Just John

Sound was working fine up to presumably yesterday when I noticed it. I didn't change any sound settings, but someone else might have. There is suddenly absolutely no sound at all. I went through all the kmix panels and nothing is muted. I've got a soundblaster live platinum and an intel ac'97 audio card on here (labeled Intel ICH5 in kmix) , and both are using the default drivers according to the mcc. When I try the recommended troubleshooting steps in the mcc I get some information but nothing that suggests any steps to take to fix the problem. "/sbin/chkconfig --list sound" and "/sbin/chkconfig --list alsa" both give the following line: sound 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off Does anyone know what the problem is? What do you recommend?

Yeah, I would prefer to choose my own desktop environment. However, it just so happens that kdemod is my DE of choice, so I can't really complain... Lexicon, I'm not sure I really understand you (hence making your name rather amusing to me :) but will take a look at PDL as well. P.S. What is the reason shaman isn't ready for full replacement of pacman? (I love pacman, I think it would be hard to best, just wondering what you thought specifically.)

I'm going to have to disagree about the new ATI cards being crap. The 4800 series had beaten nVidia hands down in price/performance ratio when it came out. Nvidia had to drop 9800 prices all the way down to 4850 prices because it was wiping the floor with their Nvidia's previous gen cards, and it turns out even the 9800 gets edged out by it. That said, I'm now pissed at ATI because they launched the 4800 series just before I built my computer and I think announced that they were officially supporting linux at the same time. Got me all excited and convinced me to go ATI. Now with the catalyst drivers being a flop I'm stuck with mediocre 3D support.

Okay so this inspired me to give arch another go and I'm having more luck this time around than the first. The huge package lists with no dialogues or even package descriptions still bugs me, but after that point the beginner's guide told me nearly everything I needed to know. Proprietary drivers didn't seem to work, a couple other hitches, had to go outside the wiki to find answers for some stuff. However, when I got that blistering fast kdemod desktop up for the first time I must admit it definitely seemed worth the effort. That said, it still made me want an easy version even more. I did a bunch more searching, and I found something that might just be what I'm looking for. The chakra project. It looks like it's still in the early stages, but it sounds like their goals for the project overlap an awful lot with my ideals. I won't be able to try it for a couple days yet, so I'm wondering if anyone here has tried it and knows if it's stable and such.

Maybe it's only the wireless then, but I distinctly remember having to know which package you need for wireless and having to select it by hand. As for the second comment, it would seem you are absolutely correct.

Thanks for the great responses already! @Jim: I did not know there was a "mini." This might be getting closer, but it also takes away the auto-installation of the proprietary driver (a feature I adore) and I still doubt it does either #2 or #4. @YinYeti Not precisely what I had in mind, but looks extremely interesting! Might do the trick. Will definitely be taking a look at it. @Tyme I don't see why a breeze to install and transparency need be so opposed. I'm not suggesting editing systems configs by hand like an Arch install. I'm merely suggesting that they're available for the user to view, perhaps by an "advanced" tab or something. Also, it's not as important as the other things I mentioned. On the flip side, I do like a lot about the way Arch is set up already. But a version with automatic hardware detection and installation would be a godsend to someone like me who doesn't know every single package by heart. @Scarecrow It's dead easy if you have every single system package memorized.... I don't doubt that it takes an advanced user 10 minutes to install. I also have no issue using the console a lot if it's an intuitive system which I believe Arch is. However, throwing that big package list at even an intermediate user without so much as a single package description is not a good way to get the reputation of being "dead easy." I think even the main branch of Arch could do with an installation dialogue as an option. (Do you need wireless? Do you need RAID? Etc.) To make it truly "dead easy" it would need to have automatic hardware detection and installation. That's essentially what I'm hoping to find. Just Arch plus auto-detection would have about 3 and a half of the 4 things I said I was looking for. I would imagine something along these lines is out there, because it seems like it would have huge appeal for noob users wanting to optimize their system a bit more (me), and strong appeal for advanced users as well (benefits of Arch with a faster install).

Aye, I'll be sure to include precautionary redundancies next time. ;) Proprietary. (Mandriva 2008.1 installs them by default, and I've run the updates so I assume they should be latest version and such as well.) *update* Looks like I've got the following driver packages: x11-driver-video-fglrx 8.471 fglrx-kernel-desktop586-latest 8.471 fglrx-kernel-2.6.24.7-desktop586-2mnb 8.471 fglrx-kernel-2.6.24.4-desktop586-1mnb 8.471 As a side note I'm not sure what the default kernel for 2008.1 was but 2.6.24.4 and 2.6.24.7 became boot options after I updated, and I'm about to switch to desktop-latest to enable my RAM.

Thanks that's exactly it.

I don't know if this board is high enough traffic to have people who've tried enough distros to know the answer to this, but I'm looking for a good intermediate distro that allows you to "build it yourself" to some degree and I have something very precise in mind. Namely, I would like it to do the following things, in order of importance. 1. Provide automatic hardware detection and driver installation 2. Not install any base packages aside from xorg and drivers 3. Have a helpful and intelligent package manager to aid the process of adding apps and a desktop environment (maybe even a wizard that takes you through desktop creation and installation of essential apps) 4. Transparent install - access to all config files, daemons, etc. from the start I think it essentially amounts to Arch plus a couple (major) additions in order to get something that's a breeze to install but lets you put things together exactly as you please. Does anyone know if this sort of Mandriva/Arch type hybrid exists? I've poked around a little bit and couldn't seem to find anything with this "build-it-yourself... the easy way" mentality. It's weird because I would think people would love it. I know I certainly would. So can anyone help me out? What's the closest thing you've seen to what I'm describing?

Title pretty much sums it up. Compiz works fine, 2D games work fine, 3D games have what looks like severe clipping and redraw problems. A couple black screen crashes as well (in games), and occasional crashes as the background is dimming on the restart screen (don't know if that one is related). I have 2008.1 installed with all the updates run (except 2009 obviously - don't have the bandwidth). Any ideas? What should I try?

Sorry, I know you probably get this all the time cause I know it happened to me once before but I can't for the life of me remember how to fix it and a quick search didn't turn it up. Desktop I was told has 2GB of RAM, shows up as 864MB or something in the performance monitor. However, MCC->Hardware->Browse and configure hardware->Memory shows 4 modules, DIMMs 1 and 3 at 1024MB, 2 and 4 at 256MB. I'm going to take a wild guess and say it actually has either 1.25 or 2.5GB and I need to enable some hi-ram switch somewhere, right? +1 internet to the first person to tell me how :)

I'll take a look, but I'm a little leery of making changes to skim based on what works in scim. Any kde users out there?

No one's done this?

Trying to get Korean working on my computer, tried installing scim-hangul-skim which says it's a setup for hangul (the korean character system). Did that and dependencies and got this skim thing going, but it doesn't let me choose input systems. The program seems to run perfectly fine, but it just doesn't give me anything to choose from, even after I installed japanese as well and made sure everything was enabled. Even restarted x a couple times. When I click to change language a blank line shows up where the box to select an input language should be. Looks like this. Any help?

Ah, so that's what that means. Thanks! P.S. What's "Cannot obtain lock on /media/.hal-mtab" mean?