First time Linux'er problems

DaSilva

Hey, finally got my laptop back, and so went to work installing WinXP and Slackware on my machine. Had some problems, getting both installed but finally got it working. Made some mistakes along the way im sure, but I'm writing this post from Xwin Slackware so, not all bad

Hard Drive is 80gb and divided something like this:
10gb Windows XP NTFS partition
10gb Linux "Standard Linux file system" partition
1gb Linux swap partition - Is that huge? I didnt know a good size, so I went with what WinXP usualy uses for a page size roughly.

and finally 59gb Partition currently in some obscure FAT fs, picked the wrong one will fix that later.

Ok so here's my problems:
Mouse wheel works fine, but the middle mouse button is funky in firefox. It opens new tabs for links when I press it on a link or bookmark which is what I expected, but its when I click it on an existing tab it just seems to load random pages which is pretty crazy.

Filesystem: Seems everytime I boot into Windows XP, or maybe it's not tied to that but thats just what it *seems*, so better descripition would be "occaisionally" on boot up Linux starts complaining about the file system, heres the message it gives.

/dev/hdc2 contains a file system with errors, check forced

It either fixes them or tells me to log into maintanance mode or something and to run: e2fsck -v -y /dev/hdc2

which fixes it, but its worrying that my HD which is brandnew is getting hurt

Any ideas?

aidan_walsh

For a swap file, I generally use twice what my system RAM is at the time. Thats probably overkill, but better safe than sorry, and its not like its a huge amount of space we're talking about.

its when I click it on an existing tab it just seems to load random pages which is pretty crazy.

I'm seeing the same thing in every version of Firefox that I have seen on Fedora Core.

If you're using an "obscure" FAT FS, then it could be that Windows is using a slightly different version of FAT when writing to the partition, which is messing up the table as far as Linux is concerned. I have my FAT partition as vfat, which has never given me any trouble.

pickarooney

DaSilva wrote:

Ok so here's my problems:
Mouse wheel works fine, but the middle mouse button is funky in firefox. It opens new tabs for links when I press it on a link or bookmark which is what I expected, but its when I click it on an existing tab it just seems to load random pages which is pretty crazy.

Random pages, or the results of google searches for text contained in your clipboard? Test it by copying something obscure into the clipboard (simply by double clicking) and then middle-clicking on a tab.

DaSilva

pickarooney wrote:

Random pages, or the results of google searches for text contained in your clipboard? Test it by copying something obscure into the clipboard (simply by double clicking) and then middle-clicking on a tab.

aha, that could be it. Do you know how to change the function of the middle mouse button?

pickarooney

not off the top of my head. have you any funky extensions installed?

Otherwise check the value in about:config for
middlemouse.contentLoadURL

Mine is false, and middle-clicking closes a tab.