Red Hat Frustration

Hey all--

Recently I posted a thread in which I announced that I had gotten Red Hat Linux and was wondering where if anyone knew any good sites to learn about it. The responses were great but I have two questions reguarding instalation and such...

-- When I click on the IRC (which was where I was going to ask this next question) it tells me to download the Java plug-in for Linux, no problem, I did and I was pretty sure it was the right one here at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/download.html. I downloaded it but when I went to open it I just got a text file. Is there some kind of terminal command that I need to excecute to get the actual program to run??? Note: I am completly new linux user, even though I've read up a bit on it before I got Red Hat 8.0, it seems like none of that is helping...(which is the frustrating part.)

-- A simaller question reguarding audio driver/ sound card set-up. First off I'll give ya the info you might need to help...
When I go to sound card setup it tells me that it recognizes it but at the bottom it says "disabled." Is there anyway I can enable it??? Also when I downloaded an audio driver from asus.com for linux and I unzip the package, it gives me another one to unzip and then gives me an error when I try to extract the 2nd one??? I don't know why this happens.

Any help reguarding this issue is greatly appreciated as always. I just wanted to also say thank you to all the people that have showed me the ropes so far in Linux and have helped me on the road to exploring ths OS (thanks).

--Peace :cool:

I'm fairly new 2 Linux myself sorry I can't answer your ?
But what help was tha Linux Bible and Unix in a Nutshell, those 2 is all U need 2 answer
your questions and just experiment.

I checked out the page and it seems that you are on the right link, been a while since I had linux on my own system and had to do updates..... but did you get the RPM or the Self-Extracting archive? if you downloaded the RPM... and have it as the .rpm file then just go to your console and rpm -Uvh <filename>.rpm and you should be fine.

as far as your second question. are they .zip files or are they other types of archives/compressed files.... ie. .gz .tar .tgz.. because you have to make sure you use the correct syntax for each at the command line... i'm afraid i can't be anymore help on that one..

what kind of client for irc aare you trying to use?
and also what are you using gnome or kde ?
and about your question about the driver sounds like you are trying to "unzip" it under windows using winzip or something like that
probably is a tar file and for that u have to use something like tar -xvzpf filename.tar.gz under linux :)

usually if Linux found your sound card but its not enabled, it hasnt got a driver for it, you may wanna do a search on Red Hats web sites and look for there hardware compatibility database and also if your card isnt listed, try searching for your cards manufacturer and asking about it there,....if all else fails get a Sound Blaster :)

What browser are you running? For example Opera for Linux keeps behaving strange with Java, cause it does not use M$ typical java implementations. Many webdesigners use java code that's not 100% compatibel with the sun java implementation therefor it will not work correctly in some browsers like Opera for Linux with sun Java.

But RH8 comes with mozilla, you can easily download the JRE from the sun website and install it. There is a detailed howto on that topic made by sun. see for the info:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/jre/install-linux.html


Sound cards... Kudzu detects most of them. If it keeps 'pushing' them in disabled try to find the audio chip your card uses and choose the module for that one.