sorry, rather dumb questions ^_^;

Hi. As you are new to linux I would suggest you get the liveCD first and try to familiarize yourself with it. It is fully functional and apart from the fact that it will be slower at loading programs than an installed zenwalk (it is after all loading everything from a CD) you'll see what you can do with it.

Then if you like it and want to actually install it, I would suggest you do some reading on partitioning and dual booting. Google is a good friend for that.

And there are these two papers by Claus that are a nice read:
http://www.zenwalk.org/modules/news/art ... storyid=36
http://www.zenwalk.org/modules/news/art ... storyid=16

To answer your questions. No, you won't lose the programs installed on windows. And no, you won't lose your files. But that is only if you are careful and you understand what you're doing. Partioning can be a tricky thing if you are new to it. And always backup your data first.

I know this sounds stupid, but it's definitely worth mentioning if people are coming straight from XP or <shudder> Vista.

The time has come to stop putting fancy symbols, spaces and to a lesser extent capital letters in file and folder names.

It's one of the major things about Linux that makes it seem geeky to outsiders, just because it doesn't have snazzy easy-to-read filenames from here to Albequerque. ( ) I'm not saying it isn't possible to have things like "My _*Pictures*_ from FRANCE" as folder names, but you are making life difficult for yourself, particularly because at some point you may have to enter that into a command line. Also, spaces and symbols like '*' can confuse the Linux inner workings ('kernel').

And don't worry about the aforementioned lack of easy-to-read file and folder names. Everything makes sense once you think about it:

/: The file system (from which all other folders stem). This one doesn't make as much sense as the others.
/usr: The USeR files on the file system (/)
/etc: The Editable Configuration Files on the file system (/)

and so on.

I hope I haven't gone and repeated someone else's tip...

Hi, I just wanted to congratulate you all, fot this very NICE piece of GNU/Linux distro. I hope that I could be of any help to improve this magnificent project.

Glad you brought this up as it is something I've been wondering about. I've converted most of my file names to lower case and have also inserted the underscore for spaces--granted none were previously as elaborately named as your example, but nevertheless... Bearing in mind that Michael said there are no "dumb" questions in here, I'd like to ask how the kernel handles apostrophes? I freely admit that I'm a wee bit of a grammar fanatic and it just bugs me to no end not to be able to name a file "joe's_garage" (for example and less the quotation marks) in good conscience. I'm also creative; I've tried "joe-s_garage" and "joes_garage" but find myself suffering from AWS (Apostrophe Withdraw Syndrome). So can Linux handle apostrophes with ease and if not, how do my fellow apostrophe aficionados deal with such a travesty?

I would rather not use apostrophes because they are used to mark strings. ("..." or '...')
So if typed the filename into a CLI, this would be treated as the beginning of a string and you had to escape it either like that or like that

So if you want to complicate CLI use name your files with apostrophs otherwise I'd rather not.

You can try the above examples and also other special chars like that quite good:

e.g. "echo He'llo", try what happens

Hmm, yes, I see what you are saying. When I typed "echo hello" it returned "hello" but when I typed "echo he'llo" it returned ">". I guess it's back to "joes_garage" or "joe-s_garage" for me...

Danke schön.

Actually you can use "joe's garage" if you want. It works as you would expect in your file manager and if you want to use the file in the terminal you have to escape the special characters: