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Imageerebrandir wrote in Imagelinuxnewbies 😡frustrated

All screwed up

In just a matter of minutes, my outlook went from one of elation to one of frustration.



I installed Red Hat 7.3 on my laptop (a 233MHz Pentium II IBM ThinkPad 380XD) today, and proceeded to have a really easy time configuring a lot of things that I thought would be difficult.




  • Set up the other hosts on the LAN in /etc/hosts

  • Set up Samba, and shared a directory to a Win2K machine

  • Set up NFS, and shared a directory to another Linux machine

  • Set up a telnet server, and logged in from the Win2K machine

  • Set up Apache, and browsed to the test page from the Win2K machine



All of that went fine, with zero problems. But then, everything fell apart. I don't know what happened, but there's something wrong with GNOME, and the laptop is no longer seeing the Internet.



First, the GNOME problem. This foray into the world of Linux is a learning expedition, so I installed both GNOME and KDE. For most of the morning, I was running in KDE, because it's what I was used to from the other Linux machine. KDE worked fine. Then I tried GNOME. It worked fine, too, the first time I ran it, and I did all of the Apache and telnet configuration and initialization while running in GNOME. Then, I rebooted. When I tried to bring up GNOME again, I got an error message (in a window) that my window manager was not compatible with the X Window System. Great, I thought. It came up with a blank blue background, no panels; but when I right-clicked, I got a menu, and was able to open a Nautilus window, minus the window. It had the GUI, just no title bar, maximize, minimize, or close buttons, et cetera. From there, I checked the window manager configuration, and it was set to Sawfish, which I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be set to. So, I figured, let's reboot, and maybe it will go away. I managed to bring up a menu that had 'Log out' on it (using Ctrl-Esc, I think), and I rebooted.



That particular problem went away, but this time, I got an error message saying that panel had crashed. Wonderful. So the desktop comes up, and everything looks normal, except no panel. I open a shell, and managed to bring up the panel by typing 'panel'. Perhaps it should work now, I thought. So I rebooted again, and started GNOME once more. This time, there were no error messages... but still no panel.



So I'm wondering if there is a safe way to just start GNOME from scratch... wipe the configuration, and make it start over; but I'm afraid to do anything, because I'm fully aware that I don't know what I'm doing. Unfortunately, this is all on the root account; because I was still doing a lot of fooling around with Apache, and planning on setting up an LJ test server.



Now, the second problem. When I rebooted after setting up Apache, the laptop would no longer recognize the Internet. The Internet is served from the Win2K machine's ICS proxy server, and ever since it first booted up with Linux, the laptop had been finding the ICS and using it, without any kind of configuration (at least, none on my part). Now, it's just not finding it. The network functions are still working—I can ping back and forth, read the Apache test page off of the laptop, share with Samba and NFS—so the network is working, it's just not finding the proxy server. What could have changed? Why was it finding it automatically before, and not finding it now? Do I need to configure it to find it manually, and if so, how?



I hope that somebody can help me. It's a good thing for Imagelinuxnewbies, because I really don't know what I'm doing, and I would hate to dump all of this in Imagelinux. Thanks.

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