I am an idiot.

You didn't need me to tell you that; basically anyone on the planet who has spent more then ten minutes with me could tell you as much. "Oh, Steven? Yeah, that guy's an idiot," is what they would say.

And last night, I pretty much proved them right.

To recap my linux experience thus far, I inherited an old PC from a friend. It's a 300 mHz Pentium 2 with slightly over 300 MB of RAM. It's got a decent sized hard drive—something like 30 GB—and I've replaced the old CD-ROM that was in it with a CD burner and added a DVD-ROM drive that I had laying around. A week or two ago, I installed Slackware 10.2 on it without too much turmoil; the hardest part was when I broke it by installing the CD burner and DVD and had to reinstall it. I even got the sound to work. So at this time yesterday I had a working linux box that was successfully interacting with my Windows machines on the network (and was, in fact, mapped as a network drive on all of my computers that are currently up and running).

But there were three problems:

1. Only the root could access the CD burner. No other users could.

2. The DVD drive, although it was detected just fine by the BIOS, was not being detected by Linux.

3. I didn't have any applications installed that didn't come with it except for Firefox 1.5, which you have to install more or less manually.

After dinking around with the first two problems and getting nowhere, I decided to tackle the third. After all, one of the reasons I want to do this is that I want to use this as a test bed to see if I can run a law office primarily on open source software. Therefore, it would be a good thing if I could install OpenOffice.org on it, and since I can see how some Windows applications could be useful, it would be good to have WINE running as well.

After a couple of days of seeking advice from the nice folks at www.OOoforum.org and www.LinuxQuestions.org, I was directed to LinuxPackages.net, which is set up basically to support Slackware and to provide Slackware users with ready-to-install packages. I downloaded WINE, OpenOffice.org 2.0, a couple of CD burning apps, and the latest Inkscape. Could NOT get them to install. After a while, it occurred to me that perhaps the problem was that I was using the wrong tool; I'd been using KPackage (the package manager that comes with KDE) and, I though, maybe that manager doesn't work with Slackware. So I dropped into the terminal mode, logged in as root, changed to the directory with one of the downloads, and launched the Slackware command line package manager. It worked!

So, feeling confident, I changed to a different directory and ran it again. This time it broke as soon as I told it to install packages in the current directory. Tried it several times with different strategies and nothing. About forty minutes into this I figured out the problem: I had the files located in /usr/NetworkFiles/downloads/Linux Apps/ and the command line package tool apparently can't deal with directory names that have spaces in them. So I changed "Linux Apps" to "LinuxApps" and everything installed.

So why am I the idiot?

Because now I started getting cocky, and I noticed that LinuxPackages.net had KDE 3.5 for Slackware (which was just released) and I thought, "Hey, it'd be nice to have the latest version of KDE!" So I downloaded all of the components and installed it.

And that's when my system broke.

I've managed to get it back to the point where it will boot up and start SAMBA, so I can access all of my files over the network, but it won't launch KDE. I get an error that line 22 of rc4 (or something like that) can't launch the binary, and then I get the exact same message but instead of saying it can't launch the binary, it says "success." Which is, you know, great and all . . . except that it just sits there and doesn't do anything.

At this point, I'm considering a couple of options. One is to try to figure out how to log in as root at a command line and manually edit the offending file. This is probably a bad idea since I'm such a linux newb and I could completely kill the thing. The other is to boot back to the setup disk and reinstall the KDE package, which may work or may just break it more. The third is to copy the network files back onto a Windows machine, install Mandriva instead of Slackware, and see if that works any better. I'm a little afraid to do that because I've heard that Mandriva uses a lot more in the way of resources than Slackware, and this poor little box is probably not capable of running something that uses much more in the way of resources.

If anyone has any insight on this, I'd be happy to listen. This is, after all, intended to be a learning experience, so if there are any nuggets of wisdom out there, I'd be all ears.