Beginning Linux?

  • Thread starter Thread starter WhoAmI
  • Start date Start date
I understand your frustration here. I haven't played with cygwin for a
long time. You've got to understand that cygwin is not a 'real' or
'typical' linux distribution. I really think you'd be way ahead to install
a real linux on your computer and dual boot. This can be done quite easily
with, for example, Mandrake or Knoppix. It would make life a lot simpler
since all the stuff you referenced above will already be installed.

BTW gcc is the standard GNU C/C++ compiler. QT is a toolkit for building
graphical user interfaces.
 
WhoAmI said:
Fine and dandy I thought because Win Explorer shows that
"C:\cygwin\usr\bin" contains my djvu files - in particular
djvm.exe - the file I want to use.

So?

"ls /usr" - shows a list a directories which matches precisely
that given by DOS "dir C:\cygwin\usr"

but .... "ls /usr/bin" gives an entirely DIFFERENT directory
list to that given by DOS "DIR C:\cygwin\usr\bin". The DOS dir
shows the djvulibre program files. The cygwin command shows an
entirely different set of files!
Click to expand...

Try executing the df command. It should tell you how things are mapped.
Here is my listing as an example.

$ df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
J:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\lib\X11\fonts
19631428 10340316 9291112 53%
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts

J:\cygwin\bin 19631428 10340316 9291112 53% /usr/bin
J:\cygwin\lib 19631428 10340316 9291112 53% /usr/lib
J:\cygwin 19631428 10340316 9291112 53% /
c: 19470748 10617752 8852996 55% /cygdrive/c
e: 19583232 8104400 11478832 42% /cygdrive/e
f: 58605088 45500988 13104100 78% /cygdrive/f
g: 58613152 47036104 11577048 81% /cygdrive/g
i: 19454712 11828232 7626480 61% /cygdrive/i
j: 19631428 10340316 9291112 53% /cygdrive/j
 
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:01:29 -0400, peter volsted
Hi,


3) The manual is a bit cryptic It says:

:: The following packages are required by the src build:
:: qt-3.0.4-b1.tar.bz2 (available from http://cygwin.kde.org/qt/ )
:: gcc2-2.95.3-10.tar.bz2 (available from http://www.cygwin.com )
:: jpeg-6b-7.tar.bz2 (available from http://www.cygwin.com )
::
:: However, you can achieve a partual build with any version of
:: gcc installed and none of these other tools.

and that's just about all it says - it doesn't give a name for
those packages - just the compressed file name.

The version I downloaded was not source - it was already built.
Click to expand...

The above three packages are used if you want to build the application
directly from the source code. The packages are:

- qt-3.0.4 : this is a cross-platform application development framework
(much like MFC in a pure windows world). You can read more about QT
at www.trolltech.com

- gcc2-2.95 : this is the GNU compiler collection (thus gcc). The
collection contains a C, C++, Objective-C, Java and Fortran compiler.
The home page for gcc is gcc.gnu.org. As a side note, the 2.95 version
was never an official release for gcc and maintainers of gcc do not
recommend it for production use.

- jpeg-6b-7 : this is a library for the manipulation of jpeg images. I
do not have a URL handy for this one.

If you are serious in building the application from source code, I would
stick with the most recent versions of the packages - especially the
compiler. I am not even sure that the newer versions of QT will compile
with gcc-2.95.
Now you wonder why people are put off Linux ?
Click to expand...

Remember that you are using a `bastard' flavor of Linux (and I even
hesitate to call cygwin that). Cygwin is an emulator that allows Linux
applications to run under windows.

Also, as others have suggested, using a normal Linux system will ease your
problems quite a bit. For example, on my Fedora core 2 system, the
following packages were supplied:
qt-3.3.2-2
gcc-3.3.3-7
libjpeg-6b-31

From what I can see from your posts, most of your problems are arising
from trying to integrate cygwin into the windows environment - especially
the handling of file locataions and paths.

Again, as others have suggested - try a live CD or a dual boot system, I
think that many of your problems will disappear

George
 
In comp.os.linux.setup WhoAmI said:
[..]

Now you wonder why people are put off Linux ?
Click to expand...

From the thread, you didn't used Linux at all but run cygwin on
M$. Please install Linux, retry and feel free to come back if
problems persist. Right now your questions are OT.

Good luck
 
I understand your frustration here. I haven't played with cygwin for a
long time. You've got to understand that cygwin is not a 'real' or
'typical' linux distribution. I really think you'd be way ahead to install
a real linux on your computer and dual boot.
Click to expand...

Thanks Ray, but I have no intention of dual-booting anything -
ever. I'm too paranoid about what might go wrong. I have a home
network here and will install linux on an older PC. I think the
Knoppix distribution on a single CD looks good. I also need
djvulibre, mono and pennMUSH and I'm guessing that those 3 will
be the only apps that Knoppix won't already have. Ease of
installation and integration with my existing Windows network is
more important to me than getting every Linux app - although I
would like it to have mySQL, postgreSQL, Apache, PHP installed
as standard - it will be a development machine. Is Knoppix
still OK for that?
 
Jean-David Beyer schreef:
If you want to use GUI interface to Linux, you should probably have
192 to 256 Megabytes of RAM (or more) to do it. I know you can get by
with a lot less if you do not want to use the GUI interfaces, but I
never tried it.
Click to expand...

I have an old laptop, Pentium-MMX 166MHz 64MiB RAM, and it runs a GUI
without any problems. I used the XFce4 desktop with GTK2 (Firefox,
AbiWord, SciTE, ...) & some console applications on it.

(I have used this configuration several times on different linux distros,
but my CRUX setup had a startup time from power-on to the desktop of less
than 30 seconds, entering my login & password included... :-)
 
WhoAmI said:
Thanks Ray, but I have no intention of dual-booting anything -
ever. I'm too paranoid about what might go wrong. I have a home
network here and will install linux on an older PC. I think the
Knoppix distribution on a single CD looks good. I also need
djvulibre, mono and pennMUSH and I'm guessing that those 3 will
be the only apps that Knoppix won't already have. Ease of
installation and integration with my existing Windows network is
more important to me than getting every Linux app - although I
would like it to have mySQL, postgreSQL, Apache, PHP installed
as standard - it will be a development machine. Is Knoppix
still OK for that?
Click to expand...

As far as I recall, Knoppix automatically loads up Apache anyway. I
don't know about mySQL and the other stuff.

What's really convenient is that Knoppix is derived from Debian. So, you
can go to the Debian website, find out which package a file is in, then type
apt-get install <package>
This will automatically download the package that you need for
mySQL/posgreSQL/whatever, and install it, together with any dependencies.

How cool is that?

You'd need to install Knoppix to your hard drive first, though.
 
Thanks Ray, but I have no intention of dual-booting anything -
ever. I'm too paranoid about what might go wrong. I have a home
network here and will install linux on an older PC. I think the
Knoppix distribution on a single CD looks good. I also need
djvulibre, mono and pennMUSH and I'm guessing that those 3 will
be the only apps that Knoppix won't already have. Ease of
installation and integration with my existing Windows network is
more important to me than getting every Linux app - although I
would like it to have mySQL, postgreSQL, Apache, PHP installed
as standard - it will be a development machine. Is Knoppix
still OK for that?
Click to expand...

I can understand your reluctance, but I've set up SuSE and Mandrake to
dual boot on several machines (with win98 and win2k). The installation is
easy to do and it will automatically set up the dual boot - even to the
point of adding the MS partition to the list of mounted partitions in the
linux setup. The biggest kicker seems to be that it's really good to do a
disk defrag on the MS partition before starting the linux install. Both
SuSE and Mandrake have good partitioning tools to deal with repartitioning
of the hard disk.

Knoppix would certainly be a fine distro to install. If you're dealing
with really old equipment, I'd suggest reading about VECTOR linux at
www.distrowatch.com - it's forte is older equipment.

If you have the chance, it might be good to do a MS install on another
machine and then do a linux dual boot install after, just to build your
confidence.
 
Cousin WhoAmI ....

A primary advantage of many Linux distributions
is that their included package management systems
may already be aware of and able to easily install
desired software that is not currently installed ....

For example, the Debian GNU/Linux system
that I use is well aware of the djvulibre package
that you are interested in and most likely other
Linux distributions will be as well ....

A user seeking to install a particular software package
in a particular OS might ask the following questions ....

o Is the OS aware of the desired package ?
o Is the desired package currently installed ?
o Is a description of package particulars available ?
o How is the package installed ?

Using the Debian GNU/Linux apt package management system
answers to these questions might be ascertained as follows ....

o Is the OS aware of the desired package ?

# apt-cache search package-name

# apt-cache search djvulibre


o Is the desired package currently installed ?

# apt-cache policy package-name

# apt-cache policy djvulibre-plugin


o Is a description of package particulars available ?

# apt-cache show package-name

# apt-cache show djvulibre-plugin


o How is the package installed ?

# apt-get install package-name

# apt-get install djvulibre-plugin


A snipped portion of the apt-cache show results
for the djvulibre-plugin package follows ....

Filename: pool/main/d/djvulibre/djvulibre-plugin_3.5.14-1_i386.deb
Size: 23688
MD5sum: a3f9612e389c4aa18be418ba4ee42186

Description: Browser plugin for the DjVu image format
DjVu browser plugin.

DjVu is a set of compression technologies, a file format,
and a software platform for the delivery over the Web
of digital documents, scanned documents, and high resolution
images.

DjVu documents download and display extremely quickly,
and look exactly the same on all platforms. DjVu can be seen
as a superior alternative to PDF and Postscript for digital
documents, to TIFF (and PDF) for scanned documents, to JPEG
for photographs and pictures, and to GIF for large palettized
images. DjVu is the only Web format that is practical for
distributing high-resolution scanned documents in color.

Enhances: mozilla-browser, mozilla, mozilla-firefox, konqueror,
galeon
 
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