SuSe 9.0 Pro - minor anomalies, help needed.

[Ruaridh]

Hi everybody

I'm not new to Cyber Tech, but I am new to the Linux forum. I have some questions about relatively minor issues and would be grateful for hints and tips and even for RTFM (but please tell me how to RTFM).

OS: SuSE 9.0 Pro (12GB partition) running parallel to Win XP Home (no problems there!)

1. The monitor display is very fuzzy. My monitor (Illyama 19" CRT) was correctly recognized by Yast2. I set the screen resolution, but I can't find a manual setting for the monitor refresh rate. It is set automatically at 85Hz, which I think is too high. If I could reduce it to 75Hz, the picture would be clearer. Any hints as to what to do?

2. When I click on the help, I get an egg timer for about 3 minutes and then nothing happens. If I then continue doing what I was doing before I clicked on the help, the help screen appears after a while. However, when I use it the page often jumps back to the start page while I'm trying to read something. This is v. annoying. What could the problem be?

3. Anyone know how to get Linux to recognize a USB flash memory stick? I stuck it in the socket and computer beeped, which means that something must have been recognized, but I have no idea where to look or what to do in order to 'install' the stick or address it or find it or whatever.

Many thanks for your advice on these little problems. As a small contribution for other Linux newbies, I recommend the following:
Learning the shell
It's a BASH tutorial for total beginners. It is very extensive indeed and offers huge resources (the complete man pages as HTML for example). I've downloaded the entire site (26MB) in order to work through it locally.

Ruaridh

[twistedcranium]

Hello Ruaridh, welcome to the Linux Forum!

I only have a moment to post right now but I wanted to point out another thread that might help a little with item #3 above, regarding the USB Flash Memory Stick.

http://www.cybertechhelp.com/forums/...ad.php?t=21111

Give that a look over and see if it helps any. I'll be back later today to help tackle the other issues. Although, cool as the 'linux-lovers' in here are, someone else will come along before me and help out.

[Ruaridh]

Thanks for that, Twisted.

I had a look under Yast/hardware and the flash stick is listed as an SCSI usb device under /dev/sda, just as you said. So I logged in as root and went to dev/sda, but it asks me what I want to open it with. Hmm - how did you "check the /dev items" as you said?

I can see I'm stumbling at even the lowest of hurdles.

Thanks for your patience

Ruaridh

[twistedcranium]

Good question! LOL After re-reading that, I couldn't remember for anything how I exactly came across the fact that it was on /dev/sda1.

So let's approach this academically:

first thing to try would be to open a terminal and as root type
hwbrowser

*now this should bring up a gui based hardware browser. It may only be a RedHat application so if you type it and get an unrecognized file error that would be the case.*

If it does come up, then plug in your flashdrive and go to the HARD DRIVES section of the hardware browser. It will likely list the storage device below all the other hard drives in your system. Mine reads a device under /dev/sda and then specifically at sda1.

Try this out and if no luck at finding it we can try another method.

[twistedcranium]

Once we verify its exact location under /dev/sda then we can setup your mounts

[Ruaridh]

Originally Posted by twistedcranium

Once we verify its exact location under /dev/sda then we can setup your mounts

Hi Twisted

Couldn't get back in touch the last couple of days. Anyway, where were we - oh yes, /dev/sda ...

I've been trying to get up to speed with Linux and some of the concepts. It's actually not difficult - it's just a paradigm shift and one which will take time as it involves vast quantities of information. However, having spent a great deal of time fooling around with WAMP in the past two years, it should be possible in my case.

hwbrowser is not a feature of SuSe, I'm afraid. The packages included in my distribution are listed here. There are two packages which might be of interest: 1. usbutils =0.11; 2. usbview 1.0. Not sure what to do with those.

So ... if I open BASH and do

ls -a /dev/sda

, will that show me what I want? Can I then do what you suggested?:

Originally Posted by twistedcranium

mkdir /mnt/cruzer

I then mounted the device with
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/cruzer

After that I was able to view, add, and modify files to the device.

To finish off the setup I added the following line to /etc/fstab
/dev/sda1 /mnt/cruzer vfat noauto,user 0 0
to allow the device to be mountable by any user.

Btw., in my admin handbook, vfat is listed as the setting for windows partitions (FAT32, right?), but does that cover flash memory? I suppose it must do since it worked for you and these USB sticks are automatically recognized by Win9x/2K/XP.

We live to learn

Ruaridh