Finally Installed Linux... let my questions begin.

Well I just installed Red Hat 8.0 today

Its pretty nice.

Here is my computer setup.

Its dual booted with Windows XP.


hda1: DOS/ Win XP FAT
hda2: Red Hat EXT3
had3-5: other partions for linux

hdb: a drive with files on it FAT

is there a way to share the HDB so i can read the files while in Red Hat


also does MS make drivers for Linux, I got a MS mouse.

yes. you can mount it in linux for FAT you can even do read and write. (for NTFS is read-only in linux...)
you should not access /dev/hdb directly as i assume you have put at least one partition on it.
"fdisk -l /dev/hdb" to find the partition number (probably "1")
then:
"mkdir /windows_d"
"mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /windows_d"

linux is the strongest enemy of MS, i doubt they will ever do anything positive for linux.
sadly there is few hardware manufacturers that supply (working) linux drivers. So most drivers are written by the Linux Kernel Hackers or the XFree guys (graphics cards), i.e. they already come with the system

for mice, no problem. it will work.

read redhat´s supported hardware list for other stuff.

M.Hirsh thanks..i will try that to mount the drive.

Well the only reason i want the drivers is so i can use the scroll wheel.. ok windows spoiled me.. i want the scroll option.. and my mouse has the extra two buttons i would like to use.. oh well maybe i can try to code something to make it work.. but that seems like soo much work..

No, it´s easy. No need for own programming.
1. see "man 5 XF86Config"
2. edit /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XF86Config (or maybe /etc/XF86Config, not sure where is is on redhat, try "find / -name XF86Config")
3. use "imwheel" or "ps2im" or similar as driver, this is the driver for wheel mice. maybe you have to start the driver BEFORE you start X, but not sure (it has been a long time...)
the "im" afaik refers to "IntelliMouse", MS´s fist wheel mouse.

from my mind:
there is a section "Input Device" that refers to your mouse.
add these lines there:

buttons 7
z-axis-mapping 3 4

look up the right syntax yourself. for the numbers, you have to do some tests. the "7" refers to all buttons+2 (wheel up/down) and the numbers of the z-axis-mapping to the two "buttons" that signal wheel up/down.

from my experience, the driver seems to assign buttons 0-2 to the "standard" buttons, 3 and 4 are wheel up/down and 5,6,7,... are the additional buttons.

Just run mouseconfig and select the Microsoft Intellimouse to get support for the wheel. I'm not sure about the extra buttons though.

RH 8.0 has complete support for the latest browsers. I have an ms wireless intellimouse optical optical and it works fine on linux.

You should have been given the option to select the correct mouse when you installed linux.

One side note though, when you use the extra buttons, they will not work as expected. Mozilla and other browsers do not use the same commands for back and forward as IE does, so this will provide unexpected results while using them.

Shocka, I help maintain a web site you might be interested in. It has lots of articles and tutorials that aim to teach you some fundamentals, that will then help you learn more interesting stuff. They include things like an explanation of the filesystemm, including what all the different directories are for, and so on.

There's also a nice tutorial on how to magae different storage devices and partitions, as well as one on how to use Windows alongside GNU/Linux.

The site is http://www.newtolinux.org.uk . Enjoy

I'm not sure about this, but if your XP uses the ntfs file system, you might have trouble mounting it - I'm just not sure about levels of ntfs support with different kernel versions.

FAT32 is fine though. What does XP use as default anyway?

christo (thinking out loud)

xp by default uses fat32. You can convert to ntfs if you have enough space to do so.

As far as mounting to ntfs, I haven't tried using the newest kernal, but previous versions did not have that option compiled into it. You have to rebuild the kernal with this option before it will recognize that filesystem type. It is also in read-only format. Writing to ntfs from linux is currently unstable.

well my XP is on FAT32 so is my slave drive. I got the slcve drive mounted. I have no need to mount the XP drive.

As a default on install XP wants NTFS, but i choose FAT32,, why i dunno i just did