Question: When is one no longer considered a newbie? I read that compiling your own kernel is "losing your Linux virginity", so maybe that's it. If that's the case, then I stopped being a newbie the day I got Red Hat 6. Totally stupid question, but what the hell.

But onto other things, thanks for the votes for the most popular editor. Didn't get that many votes, but the overall winner was Pico. Emacs (or as one person called it "Eight Megs And Constant Swapping") got a couple of votes, as did Vi, but Pico was the hands down winner. The general concensus was that people used it because it has all the commands at the bottom of the screen. I guess that's why I like it too.

Now onto weightier issues.

I now have a NON-Winmodem. WOOHOO!!! Courtesy of a kind reader I am now online under Linux, and what a fight that was!

Everything installed pretty painlessly, and getting the modem working under Windows was a breeze (even if Windows was convinced I had 2 modems installed for some reason). Then it was off to Linux, here was where the fun began...

Got all the info I needed (or I THOUGHT I had all the info) and started to mess around. I downloaded every conceivable PPP configuration program I could find, figuring better to have too many toys than too few.

This is where things got interesting. I tried KPPP to start with, no dice. Tried a program called EZPPP, crash and burn. Tried several others with no luck. Then I tried GPPP. This I had no luck with, but then I discovered a problem, I had no DNS info. Long story short I went to Windows and ran ipconfig and got the DNS info I needed, then went back to Linux. Ran EZPPP again with the right info, nothing. Tried the other programs, nothing. Then I thought, "Well KPPP has to work well.", tried it, nada. I was left with GPPP. Tried it, entered the info, then ran PPP and VOILA! I was online. As root. Normal users can use the connection, but the problem is when you want to logoff you have to go back in as root and hangup, and the only way I could figure out to do that was by killing the process. Far from elegant, but it worked.

Decided that this wasn't particularly a great way of doing things, so set about searching the net for info. Started by using Netscape 4.61 that ships with RH6, and discovered one thing. NS4.61 (I think that's the version, whatever version ships with RH6 anyhow) is a complete pile of festering yak dung. It hogs the system, and then would just suddenly disappear. I'd be doing something and BOOM! Bit of disk accessing, and Netscape was gone. I decided that this was a waste of time, and went to Windows. (I later ditched that version of NS, went back to version 3, discovered innumerable JavaScript incompatibilities, so installed NS4.07 from my RH5.2 CD.) After hunting for what seemed like hours, I discovered the solution.

It was relatively simple. To make hanging up easier, rather than running PPP from the terminal (which locked the terminal in and any commands were sent to the terminal, not PPP) I had to setup a script that basically says:

exec ppp

This means that any keystrokes or commands are sent to PPP and not the shell. To hangup I simply do ctrl-c and it hangs up. This, however, didn't solve my root problem (bad joke!) of not being able to run things as a normal user. This was solved by doing a SETUID on PPP and setting it to root. Then into the normal user account, run GNOME, setup an icon (which for some odd reason I decided would be good as a lightbulb) and doubleclick and away I went. I was online as a normal user. Now I had to sort out the keep alive problem. (My ISP has a ludicrous timeout of about a minute). This was done by a simple 1 line script which I setup to ping Yahoo every 30 seconds. So I was online, had my psuedo keep alive program running and things were sorted... Now onto email...

To cut a long story short, KMail is horrible. (And from what Bill has been saying, pretty damn unstable.) I started doing email in it, but soon went back to Pegasus in Windows until such time as I could get PINE working. Getting Fetchmail to work was brain damagingly easy. (Needed to setup 1 line in a file called .fetchmailrc and that was that.) Sending however was another matter. Sendmails man files are all screwed on my system, the pages are formatted all too hell which makes reading them a MAJOR chore, so I decided to hunt around online. After an hour or so I came across the info I needed. To clear the queue, I just needed to type:

/usr/sbin/sendmail -q

...and off went my mail. Dead easy. Of course, this being Linux, things are NEVER this easy. Mails I was sending came out as being from my username@ which was a major problem. Searched high and low, then bit the bullet and posted to comp.mail.pine. Got an answer in a couple of hours, all I needed to do was add a couple of options to the .pinerc file and that was that. A quick test showed that things were working fine, and I could now use PINE for email. Sure, some people may think I'm crazy giving up a GUI for a text based mailer, but when I first came online (5 years ago) on the Amiga, all I had was the Amiga version of ELM or a pseudo PINE hybrid. I just look on it as going back to my internet roots. Plus, of course, PINE is a LOT more stable than anything X has to offer. (At least for GNOME and KDE anyway.)

So I'm online in Linux now. This of course means one thing, LINUX GAMES ONLINE! Linux has a LOT of multiplayer-only games which I can now play, so if you love a particular game, and fancy facing a newbie in whatever game it is (a newbie who will probably suffer a severe beatdown) and showing me the ropes, drop me a line. I have XPilot and Freeciv installed just waiting to be played. (I actually tried XPilot, but logged onto a server to discover I was the only player.) I've tried to setup Netrek and Empire, but on both counts had no luck at all. I can't find a decent client for either game which really sucks as I really want to try both of them. (The only clients I can find either don't compile, or don't run, of it they do run are too tiny for my pathetic 800x600 display. And no, I can't go any higher.) So any assistance in that department would be great as both games sound great.

Talking of games, let me give a plug to a game I've been playing a lot in Linux. The game is called Rocks 'n' Diamonds. It's a Boulderdash clone, and it's TERRIFIC! It has an insane number of levels, a level designer, and is FIENDISHLY addictive.

And I can't end this section without mentioning one game I'm utterly hooked on right now. When I'm not job hunting (I have an interview this coming Thursday, so I expect everyone to cross their fingers) I'm playing HalfLife - Team Fortress online. With the Winmodem HalfLife was unplayable online. With the CPU Vampire gone, I can play it online and MAN is it addictive!

Problems

I'm starting to get really annoyed with compiling programs, especially those for GNOME. I have missing files, it would appear, even after installing every devel kit I can lay my hands on. When I try and compile I get a message (for GNOME programs) saying "Unknown library applets", then the compile craps out with (amongst other things) "gnomesupport.h not found" and "applet-widget.h not found" and then that's that. Nothing else happens.

Then there's the OpenGL problems. In /usr/include/GL there are include files for programs that use OpenGL, except the includes are missing... If anyone can help me out, that would be great. (Just sending me the includes would be perfect.) It's starting to get REALLY irritating when I download development kits so I can compile stuff, only to find there's still files missing... I have a directory full of things I can't compile due to these problems...

So that's that for this time. As I said, if you're into a particular online game in Linux and want to administer a beatdown to a newbie (and I don't feel like logging onto a normal internet server and getting humiliated, so being humiliated by readers of my column is much easier to take:)) drop me a line. Same goes for the compiling problems, drop me a line on them too. (PLEASE send GL include files if you have them since I can't find them ANYWHERE!)

Later fellow penguins...