[Delivery182]

I've joined the revolution, i've taken the pledge and switched to linux - Mandriva PowerPack 2006 and i'm now wrapped in golden thread, diamonds in my hair floating above the rif-raf by the power of -the penguin-

My plan is to do away with dependence on windows XP, to use Mandriva for all of my wordpprocessin, development and music playing, to use the great diversity of programs, documentation, commnities and ease of use inherent with Mandriva and Linux in general.

Erm.. about that *comes down from penguin fuelled cloud with a bump*a little problem.

I'm using windows XP for all of this, reason? Because there's pretty much no point in doing anything in Mandriva - Unless I'm content on my stuff being isolates, mandriva will simply not talk to anything else, windows or my WLAN.

Now I can understand that WLAN support is an ongoing battle for Linux, my laptop has a Broadcom driver built in, and i've heard they are not particularly Lin freindly, i'm planning to get a USB Dongle with a supported chipset (ZYDaS i've heard), and thats the plan there.

But support for FAT? Comeon, it must be there. so how come I simply cant write to it, full stop, I can mount it as RW, apparently, and i can read fine, but it seems to be that there is a total lock on me changing to permissions to the directory, even as Root. I even tried writing to it using root priveledges, and it came out as nonsense in windows. Not good

Well, it could still be stupid user error, I haven't tried everything and I have a few ideas to try now, but ultimately it's got a bit much and if it doesn't reach 'Just Works' status soon, so that i can send things to Windows, I will have to give up entirely on Mandriva until I get my USB dongle, and hope that 'just works'.

Is this a common issue, or something to do with my laptop (Hp pavillion zv6000 with AMD Sempron)? Seems unlikely from what I can see. Any advice or shocking revelations to impart to me? Noob needs help.

[fingal]

You said you wanted to ditch Windows? If so why are you worried about Mandriva talking to a Windows box? You can indeed word process, develop and achieve Nirvana from a *nix system ... Oh well. You want it all don't you?

Having said that, you can use Samba: http://www.samba.org to get Linux talking to Windows, and many (most?) people in these forums dual boot ... Or multi-boot in fact.

You'll need more comments than just mine to get going.

FAT! Not a good file system if you ask me. Shocking revelation: give it time and you'll get there in the end.

Nearly forgot! Check out the wireless LAN tutorial in the (surprise!) tutorials section.

[bryansmith]

Could you please post the contents of the /etc/fstab file? I will correct it so that you can read and write to your fat partition.

Bryan

[AlexK]

For the broadcom wireless card, check out this tutorial get ndiswrapper by using urpmi i.e. execute following command as root:

urpmi ndiswrapper

then just use the WinXP drivers.

[Delivery182]

Fingal:Problem isn't so much as achieving nirvana on a nix system, I can very easily see that as possible, it's a matter of time and simple arrangement, I need to be able to move content from my system to the internet - until I can get my connection the only way is to send it through windows. I hate FAT to, i've heard enough to know that, but it can talk to Windows and I heard that NTFS wasn't stably supported in Linux atm. Without one of those working my Mandriva partition i just a one way information trap. Thanks for the tutorials and Samba tip tho .

briansmith:I c, Fstab, I haven't tried that yet, don't yet know my way round a Linux system well enugh. i will get that next time I log in to linux

AlekX: unfortnately I have tried ndiswrapper, well nothing to stop me from trying again. I suppose i've got to try that command, Urpm, haven't seen it before. I need to learn my way round the shell as well

I have found that I can send things from Linux to Windows using my USB data stick, which is formatted as FAT, so it must be possible. But it's a tad cumbersome. On that bombshell i've decided to start using linux properly, i've noticed KOrganiser and think that's really cool and linux is just generally easier to use.

I also think that the speed and focus of the replies I've recieved on this forum is testimony to the community

Cheers

[linuxuser40351]

FAT is naturally supported by Linux and is actually an optional file system for Linux, NTFS on the other hand is proprietary to Microsoft Windows and it has not yet been decoded sufficiently enough for use in Linux(as far as I know, I may be wrong). I have an NTFS drive and can read from it, but can't write to it yet. I'm using Mandriva 2006 and can read and write to FAT partitions just fine, and you said you can write to your FAT thumb drive, so do you think maybe there's some damage to your Windows file system that just isn't enough to impair the operation of Windows? Next time you're in Windows run scandisk and see. The "urpmi" command is the command line implementation of Mandriva's package manager. You will need to run some updates on it to have access to a ton more software, just go here and follow the directions to install all of those packages. The urpmi command lets you install most anything via command line, which is quite a bit handier than searching through the package manager's gui if you know what package you are looking for. If you're not sure but want a list of packages with a word in it, type "urpmq keywordhere" and it will list all packages with the given word in it. To uninstall a package type "urpme packagenamehere". Samba is available through urpmi, the command should be:

urpmi smb4k

and it should appear in your "File Transfer" menu under Internet. It lets you mount Windows shares, and if you have permission write to them regardless of file system. Also if you have other Windows machines you want to Remote Desktop, Virtual Network Connection will let you do that.
Also since you're new I'd suggest going to http://www.winehq.org and downloading wine. It's a very basic, free Windows emulator that allows you to run .exe files. It doesn't support DirectX or anything off the bat, but if you want to work at it you can get almost perfect Windows emulation through it so proprietary software won't be off limits to you. Just thought I would give you a few hints, and you just gave me an idea for a page on my website, an "I've Installed Linux, Now What?" page. If you have any more problems we're always here to help.