[ILUG-BOM] First Customer Put on Linux

[Rony Bill]

Hello All,

Today I got my first customer to get into linux. The machine was an 
Intel Original GLVA with a Celeron 2 Ghz. cpu, 256 Mb RAM. The distro 
loaded was Mandrake 10.1. The sound device got detected smoothly and it 
gave the boot up music too on login. The system uses a LAN cablenet as 
well as a dialup (when the lan is down).

I used the gui to setup the same in Mandrake. This cablenet is luckily 
direct with no PPPoE. The ip address was a static one and in windows, it 
has a domain and host name in the dns setting that is necessary. However 
that was a mistake to do in linux as the search domain is different from 
domain entry in windows. The eth0 would not connect to the net. Then I 
created the ppp0 connection and that too did not connect to the net. The 
problem was that the ppp0 picked up the dns server entry of the eth0. 
Both the connections were removed and first the ppp0 was setup and it 
went on the net smoothly. Then the eth0 was created again but this time, 
no names were used at all. Omly ip, subnet mask, gateway and 
dns-server-ip. That did the trick and the eth0 was up and running on the 
net.

There is a very nice control on the task bar for disconnecting and 
reconnecting the eth0 link and that adds added safety of disconnecting 
the link when the user is not on the net. It reconnects successfully.

Thunderbird, firefox and firestarter was added. One nice feature of the 
firestarter firewall is that if you leave the program running in the 
task bar and reboot, then on login, it asks the user to enter the root 
password and starts the firewall, like a reminder.

There was one problem though on reboot. The sound server gave startup 
errors and the sound went dead. It was getting too late to investigate 
but It must be something about the automatic bios setting that was 
discussed by  some members here. Its irq may be shifting??? The video 
player does not play VCDs now. But that is a minor issue and the cus. 
will use windows for multimedia for the time being. Maybe on my next 
visit....

What surprised me was the ease with which the cust. took to linux in one 
shot inspite of the various logins and password entries. I had not 
anticipated that. Anyway, a good start. :)

Regards,

Rony.


	
	
		
___________________________________________________________ 
Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com