[kde-doc-english] lots of questions

[Alyssa A. Lappen]

Dear Rinse--

Thank you for your kind assistance. I'll try to straight things out. The 
biggest problem, I think, will be to determine what I did wrong with the 
kernel installations and to fix them. 

I'm using Mandrake. I'm not sure what you mean by distribution; the computer 
itself is a Dell machine, but they have nothing to do with the software, 
which I bought separately.

There aren't any KDE viruses that I am aware; that was the point of buying 
into this, despite my novice status. But in any case, I do want to thank you 
with very much for the help you have given me. And I will certainly write to 
KDE about the Find mechanism; it's one of the things I used most heavily on 
Windows, and when my indexing system was hijacked I was screwed. Lost 2.5 
months of work, and God knows how much on computer "experts" whose only 
expertise was to run standard screens I could have done myself, which all 
came up with zip.

Except that I had extended hard drives that overshot every single boot 
mechanism, corrupted the system Bios and kept reinfecting the machine every 
time I reinstalled the Windows XP system. My biggest problem is that I 
learned too  much about a system I was forced to dump, and now have to start 
all over again.

Many gracious thanks for your kind help.

Best always--
Alyssa




On Wednesday 01 September 2004 05:26 pm, Rinse de Vries wrote:
> Op woensdag 1 september 2004 22:49, schreef Alyssa A. Lappen:
> > Dear Sirs--
> >
> > First I am thoroughly confused about how to make my system request a
> > password and user name upon boot, without also losing the ability to have
> > three options at logoff (those being 1) only end session 2) shut down, 3)
> > whatever the third option is, which I forget).
>
> Is simple, go in kcontrol to 'system administration->login manager' (or
> similar, I use Dutch version :)
> Open tabpage 'convenience' (last one)
> Remove the checkbox of the option "activate autologin"
>
> Save your settings.
> Now, next time you boot linux, the login manager will ask for your username
> and password.
>
> > I have tried using the desktop wizard, but this does nothing to resolve
> > this question.
>
> Correct, this is a system administrator option, not a user option :)
>
> > Neither do any of the instruction manuals I have seen so far
> > give nearly enough detail about these options.
>
> kdm has documentation, can't imagine that this part is not described in it.
> But if not, the new version will, i noticed that a complete new
> kdm-handbook is in cvs :)
>
> .
>
> > But I don't want to install a password at boot at the expense of losing
> > the ooption to shut down completely; that was what happened the last time
> > I changed password settings in the login manager section.
>
> You can tell in the login manager section of kcontrol who is allowed to
> shutdown the computer.
>
> > Additionally, I have been unable to resolve issues that have arisen from
> > the upgrade of the kernel I did this week. I now seem to have several
> > kernels on the system,
>
> more then one kernel on your system is no problem :)
>
> > and I have received an error when attempting to
> > access the "User Account" item from the KDE menu; it says "There was an
> > error loading the module; An error occured during your last KDE upgrade
> > leaving an orphaned control module" or "You have old third party modules
> > lying around."
>
> I guess you screwed up your installation.
>
> > It's possible I loaded more items than I should have, since kernels
> > cannot (horribly) be updated automatically,
>
> They can be updated automatically, depending on your distro :)
>
> > and those of us who are not computer
> > geeks are lost and out of luck.
>
> Again, depending on your distro
> I updated my kernel about 4 times nou on SuSE, just by a few mouseclicks on
> a system tray icon :)
>
> > I felt great that I managed to upgrade the
> > kernel. Wow! But Lord, I have no idea how to fix "orphan modules" or
> > "third party" modules much less find them.
>
> The modules kcontrol speaks about are not releated to your kernel, they are
> configuration modules of kde.
> kde is no part of Linux itself.
>
> > I have no idea what they are! Simply
> > instructing me to "check these points carefully," as the details of the
> > error message note, is about as useless an instruction as they come. Like
> > HOW?????? (Especially since my "find" program also does not work.
>
> that is correct, 'kfind' in mandrake is broken. Please contact mandrake
> about this.
>
> > Another question is why "Dr web" has come up as a user? It's a virus
> > program, isn't it? Not a user? But after I installed that program, Dr.
> > Web appeared as a user, and I can't get rid of it.
>
> Dunno which program you installed, but Linux often has more then 20 users,
> although youre the only one using the machine :)
> The other users are used to give certain systemapplications permissions to
> do something, and to avoid that they can do harm to your system.
>
> >  Other than that, I'd like to thing that KDE might be better than
> > suffering virus attacks every five minutes on Windows.
>
> Name one kde-virus :)
>
> > But trying to figure of "Geek"
> > instructions is taking up way too much time at this point, and
> > distracting me from the work I got this computer to do--WRITE (not about
> > technology, but journalism.)
>
> Like with all systems, you should read the manual to be able to use it.
> Please check the manuals of your distribution. If it is too geeky, please
> try another distribution with better handbooks.
>
> > And finally, there are the questions of how to make multi-media run,
>
> check the manual
> i make multi-media run by clicking on it :)
> But again, that depends on your linux distribution.
>
> > and
> > how to extract a tar ball, whatever that is.
>
> Click on it :)
> a tar ball is an archive: you can roughly compare it with WinZip.
>
> > Downloading new upgrades to my
> > desktop is proving fairly useless since I have no idea how to extract or
> > execute files, or where in the tree they are supposed to go.
>
> On mandrake: to install for example the mozilla browser, type:
> urmpi mozilla
>
> You don't have to bother about anything, urpmi installs mozilla for you on
> the right place, and creates start menu entries.
>
> Other distributions have similar mechanisms.
>
> Again, check the manual of your distribution.
>
> > Many thanks in advance for any assistance you can offer. I am slightly
> > desperate.
>
> Well, this is the wrong mailinglists for those kind of questions.
> Please checkout the website of the Linux distribution youre using for
> mailinglists and fora that can help you with your questions.
>
> Kind regards, Rinse