What were your greatest victories and punishing woes as a unix/linux system administrator? [more inside]
posted on Jul 21, 2008 - 11 answers

Does anyone know a good way to make input devices be the only thing recognized by usb on linux? [more inside]
posted on Jun 4, 2008 - 8 answers

I need a skinny, possibly fanless video card for a 1 U server. Linux drivers, PCI Express, very little room for it to live. [more inside]
posted on Apr 16, 2008 - 7 answers

How do you create system-wide desktop icons in KDE 3.5? [more inside]
posted on Mar 2, 2008 - 0 answers

What is the best book for a self-study course on learning to use Linux. This would be for a sophomore in college studying Computer Science, but a person totally unfamiliar with anything other than Windows. I am looking for something where the student would install, then go through a series of tasks: configure networking, mount a remote smb drive, configure firewall, set up new accounts, configure apache, etc.
posted on Nov 9, 2007 - 11 answers

Hood+Tech Filter: Help me give these kids a fighting chance. [more inside]
posted on Aug 9, 2007 - 10 answers

How do I get PHP to send an e-mail. Is there a way to do it without recompiling PHP/Apache. If not, how do I recompile PHP/Apache on a linux system to do this? [more inside]
posted on Aug 7, 2007 - 11 answers

I am running Ubuntu (Edgy Eft) on my computer and while I am feeling more and more confident about most aspects of a Linux OS I am still unclear on what sort of regular maintenance operations I should be performing. [more inside]
posted on Apr 4, 2007 - 13 answers

I have a SATA hard drive with all my data (yeah, I was just about to implement a backup scheme with rsync...), and my Ubuntu installation shit the bed. I'm back up, but the partition table on that drive is kablooey. It is formated ext3, and I have little reason to suspect that the data is not there. Are there any good tools for restoring a partition table on ext3, or can this be done natively? Gparted shows the file system marked as ext3, but with a warning about not being able to open dumpe2fs. [more inside]
posted on Dec 12, 2006 - 5 answers

Help using Amarok with a removable drive [more inside]
posted on Nov 12, 2006 - 2 answers

I used Automatix to get my Ubuntu system up and running. I know the thing installs stuff like Beagle and Gmailnotifier, but for some reason they're not showing up. [more inside]
posted on Aug 24, 2006 - 8 answers

Help me find the great Linux downloader for Emusic that I lost. [more inside]
posted on Jul 22, 2006 - 2 answers

ServerFilter: How do I set up a server at home? [more inside]
posted on Jan 19, 2006 - 9 answers

How can I fix my SiS onboard video? What did I even do to break it? I recently reinstalled my girlfriend's Linux machine, adding a hard drive in the process. For some reason, the display shows horizontal glitches and every once in a while blinks black for a few seconds. [more inside]
posted on Jan 17, 2006 - 9 answers

Can I run Linux under Windows with no reboot, no installation, and 100 MB on a USB drive? [more inside]
posted on Jan 1, 2006 - 16 answers

I've got a ~40G filesystem on a Linux machine. I'm looking for a solution that will let me backup to 4.7G DVD blanks - e.g., fill one disc, tell me to put in another, etc, until all of the data is copied to disc(s). I can do this easily with Dragon Burn under OSX with its "Span discs" option, but I'd like to find something similar for Linux. I know about cdrecord/proDVD, but last time I checked it didn't offer anything like this. Any suggestions?
posted on Jul 3, 2005 - 7 answers

The Fedora Core 3 installation crashes on my Red Hat 9 PC, and posting to Bugzilla has yielded zero results. Is there any way to get my system up to date without upgrading? [more inside]
posted on Mar 7, 2005 - 8 answers

Small Operating System: A ship that I work on has a VERY old computer (running Win 98) that is used as a public terminal. It's likely a P120, or some such thing. [MI]
posted on Jan 26, 2005 - 18 answers

What PC games don't require any installation whatsoever? Or put another way, what PC games could I burn to CD/DVD and play on a system that I don't want to copy any files to? Linux-plus-games-on-a-DVD suggestions are also welcomed, although I would prefer games that would run on an existing XP installation.
posted on Jan 22, 2005 - 12 answers

Hope I'm not opening a can of worms here. I'm jumping into the Linux ring for the very first time. There are a ton of distributions and I was wondering if there were any that the community would recommend for a noob like myself. So far, I've downloaded Mandrake and RedHat images but there are a ton of other out there and I wonder if I'm missing something better? I'll be dual booting on a WinXP pro box (Intel) so I'm looking for something that is relatively easy to install in this situation.
posted on Jan 15, 2005 - 30 answers

Using Firefox with Linux. When I click a "mailto:" link, it automatically opens Evolution. How do I tell it to use Thunderbird instead? I didn't find any obvious settings in either the preferences or about:config.
posted on Jan 5, 2005 - 9 answers

Are any flavors of Linux currently more adept at exploiting the AMD64 chip than others? I know that Gentoo has a robust package available. Last I check with Debian, they had one version better suited for the Intel, but were working on AMD-specific one. To compound my problem, I hope to add VMWare once it's up and running (to run WindowsXP as a virtual 32-bit OS).
posted on Nov 26, 2004 - 9 answers

I need an ATA controller that fits in a short PCI slot, can control two 200GB drives (The Western Digital WD2000) and works extremely well under Linux. Any suggestions?
posted on Oct 13, 2004 - 5 answers

Perl, semaphores, linux, problems [mi]
posted on Oct 4, 2004 - 6 answers

Strange sounds from my computer: a beep, followed by a click, followed by a beep. Not at startup, but while I'm booted into Linux (but not Windows!).
posted on Jul 25, 2004 - 5 answers

I have a screwed up driver situation on my pc. I've tried everything i can think of, and i need help. it was suggested i look here.

Here's the PbP:

- My DVD player (Sony DDU1621) on my WinXP box wouldn't open. it would just whirr and blink, so i removed it, uninstalled it, and then reinstalled it.
- While I was checking the connections, i accidentally unplugged my harddrive ribbon. I had XP installed on the second drive in a daisy-chain, and when i replugged everything, my computer started up in win98. But my DVD drive worked.
-- The goal here was to install Linux, so i figured i didn't need XP anyway, and while i was downloading the linux iso (onto another box), i set out to totally clean out the harddrive that used to have XP on it, so i could get it ready for Linux.
-- Two hours later, i went to actually begin installing Linux, and suddenly the DVD drive won't open again.
-- I have now physically removed and replaced the DVD drive at least a dozen times. Sometimes the F drive shows up in My Computer, sometimes it doesn't. When it does show up, it still doesn't work (when i click on it it gives me an error alert saying there is a problem with the device).
- When it doesn't show up , i go to Install New Hardware, and it lists Sony Proprietary CD-Rom Controller. When I select it, i get an update window that says 'This device is already installed, but it has a problem.' There are no updates available (i'm not currently online and all of the networking software was installed into XP), and so i just click OK, and nothing has changed.
- I cannot find another driver for this device. I found something listed on DriverGuide, but it was just some batch that callibrates audio and video input.
- I found another DVD drive, this time a cheap one called a MadDog BKM-52X16, and i replaced it. but my win98 device manager doesn't detect it and still brings up the Sony Proprietary CD-Rom Controller as the only option when i run Install New Hardware.

so all i need is to get a cd drive recognized so i can either reinstall xp, or go ahead and install Linux -- both of which, of course, would solve the problem. but so long as i can't read a cd, i can't do either. so i'm stuck.

help would be deeply appreciated.
posted on May 1, 2004 - 4 answers