Re: [TCLUG:15841] 3 Newbie Questions

[Daniel Taylor <dante@plethora.net>]

If you need clarification on any of the answers below you may e-mail
me privately or to the list if folks don't mind.

On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, Chad Davidson wrote:

> I just installed Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 and am very new to Linux.  I have
> three questions that I hope will be easy to answer:
> 
> 1.  I installed from my CD-ROM drive so my floppy was not used in the
> installation.  When I mount a floppy disk, I can see the contents, but
> if I try to open anything on the floppy (or even copy files to or from
> it) my computer freezes.  Do I have something configured wrong or is my
> floppy drive bad?  Is there some way I can unfreeze it?  (I tried
> Ctrl-Alt-Del and Ctrl-Alt-F1.)
>
"cat /proc/interrupts" to check and see if you have an interrupt conflict
with your sound card or a similar device.
An interrupt conflict _would have this effect.
 
> 2.  I have 64 MB of RAM and a 450 MHz AMD K-6 processor.  I am using
> KDE.  When I use the Task Manager (or free) to monitor how much RAM I am
> using, I see that I am using about 56 MB of RAM when I have no
> applications running.  If I try to open any application, it seems to run
> very slowly (I assume because it is using swap RAM).  Is 64 MB of RAM
> enough for basic operation (using KDE with StarOffice and GIMP)?  Is
> there something I can do to speed things up?  Do I have KDE
> misconfigured in such a way that it uses too much RAM?
>
64MB should be plenty except for GIMP with large files.
Don't forget that a lot of the 56M used is caches that get
tossed as soon as the memory is needed by applications.
 
> 3.  I now want to install a 3Com 905 10/100 NIC card.  How do I find out
> the required software drivers/packages to install?  Are these packages
> on my OpenLinux CD? (I hope so because I cannot get my floppy to work,
> see #1 above)
>
If the card is not autodetected by your installed kernel, there
should be a module 3c905.o in /lib/modules/[somewhere under here]
or on the CD.  This is a standard Eth card so the drivers are probably
already installed.
 

Daniel Taylor