Sometime Today, Nikhil Joshi assembled some asciibets to say:
A few points first. Don't post to newsgroups/maillists in HTML, and restrict your line length to about 72 characters. Your ISP should have mentioned this to you when they gave you an Internet account. If they didn't, then shame on them.
When linux boots there is a plethora of messages which really bugs me. Can I have a simple message like "Welcome To Linux" when I boot into linux instead of those overwhelming messages (those telling me my processor type, HDD type etc...or the ones telling me that the startup services are ' [ OK ] ' )
Let's say something goes wrong while you're booting up. Say you've got some new hardware, or some software has been corrupted (by power failure or hard disk corruption). Wouldn't you like to know about it? If you just had a welcome to linux message, you wouldn't know anything. One of the reasons so many of us like linux is because it tells us everything instead of hiding it behind a splash screen. You could do the splash screen too. There's a project on freshmeat that does this. Search for it on freshmeat. The other thing about linux, is that it lets us do what we want, so if we want to be blind, it will let us. You could also write a program using svgalib that changes the graphics mode and draws a bitmap to screen. Shouldn't be more than a few lines, and then you can stick it in rc.sysinit.
Can I set up my own mail server ? In the PCQ's latest issue there
Well, if you see something like `Starting sendmail' in those startup messages, then you already have your mail server up and running. And you didn't have to do a thing. Configuring it though, is a completely different nightmare. Read through the sendmail docs in /usr/doc/sendmail... or /usr/share/doc/sendmail...
You should also read the Howtos. somewhere in /usr/doc or /usr/share/doc or at linuxdoc.org
Yesterday I played a mpg file for the first time on linux and I was very disppointed by the performance . The file was almost played in slow motion :-( Windows media player gave me a better
Chances are, you were running it at the wrong sampling frequency. You may have to tweak the settings in your mpg software. Get it to play at double rate or half sampling rate. Check the man page for the software you use. Unlike windows, linux drivers for multimedia were written by users like you and I, and not by the original hardware manufacturers. Sometimes, the windows drivers use undocumented features that the linux drivers aren't aware of.
In other cases, it just may be that linux lets you do everything for yourself, while windows makes you do everything the windows way. Sometimes the windows way is what you wanted in the first place, many times it isn't. With linux, you always have the choice.
I am relatively new to linux and when I get some major problems I get atleast one suggestion to ' compile the kernel ' . What does it
You don't have to be a programmer to compile. The kernel has already been programmed, you just have to recompile it. I suggest you first go through the kernel-HOWTO, and then play around with make menuconfig in /usr/src/linux
Telling you any more right now could harm you.
Philip