need a LAAL BUJHAKKAD CHACHA for FC4 newbie

[tech_cheetah]

hi friends !!
Do u remember 'laal bhujakkad chacha' on doordarshan ?? some of u might have seen the serial in ur childhood. Well .. he was a bearded old fellow whom two kids approached whenever they had any query pertaining to how things work .
I am also feeling the need to have someone like him to answer my queries on Fedora Core 4.

Being a new user of linux, i am facing a hell lot of problems.Here i present some of my queries.

I have Windows Xp on C: and FC4 on D: partition.

Red Hat and Fedora Core 4 :
Whats relation between Red Hat linux and Fedora Core 4 ?
Earlier none of linux flavours supported my Aureal Sound card.Now FC4 supports it.So can i expect RedHat linux to support it now ? and what about other linux flavours like SuSe,Mandrake etc. ?
Is Redhat linux built on FC4 ? if yes then which version of REdHat is based upon the latest FC4?
I have heard about Red Hat Bible which is shipped along with CDs of Red Hat linux (costing around Rs 400 -500).I want to compile the kernel on my own.So should i buy the Red Hat Bible ? Where else can i get information about compiling the latest FC4 kernel ?

Xine :
FC4 amounts to zero if we see the multimedia support on it.It neither supports mpg,rm,mov or any other popular video format and forget playing mp3.The whole bunch of media players shipped are just useless.I dont know how they are going to give competition to Windows when no media runs on their OS.For a new user multimedia is the only attraction on any OS (bcoz playing music and movies is a child's play).
After fulfilling the plethora of dependencies of libxine,finally i was successful in installing xine.But the interface look very poor as u can see in the screenshot the munus are all overlapping and fonts are not properly displayed.Is this the true picture or some problem in installing xine led to this pathetic show ?Is it necesssary to install lib of some software (like libxine) ? will xine not work without lib ?

*www.geocities.com/coolshirazonline/snap.jpg

With numerous difficulties i installed mplayer(in 12 days after seeking help in many forums) and i think it is one of the best media players in the world.With support of all the video formats which one can possibly come across and nice skins it is worth trying.

Swap partition :
While installing FC4 i could not partition a 'swap' partition and could manage only the '/' partition on one of the four partitions of my hard disk.Now i want to know can i create a 'swap' partition with a 3rd party utility (like partition magic or FDISK) ? and how can i configure FC4 to use that partition as 'swap' space ? Or can i partition the present '/' partition into '/' and 'swap' without formatting or installing FC4 again ?

Gnome and KDE :
Using system monitor i was astounded to see that out of 384MB of my RAM ,KDE was using whole of it and just 6-7MB was free !!! There are so many processes running.I dont know which are necessary and which are useless .How can i reduce the memory usage in KDE ?
In Windows XP only 150 MB ram is used normally( I checked it out on my system). How will KDE run on 128 MB ram PC ?
Plz tell me how to free the memory so that other big programs like Gimp,Eclipse can run on it ?(remember i have no swap space)
Gnome is very light as compared to KDE and eats only 150 MB ram just like XP.
Are there some other desktop managers (like Gnome,KDE) which can be installed on Fedora Core 4

 

[ujjwal]

Adding a swap partition, check this page for a guide.

Regarding the messed up xine interface, perhaps the xlib skin is not working well with your resolution, I would recommend trying a better interface/frontend for xine, gxine is a popular GTK+2 interface, which will look like the other Gnome applications you use.

KDE and Gnome are both pretty resource intensive, if you are concerned about memory or resource usage, try something lighter, like XFCE. A word here, generally it is not a problem to have 7-8MB free memory at a time. The linux kernel will try to allocate more memory to each process if it finds that there is enough available, such that they can work faster. If you have 150MB free memory at all times, it would be wasted memory. However, you can dramatically reduce memory usage if you wish, on my 128MB RAM, I generally have about 10-20MB free, with Opera and a few apps running.

EDIT -

Regarding the Fedora and redhat thingy, a few years back, redhat discontinued their desktop redhat linux edition, and concentrated on their enterprise linux. They formed the fedora project, which was a community maintained distribution. Its mainly a test bed for the features which will be incorporated into the commercial Redhat Enterprise Linux.

Oh yes, if some hardware of yours is supported by fedora core 4, it will be supported by every recent distribution. Device support is incorporated into the kernel, and does not depend on the distribution. But yes, some distributions may not automatically detect/setup the device for you.

 

[Satissh S]

Why are the media players such as totem , Xine ,amarok ,mp3 player etc are not playing anything despite being music players and videoplayer. Only Noatun works and that too plays it very scratcily skipping severel seconds.
The media capabilities are dissapointing. Though i heard in Di9it that linux is poor at Multimedia applications, i thought atleast it can play some songs.

 

[ujjwal]

Satissh, that sure sounds as if your sound card is not set up properly, are other sounds, like system sounds in Gnome/KDE, working properly? Also, unfortunately Fedora removed MP3 support from all its multimedia programs, so you may need to download and install another player (mplayer is nice) or get plugins for your existing ones, to play MP3 files.

But rest assured, linux's multimedia capabilities lie beyond playing a few songs

 

[QwertyManiac]

I have a problem installin the digit given Mplayer..
While compiling the TAR, it says that the Gcc is blacklisted or somethin and will not install..
HElp !

 

[Satissh S]

Why are the media players such as totem , Xine ,amarok ,mp3 player etc are not playing anything despite being music players and videoplayer. Only Noatun works and that too plays it very scratcily skipping severel seconds.
The media capabilities are dissapointing. Though i heard in Di9it that linux is poor at Multimedia applications, i thought atleast it can play some songs.

Hi! I take back my words. I installed da 2 CD version of Xandros frm my friend. Everything was superb! Xine , Noatun ,Totem. They even played my Divx movies though the quality was n't that good. I am totally impressed with Xandros.

Another query abt Noatun : It doesn't play wma songs well (Scratchingly). can i install any pluggins to make it play.

 

[tech_cheetah]

i got solution for the swap problem and created the swap file.
Now tell me if i can install other desktop managers on FC4?
And there are so many processes running on kde which i dont utilise like it starts redhat network support,printer support,sendmail etc. i m not using these things .How can i stop these services ? In windows there was msconfig ,what is fc4 counterpart ?
Also plz can anyone tell where i can get some idea about variuos processess like cups,daemons etc.

 

[QwertyManiac]

heres a wiki on that
*en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computer_software)

daemons are backgrnd runnin softies...

U already have GNOME , KDE, XFCE in FC4 ,
what more do u want ?
CUPS
Common UNIX printing system
*www.cups.org/

I dont think those KDE items affect the rate of ur proccy...

 

[tech_cheetah]

oh man i need a tutorial kindathing on all the processes going on.
I want to stop useless processess as i mentioned above.
They all occupy 350MB of my 384MB ram in KDE.
i want to free the resources but know nothing about the various processes going on .
I didn't noticed XFCE .. whts dat ?
let me check it out today

and do help me configure my tvtuner card on this thread
*www.thinkdigit.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=26902

 

[QwertyManiac]

heres a google :
*www.google.co.in/search?q=stopping...ient=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

 

[ujjwal]

I believe Redhat ships a utility called ntsysv for configuring services. Invoke it in a shell as root and uncheck what you don't need (by using the space key). Alternatively, read man chkconfig and use it for the same purpose.

As for XFCE, its a (comparitively) light desktop environment, will take less memory than Gnome or KDE. Try installing it using yum, the redhat package manager, or get it from www.xfce.org

 

[Saahib]

Good to see many people knowing about linux.. !!..

Good going.
Not thinking to comment more !

 

[tech_cheetah]

I feel there is no help available on linux anywhere
U have to try urself to fix the things.
After many "trial and error" attempts ,finally my tv tuner card has started working on linux.
It took me 20 days !!!
and so many hours !!! in trying different combinations of card and tuner types.
Now i m back with a new query
When i try playing VCD in mplayer or XINE it gives error " seek failure"
.Even individual files can not be opened from the folder MPEGAV.
What to do ?

 

[vignesh]

Linux help is everywhere if you know where to look.