but now I have a few questions. If you've got links to this stuff online, feel free to just post them.... I get pretty exasperated with the millions of not-relevant results from goog et al any more.... (oh, did I remember to tell you about the superduper domain names I own for SEs - should I ever choose to start my own? reallyrelevantresults.com, .net, .org, .us, .info.... and be sure to let me know if you know someone who'd like to pay me a LOT of money for them! *laughing*)

Questions:

1. How do I make linux (which "sees" the vid card perfectly) allow me to run my dual monitors the way I do in windows, with same desktop background, different resolutions, and different windows open on each desktop? Right now, it's set up with 4 desktops but they're all identical, and the highest res I can get is 1024x768 (right now, I have one screen at 1600x1200 and the other one at 1280x1024 - the vid card will run both at 1600x1200, though the old monitor would probably fry....)

2. I have tried following the help screens/setup detail instructions for the modem. It finds the modem and dials my ISP, gets to feeding the login script instructions, but no matter what I give it for login scripting, it times out on username and then disconnects. The wizard doesn't include the US so that's not an option.... and I made sure to add in the *70 to disable call waiting.

3. How do I make the grub bootloader pause longer so when I need to go to windows I have time to do that? Sorry but I'm too slow and old to beat a 5 second delay....

I'm sure I'll think of other stuff eventually....
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Some of these questions are harder than others. I'll start with the easiest one:

Configuring grub boot loader [ read more].
Open the konsole window [task bar, konsole icon, the black and white tv]:
type:

You will now see the grub menu, pico is pretty easy to use, scroll down using the down arrow, you won't need to scroll far, until you see this:

Change the number to the seconds you want it to wait.

Hit ctrl + o to save it, writeout means save in pico. Pico will ask if you want to write to menu.lst, hit enter for yes.

That should do it I think.

Finding files in Linux
Note that the grub configuration file has a different name in Kanotix, Linux has an annoying habit of changing file names system to system, but overall it's pretty easy once you get used to the basic structures they use. In this case I knew that the boot stuff is in the, well, it gets obvious after a while, in the /boot directory. And since it's grub, you can pretty much guess it's in the /boot/grub directory. It takes a while to get used to a system that is actually logically ordered if you're coming from windows. Usually configuration files are in /etc by the way, except for boot stuff and some other exceptions.

Once I cd with cd /boot/grub I just get the directory contents with dir which you'll remember from DOS, or with ls, which is the more Unix way to do it. Same results though.

More generally, you can find all instances of a name in directories or files by running these commands:


This will return a list of all occurances on your box of that file/directory name. That can be useful too. You can filter it with grep.

For example:

will return all instances of grub file/ directories with 'boot' in them.

Note the use of the | [pipe] character, that feeds the results of the first part, locate grub, to grep, which then filters that set with boot. Fun fun.
Kanotix Dual Monitor setup
I'm not sure where Kano is on this yet, I don't have dual monitors, but my suspicion is that each release is getting better at this. You can read more on the subject on the Kanotix Forums.

I think this is one area that SUSE might be better out of the box, I seem to remember that, it has a built in x86 display configuration tool called SAX2, Yoper also uses that, and it makes this process a lot easier.

There are pluses and minuses to each distro, that's why it's good to find the one that fits your needs the best. But this being Linux, there is always a way to make something work, depends on how much time you can spend on it. I find the work I do solving issues generally teaches me a lot about the system, unlike on Windows, where the work I do is just lost time in terms of deepening my understanding of the underlying systems.

KDE desktop display settings.
I like naming my desktops, I use single characters. To give each desktop a different name, say M [main], W [web], E [email], G [graphics], and U [utilities], simply right click anywhere on your desktop and select 'configure desktop'. Click on 'Multiple desktops' to give each a unique name, and on 'background' to set the background color/image for each desktop, I find that helps a lot in terms of knowing right away which desktop you're on. For more fun, select the mousewheel on desktop to switch desktop option.

Modem Configuration
I've never used the built in Kanotix modem configuration tools, since I've never used a linux modem, but if you haven't already tried it, click the K on the taskbar, go down to 'Kanotix', select 'Modem', the select kppp, and use the gui to setup your account.

If you have problems with this, I'd think of posting on the english section of the Kanotix forums, here's one, from an older Kanotix version. Also search through their forums, use the 'category -> english forums' option in the searches by the way unless your german is workable, :-)
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Yah, the kppp gui is what I used, and what isn't actually "finishing working". I'll give the forums a try (after I finish this 15mb download - always fun on dialup, and with thunderstorms).

The virtual desktop thing will be fine, if I can figure out how to configure my dual screens.... another trip round the forums I guess. I was going to install SUSE anyway, so maybe that's the way I'll go eventually. I'm used to my duals, and WAY unwilling to go back to 1024x768 for developing.... I don't care what others say, I have to have my high res and graphics look RIGHT before I can "dumb them down" to lower resolutions....

I should be able to fix the time situation now, thanks again for clear instructions.
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Well, pico couldn't be found, and I had to change permissions on menu.lst, but logging in as root and tweaking through Kwrite worked fine....

Off to check the forums now for the other tweaks. Thanks!
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Oh, I forgot, pico doesn't always come with all distros. Nano does though, it's similar.

To find out if a program is available, you can type in one of these commands:
If it isn't available, it will tell you that.

Then it's time to move to option b, nano.

I see you fell for the windows solution to not being able to work on a root only writeable file, that's however not the correct way to go about it.

What you want to do is this:

Decide which editor you want to use, in your case you decided on kwrite.

Right click on desktop, select 'run command'.

The dialogue box will open, click the 'options', that will give you more options. In this case, click 'run as different user', then enter 'root' as user name, and enter your root password. In the 'command' field, enter the program name, say 'kwrite'. If you know the full path, you can also enter it at that point, say:
kwrite /boot/grub/menu.lst
Click OK, and kwrite will open in root mode, giving you full read/write permissions on any file on your system.

Let me know what the solution is for your modem. Modems and linux just aren't very closely related, though they can be made functional. This will probably be your biggest hurdle. If I were you I'd pick up that used modem I linked to in the hardware thread, I might get one of those too just to play around with it in Linux.
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Oh. I didn't say that right. I didn't change the permissions. I just opened the editor as root and it was fine. I knew if I was working as root I wouldn't have to change the permissions at all. Sorry - I just write sometimes as I think, shortcutting....

Is there some good reason for going through the "right click on desktop, run command" instead of opening Kwrite through the menu system and logging into it as root?
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I'm not sure I understand this question. How did you start Kwrite as root? Do you mean you're logged into your desktop as a whole as root? If so, that's frowned on, since it opens your entire system up to exploit.

One thing I like about Linux is how built in security is, you basically always run as user mode, except when you have to perform a specific task, then that single task runs as root mode.

Does the menu have an option to start kwrite in root mode, I didn't see that, maybe Kano added it though. There's a 'root terminal' option, but that starts the terminal in root mode after you supply the password.
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I started the root terminal, logged in, then started Kwrite from the menu option. At that point it allowed me to make changes to menu.lst and save them, which it had refused to do when I was logged in only as my "self-user".
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