I have four C/D's, Two installed the o/s, the other two I have no clue what to do with. There may even be a media player on the discs My newbieness is the cause of most of my problems I think.

You "newbieness" shines through like a beacon. :)

I will try to set up the yum. I need to know how to open or, get to, /etc/yum.conf so that I can paste the infomation to it.

OK. Here's some tips. A lot of the time you have to get your hands dirty on the command line in Linux. In fact long time users like myself do nearly everything at the command line even if we live in a "Desktop Environment" like GNOME or KDE (in my case I use GNOME). You have probably mastered starting a terminal in GNOME or KDE. You should find it in System Tools->Terminal on a Fedora System. It would be wise to learn your shell. A shell is the program that gets run when you login at a text mode virtual term or when you create a "Terminal" in X. By default in Fedora your shell should be bash. Or the Bourne Again SHell. This is not the only shell available on a Unix-like OS. Others include tcsh, ksh, ash and zsh. Bash is by far the most common though. You can even get a lot of these shells for Windows to run instead of CMD.EXE (or COMMAND.COM if you still use Win98 or below). Anyway, the most useful thing to know about bash are the following things. 1. The command history. Use the up and down arrow keys to navigate your command history. The history is stored in a file called .bash_history in your home directory. You can also search your command history with CTRL-R to do a reverse search. Just press CTRL-R and then start typing some of a previous command and it will fill the command line. Press CTRL-R again to find the next previous match. 2. Tab completion. By default bash will auto-complete paths and files if you type the beginning of the filename and press tab. Eg, typing cd /home/o<tab> expands to cd /home/oliver. If there are multiple options to a path eg, if I type cd /usr/l<tab> bash just beeps. I can press tab again and bash will print out all the available options. eg: [oliver] luna:~$ ls /usr/l<tab><tab> lib libexec local lost+found [oliver] luna:~$ ls /usr/l If it doesn't print out anything then that means there are no files beginning with l in that directory. Tab will also autocomplete executables on your "path". Eg, I can type em<tab> at the command line and bash auto-completes that to emacs. Tab saves you a lot of typing at the command line. 3. Starting programs in the background. If you use X and you want to start another GUI application from a terminal you should start it in the background. You do this by following the command with an ampersand (&). Eg: emacs& starts emacs in the background. Emacs uses a GUI if you start it in X. Starting X apps at the command line requires you to use an & so you can continue to use the terminal you started. Otherwise you have to wait for the app to finish before you can use the terminal again. Well this isn't entirely true. Most apps let you press CTRL-Z and to "pause" them and return you to the terminal. You can then type "bg" to background the app. This is helpful if you forget to use & to begin with. Eg: [oliver] luna:~$ emacs <CTRL-Z> [1]+ Stopped emacs [oliver] luna:~$ bg [1]+ emacs & [oliver] luna:~$ Conversly you can use "fg" to forground a backgrounded app. This is very useful in single use mode. Eg: [oliver] luna:~$ vi test <CTRL-Z> [1]+ Stopped vim test [oliver] luna:~$ vi test2 <CTRL-Z> [2]+ Stopped vim test2 [oliver] luna:~$ fg 1 ^^^ This returns me to the first app I "paused". I can continue to switch backwards and forwards as much as I like. This is a contrived example but it is useful to know some of these more "advanced" features. For more info on bash and how to use it best see some of these pages, or search Google for "bash tutorial". http://www.hypexr.org/bash_tutorial.shtml http://tille.soti.org/training/bash/index-normal.html As mentioned previously on this list many system admin tasks require root privileges. To get root privileges you need to "switch user" with the su command. su allows you to switch to any user you know the password of. By default su switches to root if you don't specify a username. Editing files in /etc, installing RPMS, changing pretty much anything outside of your home directory or the /tmp and /var/tmp directories requires root privileges. Use the following command to switch to root: su - To switch to another user just append their username to the command, eg: su - bob The - in the command tells su to "login" as the user you're switching to. This tells su to get the shell it invokes to run the login scripts like /etc/profile and your .bashrc. If it doesn't "login" then the paths and environment for the user you're switching to are not setup and particularly with root that can be annoying because only root has /sbin and /usr/sbin in their executable path. And when you're switching to root you usually want to run something in /sbin or /usr/sbin. Though sometimes you want to carry over your existing environment to the new user so there are times when leaving off the - can be useful. But that are less common. Another thing you will need to learn to do is use a text editor as most Linux config files are just text files you can edit. Most Linux systems come with a plethora of text editors. Probably the most commonly used editors are vi and emacs. Both of these editors are esoteric and very different from Windows notepad. Both require you to learn key commands to operate them on a text term. Key commands that will make little or no sense to a Windows user. Learning them is useful though because there are times when you can't use X and you need to use an editor that doesn't have a "GUI". Learning the basic commands for both is pretty easy. Here are some tutorial sites (found by searching Google for "emacs tutorial" and "vi tutorial"): http://www.thomer.com/vi/vi.html http://www.futureone.com/~sponge/tutorial/emacs/index.html You can also have the programs themselves teach you how to use them. To do so start emacs via Programming->Emacs or "emacs &" at the command line. If you're in X then you get a GUI with menu choices. You can just choose Emacs Tutorial from the Help menu. Or you can type CTRL-h t. That is hold down Ctrl press H, let go of Ctrl and press T. For a tutorial on vi type vimtutor at a command line. vim is the actual command name for vi on most Linux systems. vim stands for Vi IMproved. Note that emacs and vim tell you to use weird keys to navigate around. Eg, vim says to use hjkl to move the cursor. While this works you can also use the arrow keys, page up and page down etc. Though there is a bug in Fedora Core 2 that stops arrow keys from working in VIM. You need to install the vim-common RPM for vim to work properly. It doesn't get installed by default. This is a known bug in FC2. VIM doesn't start with a GUI interface by default in X like Emacs does. You need to start it manually with gvim if you want a GUI. This GUI is only available if you've installed the vim-X11 rpm package. Also, emacs comes in two varieties. Standard GNU Emacs and XEmacs. XEmacs is a fork of GNU Emacs. Emacs has a rather sordid development history. XEmacs is often installed on RedHat/Fedora systems and some people prefer it as it has a slightly better GUI under X. There is little difference between them in a text term. You can start XEmacs (if it is installed) by using "xemacs&" on the command line or choosing Programming->More Programming Tools->XEmacs in the GNOME menus. Also, if you want to take the easy road you should be able to use gedit which is a simple GNOME Text Editor. It's very simple to use. Like notepad in Windows but a bit more powerful. Just be aware that it doesn't work when you're not in X. So it is best to learn a text based editor so you can edit files when logged in remotely (via ssh) to a machine or you're not running X. You can start it by executing "gedit&" at the command line or via Accessories->Text Editor in GNOME.

My original plan was to download xine because the Australian Linux journal said it was an easy install and a good programme, then came all the dependancies and confusing stuff so I went for what I thought was an easier option, Hmmnn!

Xine is indeed very good. The GNOME based Totem video player uses Xine under the hood. Xine's default GUI isn't so easy to use so Totem can be nicer for Newbies. I use Xine a lot to view Windows Media, MPEGs and the like. It can even use Windows codecs via Wine-like DLL loading so you can play Quicktime and stuff. As mentioned previously on the list the yum.conf at http://www.fedorafaq.org/samples/yum.conf is useful for getting packages (including Xine and co). A combination of Livna.org and FreshRPMs is probably what you need to get most of the video playback stuff you need via yum. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com