I have now had nearly two days with 2008.
I like the very professional presentation which is miles ahead of earlier versions.
Installing the Nvidia driver from nvidia was a few minutes pain but as I pointed out in another thread post I did solve it quite simply.

The Printer was quickly set up aok when I rebooted but due the online connection constantly disconnecting after rebooting, the setup could not connect to Cups. It was only when I noticed the disconnection and fixed it to connect at rebooting that things went AOK.
Never ever had that problem with earlier versions.

There are three things that prevent me from switching to 2008 as my main platform from 2007-Spring.

First there is no sound. I have gone through every routine mentioned here at MUB to fix the problem but nothing works.
I notice in MCC..... Hardware.....Look at and configure the hardware that there is no <Run config tool> button when clicking on the two audio devices listed so I cannot change any of the audio drivers. Secondly although the on board sound is disabled in the bios it still shows up here (This occurred in 2007-Spring but not in 2007 that I can remember). Also it shows up in Kmix where it appears to be the default in that regardless of the fact that I select Soundblaster Live and close out, the very next time Kmixer is opened there is the Via837 again. This does not happen in 2007 or 2007-Spring.

Second item is the scanner. This is the very first time since using the scanner in firewire connection that the scanner is not detected and automatically setup correctly. Prior to using Firewire I used the USB connection and it ALWAYS required all sorts of fiddling around to set it up correctly. That is why I tried Firewire and have used it ever since.
No matter what I try it will still not detect the scanner yet when I reboot into into 2007-Spring, there it is working.

I will not be upgrading my numerous friends Computers until I am satisfied that an rpm is available to correct these two major problems. I am not interested in patches or having to change lines in files etc. I can do that on mine if it simple enough otherwise I will stick to Spring. Imagine my friends watching me do a fresh install and at the end of it watching me altering lines in files to get things working. I'd lose all their accumulated trust instantly. When I do new installs I have never had a problem explaining to them about updates since the initial release and they understand that.

I think it is safe to say that I am a little disappointed thus far. The only thing that consoles me is that I know Mandriva (through the great AdamW) will fix the problems.
My disappointment is that such basic tools such as Sound and Firewire should not still encounter such problems, it is not as if they are new technology.

Third thing.
My Logitech Mouseman Dual Optical has a Back button on its left side which has worked without any fiddling setting up since Mandriva 10.1. Now for the first time it does not work no matter what I fiddle with. What gives ???. This is most annoying because it is such a useful feature. The fact that there are other ways to go back is not the point.

On further niggle is that the Glow in Window decorations has been dropped but other crummier decorations which have never impressed me are still in the sets.
Now I have go hunt for this decoration from some other source. I don't yet even know where to start.

When I do a fresh Install of Mandriva-Spring, everything works out of the box. Not so with 2008 sadly.

Cheers. John.


[moved from Software by spinynorman]

Irritating, isn't it?

Sorry to hear you are having your problems John, I've not tried firewire nor soundblaster so I can't comment on them. However I do have the glow window decorations installed by Kde. I have a logitech bluetooth mouse with back & forwards buttons and a few more and all of them worked out of the box.

As things stand, your problems won't necessarily be fixed, John, as they haven't AFAIK been reported as bugs yet and the information here is too vague to 'fix' them.

I'm not exactly sure what your problem is with sound. It seems that Mandriva sees two sound devices, and the one you want to be the default is not, right?

Unfortunately this problem is essentially impossible to fix as Linux sound technology stands. It is the kernel that detects the onboard device even though it's disabled in the BIOS - we can't change that. ALSA then picks the order (i.e. which device becomes the 'default'). This is also something we can't really 'fix' (although in general it would be sensible if ALSA knew what chips were usually onboard devices, what were usually sound cards, and preferred the second group over the former...this may be a suggestion to make to the ALSA project). There is a simple and reliable way to make one given device always be the first card as far as ALSA's concerned, but it involves manually editing a file, and therefore fails your criteria, but it is the only real possibility at present. To do this, edit /etc/modprobe.conf , and add the following two lines:

options driver1 index=0
options driver2 index=1

where driver1 is the driver for the card you want to be the default, and driver2 is the driver for the other card.

For your scanner problem, the details you've provided are nowhere near enough to fix the problem. It can only be fixed if you file a bug report at http://bugzilla.mandriva.com/ with information on your hardware - the Firewire controller you have (lspcidrake -v is enough for that) and the exact model of scanner you have.

On the mouse buttons, I'm not sure what's happening there. Back / forward still work on my mouse, but I've seen a couple of people mention the same problem as you. As far as I can see, no-one's filed a bug report yet, so again, please file a bug report. Include your exact mouse model, and also /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Also report whether the 'imwheel' package is installed, and an 'imwheel' process is running (ps -e | grep imwheel). Then it's likely we would be able to fix the bug. Thanks a lot.

Thanks everyone and especially Adam. I'll have a look at what you suggest regarding sound and Firewire.
Yes imwheel is installed.

I think you might have missed the point that MCC..... Hardware........Look at and configure the hardware, that there is no <Run config tool> button appearing at the bottom right side when clicking on the two audio devices listed so I cannot change any of the audio drivers. As a consequence I am not certain the correct driver is in place and cannot change it if it is incorrect.

I'll let you know asap what I can find out.

Cheers. John.

You're right, I couldn't find it either. That's weird, it was there in 2007.1.

John, this may not help - because I don't even know if the sbp2 module is involved in talking to firewire scanners - however, there is a bug filed where external firewire hard drives are not detected until sbp2 is loaded, and sbp2 is not loaded at setup time.

I had to force my 2008.0 install to load sbp2 at boot time in order to access my external firewire hdd.

If you look through the output of
and see if sbp2 is loaded,

or, easier:
which will return nothing if sbp2 is not loaded

then if it isn't, try to
then try to detect your scanner again.

Like I said, it may not be relevant, but it's a 2 minute job to try it.

If it works, I made the system load sbp2 at each boot by adding the single term
on a new line, on its own at the end of the file:
/etc/modprobe.preload

Here's a page which indicates that sbp2 could be relevant for scanner detection:

Epson Scanner Configuration

So, you never know...

Worth a try, in my opinion.

Here's the Mandriva Bug

On the brighter side John you could have paid big bucks for a new release and that new release broke several of your peripherals causing you to buy new ones just because the suppliers of those peripherals have not updated their software and have no intention of doing so.
I have just been reading that users of windows vista are in that situation now. That would really dent anyone's credibility. Here you get really helpful advice and the willingness to put things right that can be put right. I think that alone is a good selling point for Mandriva and maybe other distros.

that printer one is odd. Unless your printer is networked, it should use loopback (127.0.0.1) and not your local IP to deal with cups.

File the bugs... might get fixed by 2010.

James

john: you can see what drivers are being used for the cards with lsmod:

lsmod | grep snd

you can also call the sound configuration utility directly, just run 'draksound' as root.

Thanks to jimdunns suggested lines of information I simply added sbp2 as a line item in modprobe-preload. Did nothing else.
Rebooted to be sure it worked and bravo I have the Epson Perfection 2450 Photo Scanner working. Rebooting a few times and works each time
It seems that Mandriva have screwed up somehow. I remember that there used to be references to hotplugging associated with Firewire in 2007-Spring.
I can't find anything associated with hotplugging in 2008. It seems this lack of hotplugging is what causes the Firewire to not be activated or whatever.

The lack of sound was weird. I did a number of reboots, about 6, and on one occasion I got sound. So I did many many more and found I still got occasional sound.
Thinking that alsa might be flaky I un-installed what alsa packages I could remove and reinstalled from the net and not from the DVD. It didn't fix anything.
So I went to Cooker and installed all the updated alsa stuff.

I now have sound even after a dozen reboots. I don't know which of the alsa packages had the fix but obviously one of them did.

Regarding the apparent loss of Glow, that was an oversight on my part. Due to the rearranging of kdeartwork into selectable sections so not everything has to be installed if you really only want a part or parts of it, it caused me to leave out the kdeartwork basic......it had the Glow stuff in it.

About the Mouse back button being no longer usable. I followed AdamWs' advice and checked imwheel as he suggested but it gave a funny response

5785 ? 00:00:00 imwheel

to the ..........[root@localhost john]# ps -e | grep imwheel check.

I did try installing the logitech-mouse-common package and also the logitech-applet rpm but when rebooted, during the bootup it gave a load of errors related to udevd and wouldn't complete booting.

I did a new install of 2008 and am in it now.

I can see I won't be removing 2007-Spring any time soon. 2008..........very disappointing.

Cheers. John.


Thanks Adam for your post......I fell asleep while I was doing this post so I did not see yours until I had concluded this one.
I realized later that even though the Run Config Tool button is missing that one can still see which driver has been installed and they are correct.
There is just no GUI way of changing if they weren't.

Thanks for the Draksound info. That does work. Obviously draksound in MCC doesn't.

I think I have everything ??? running correctly ( except the Mouse issue) at the moment so I will use it full time for a while to make sure it is stable.
Cheers. John.

With the sound one... the reason you get it intermittently is that the priority of sound cards is based on the order the drivers register them...

If you can, blacklist the module for the one you don't want to use. Thus, the other one will be the only one loading, and will become the default card.

As for the mouse.... imwheel shouldnt be needed if it's worked in the past, and I'd be surprised if it did much at all now it's so old. Do any other mice buttons exhibit the behaviour you want AussieJohn (eg wheel click, wheel left/right, other side buttons?)? You could swap them around with xmodmap if so.

I'm guessing based on the limited information for both, so I could easily be entirely wrong.

James

iphitus: actually, we use imwheel to handle multiple buttons and have done for several releases. If I kill the imwheel process running on my machine, it stops my back / forward buttons working in Firefox. You have to have *something* to translate these buttons into actual actions that applications will recognize, as most applications aren't written to recognize these extended buttons natively. imwheel is it, for Mandriva.

john: the response to the check is actually what I expected (it tells me imwheel is running) but I should actually have asked for this check, sorry:

ps aux | grep imwheel

it'll tell me the parameters imwheel was launched with, which is important. Also it'd help to see your xorg.conf.

forgot to mention, john - there's a bug report for the sbp2 issue: http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=26284

I just signed up for MandrivaUsers...and happened upon this topic before closing out of the site. And it's a good thing. I've been the not-so-proud owner of 2008 PowerPack. In my goal to move from Windows XP (and avoid Vista altogether) I put full faith in Mandriva and made the purchase. I have had no sound since the Oct 18th, and need to tackle web cam setup next. I also have a eSATA drive to connect at some point too. At least this topic gives me hope that sound is possible... Thank you.

Thanks Adam. Herewith as you requested.

[john@localhost ~]$ ps aux | grep imwheel
john 5709 0.0 0.0 3432 868 ? Ss 16:47 0:00 /usr/bin/imwheel -k
john 7086 0.0 0.0 3076 812 pts/1 S+ 16:55 0:00 grep --color imwheel
[john@localhost ~]$



From /etc/x11/modeprobe.conf

# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig: version 1.0 (buildmeister@builder3) Wed Sep 12 14:29:35 PDT 2007

# File generated by XFdrake (rev 230776)
# **********************************************************************
# Refer to the xorg.conf man page for details about the format of
# this file.
# **********************************************************************

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "layout1"
Screen "screen1" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Mouse2" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "dbe" # Double-Buffering Extension
Load "v4l" # Video for Linux
Load "extmod"
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx" # 3D layer
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"

#DontZap # disable <Ctrl><Alt><BS> (server abort)
# allows the server to start up even if the mouse does not work
#DontZoom # disable <Ctrl><Alt><KP_+>/<KP_-> (resolution switching)
Option "allowmouseopenfail"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard1"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
Option "XkbOptions" "compose:rwin"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse2"
Driver "evdev"
Option "bustype" "0x0011"
Option "relBits" "+0+1+2"
Option "product" "0x0006"
Option "vendor" "0x0002"
Option "HWheelRelativeAxisButtons" "7 6"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"

# TV fullscreen mode or DVD fullscreen output.
# 768x576 @ 79 Hz, 50 kHz hsync
Identifier "monitor1"
VendorName "Plug'n Play"
ModelName "SyncMaster"
HorizSync 30.0 - 81.0
VertRefresh 56.0 - 75.0
ModeLine "768x576" 50.0 768 832 846 1000 576 590 595 630
ModeLine "768x576" 63.1 768 800 960 1024 576 578 590 616
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "device1"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "nVidia Corporation"
BoardName "NVIDIA GeForce FX - GeForce 8800"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "screen1"
Device "device1"
Monitor "monitor1"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "DPMS"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 8
Modes "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "640x480" "480x360" "320x240"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 15
Modes "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "640x480" "480x360" "320x240"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "640x480" "480x360" "320x240"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "640x480" "480x360" "320x240"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite"
EndSection


Cheers. John.

Adam thanks again reference the Firewire issue. Glad the problem is recognized and being looked at and that the solution workaround I am using at the moment is the correct one in the interim.

Updating alsa packages from cooker seems to have solved the no audio problem since I continue to not have a problem although rebooting often as I continue to move back and forth between Spring and 2008.

Cheers. John.

Hello Iphitus. Thanks for your input.

My Mouseman Dual Optical Has the usual Left, Right and Centre click on the mouse wheel.
It has a single Left thumb button on the lower left side and no other buttons. This is the one that is not working.

All the Left and Right click functions work perfectly as does the scroll wheel and its other functions such as auto-scrolling up and down when pressing down on the scroll wheel or dropping text when doing copy and paste.

Regarding the sound, I updated the alsa packages from cooker and it solved the problem however I appreciate you mentioning the blacklisting of an unrequired function.
Could you please outline how I could do this because this would be handy knowledge for the future.

Thanks and cheers. John.

john: aha - it's not loading a config file for your mouse. Note my output for the same command:

[adamw@lenovo deluge]$ ps aux | grep imwheel
adamw 4813 0.0 0.0 3436 888 ? Ss Oct24 0:03 /usr/bin/imwheel -k --rc /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc.MX500

see the --rc parameter.

let's try some good old-fashioned experimentation. Kill the running imwheel process, then run exactly the one in my example - /usr/bin/imwheel -k --rc /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc.MX500 . See if the thumb button does anything in Firefox now. If it doesn't, try /usr/bin/imwheel -k --rc /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc.MX700 , then /usr/bin/imwheel -k --rc /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc.MX1000 , then /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc.generic . Don't restart X or anything between tries, you shouldn't need to.

Well, everyone has a different experience when it comes to installing Linux on their hardware, but in all honesty, this version of Mandrake/Mandriva is by far the best I've ever used and I've been running it in some version since the 7 days. I have an IBM Thinkpad T60 with Intel and ATI components and everything on that laptop works like a dream. The package management is much more streamlined than ever before using the configuration tools and the over all feel of the distro is extremely polished. Now I always have a habit of installing SMART to handle package management, regardless of which distro i install (OpenSUSE, Mandriva, Redhat, etc) but I've found myself using it less and less with 2008 because the update applet just works. Now I will admit that some of the 2008 Mirrors have behaved somewhat strange from time to time, but it's not much of a show stopper, because you can delete all the mirrors and re-add new ones with minimal fuss.

No distro is perfect, but i must say that aside from playing musical chairs with the mirrors I haven't had to do anything outside of just use 2008. The 3D desktop worked great out of the box although I wish the fusion plug-ins were installed by default along with Compiz and the Wireless setup and Hibernate/Resume features work just as well as they do in Windows now.

2008 is the perfect balance between user friendly and Power user. There's nothing the system won't let me do, but there's also little reason for me to go off and start hacking away. Perhaps it would be nice to have the fusion-icon sitting in the systray, but we all know it starts Compiz automatically, which inherently conflicts with the Mandriva scripts which does the same thing when logging in. Maybe a modification to the python script would quickly solve that issue so i suppose I'll contribute and try to hack it tonight and get some packages together. Ubuntu and openSUSE will get the spotlight, but having used openSUSE 10.3 on my Desktop I can clearly say it's solid, but a step below Mandriva in over all polish and out of the box usability. I'm saying this even though I've used openSUSE 10.2 since SLED was released. I can't praise this release enough, because it really is what Mandriva has needed the past few years. There no slowing down Ubuntu at this point, but comparing Ubuntu to Mandriva is like comparing an 8th grader to a High School Senior. Mandriva has already solved most of the problems Ubuntu is just starting to cope with. if Mandriva could get it's public persona back in the good graces of Linux users I have no doubt that it is more than a match for Vista and Leopard.

I like the Forum changes, but I still think it needs a makeover that gives it a more whimsical appearance like the new gimp site. Mandriva has one of the greatest communities you'll ever find, but we need to look like a leader if we're to bring the followers back. Eye candy goes a long way to reshaping perception. I also like the fact that Mandriva included the proprietary components in the box (ATI drivers/ Fuendo multimedia codecs). While it conflicts with the pure open source philosophy, it's the just make it work solution that has been needed by the distro over the last few releases. The codec package has made a believer of some of my Ubuntu friends even though they know the multimedia support is just a few clicks away. It never hurts to have things work right out the box.

Thanks Adam for showing up all over the Internet in just about every Mandriva forum I can find. From Os News, to here, to the Mandriva forums you've towed the line and been there with never ending support for the Distro and I really appreciate that. Mandriva won't get the , "It can do no wrong" reviews that Ubuntu or Leopard will get, but that doesn't mean that it isn't the creme de la creme of the 2008 distro releases.

Anyone know how to get FreeNX to play nce with a Lynksis router. I can get through to my desktop, but I'm having some trouble getting to other boxes sitting behind the router from my Office Windows XP machine. Perhaps I've got the port forwarding screwed up but if anyone has any articles that might help I'd really appreciate it. Remote computing is a great way to have unencumbered internet access with all the restrinctions that most work environments place on the internet use these days.

Just a minor point about the "One" CD (obtained from the official torrent) - the files in the root of the CD (readme.pdf and lesezmoi.pdf) both refer to 2007.1 Spring rather than 2008.0. A little bit confusing when you just put the CD in to see what it is (having forgotten to label it) and the only files in the root refer to the old version!

Also I noticed that even though I installed with the English language and a UK keyboard, Firefox is trying to spellcheck my mub posts with the Portuguese language! Took me a while looking through the preferences to find that option!

On the plus side though, I've got all sorts of Compiz tastiness going on here now Oddly when I press Alt-F2, the run dialog appears _behind_ the active window, maybe that's related to the Compiz, I don't know.

Best of all though, when I use Filezilla, I can actually connect to my ftp server without it hanging on directory listings! That's the first Mandriva that's been able to do that, I've been trying since Mdk10.1 to get it to work on my installed system (and on live One CDs) without any success, despite other live distros having no problems with the same site. So for 2008!

Haven't tried gps or camera yet, but the basic hardware (including 1400x1050 laptop screen for the first time ever!) all works great.

Forgot to mention - there's still the annoying problem of missing menu entries.
I'm not the only one to notice this (see for example here) and I heard gparted was fixed in the errata, but I've just installed filelight (no menu entry), filezilla (no menu entry) and hugin (no menu entry).
This was never a problem with 2006, but ever since 2007 came out it seems they just can't get the menu definitions right?! Back then the story was that the menu system was being changed and some definitions of menu entries were still in the wrong format, but that was ages ago, is that still the case now?

By the way, some further tests:
Camera 1 (Canon Ixus, USB) - FAILS, detects Ixus ok but hangs on "connecting to camera..."
Camera 2 (Panasonic FZ5, USB, looks like mass storage to 2007.1) - FAILS, detects camera but aborts with "unspecified error"
USB stick - works perfectly, dialog pops straight up to browse with Konqueror
trackball (USB) - works fine
GPS receiver (Garmin etrex, serial port) - works perfectly

Don't know what to do about the cameras, it's odd that neither work because I've never had problems with them with 2007.1. I think I've tried all reasonable combinations (turning camera on when digikam already running, or closed; selecting mount, launch digikam or cancel from the dialog, using auto-detected camera settings as well as "Mass storage camera" and "Directory Browse") but even konqueror can't see the Panasonic.

PS/ Sorry for the unintended thread hijack

"Best of all though, when I use Filezilla, I can actually connect to my ftp server without it hanging on directory listings!"

sounds like the old passive / active connections chestnut. You might want to test with a console client like ncftp and see if it gives you any warnings about passive transfers timing out.

the Firefox spellcheck issue is a very odd one - the oddest thing is that everyone seems to get a *different* Random Foreign Language to have the spellchecker set to. And it doesn't happen to me, so I can't figure out why. I'm not sure if anyone's filed a bug yet, if not, you might want to.

"Back then the story was that the menu system was being changed and some definitions of menu entries were still in the wrong format, but that was ages ago, is that still the case now?"

actually, yeah, some packages (especially contrib ones) still don't have XDG menus. Just about everything in main should by now, though, I rebuilt just about every package in main that hadn't been touched for a while during the 2008 cycle, and added XDG menus to all packages that were missing them. I'm going to try and get through contrib before the next release happens. However, I'm not sure that's the problem in this case. I just checked Filelight, and it does have a valid XDG menu entry in the package. What desktop are you in? On KDE, I think it should be in the 'Utilities' area. On GNOME, I think the menu entry may not appear, as the file is in /usr/share/applications/kde , not /usr/share/applications . This may be worth changing. I'm fairly sure Filezilla also has a valid XDG menu entry, I'm not so sure about Hugin. If you want to check, check that the package includes a .desktop file in either /usr/share/applications or /usr/share/applications/kde .

You're right, my bad. I looked in "Tools" but didn't notice that there are two submenus for "System Tools" and "Accessibility". Filelight does indeed appear under "System Tools", I just missed it, sorry.

For Filezilla and Hugin, there are .desktop files in /usr/share/applications (not in kde like filelight has) and neither appear in the menu (or submenus).

As to the other problems, can you confirm that the readme.pdf and lesezmoi.pdf are both incorrectly referring to 2007.1 Spring, and have you got any idea why digikam can't connect to either of my cameras?

I just downloaded and installed ALL of the latest updates which included drakconf and harddrake and so on..

Results:- 1. Still no Left Thumb button capability on the Mouse.

2. I commmented the sbp2 work around in modprobe-preload and rebooted. Still no Firewire Scanner detection. Had to uncomment it to get scanner functioning again.

3. Rebooted and still got no sound. Checked KMIX and saw the unwanted via as the default still.
Rebooted once more and this time I got sound. Checked kmix and saw that Soundblaster was the one shown.
Obviously something in 2008 is flakey i.e. unstable, because there is no such problem in my 2007-spring.
From previous experience, ifI reboot again I will likely have no sound again but then I might, one just cannot count on it to stay fixed.

cheers. John.

I checked on the bugzilla (should have done that before, sorry) - and found one already listed for the readme gaffe (34872). There's also one for a digikam problem (33070) but I'm not sure if that's the same as mine. As an experiment I tried it again, running One from the CD, and got the same errors as before. I added my sources for 2008 using rpmdrake and checked for updates (tons of open office and mozilla, no digikam or gphoto2). So I urpme'd digikam, used mub's easy-urpmi to set my sources to 2007.1 and tried to urpmi digikam again - but it didn't work, it relied on older versions of stuff although it didn't say what. So I changed my sources to cooker and did manage to urpmi 0.9.3 of digikam, but it had no effect - I still got errors trying to connect to my Canon Ixus v2 and my Panasonic FZ5. I'm thinking it might be deeper than digikam though, because even Konqueror can't browse the FZ5's file system... and on the FZ5's screen, where normally it says "PC" when connected to the laptop, the "PC" symbol only briefly flashed up before disappearing. So that's when I ran out of ideas and gave up. I would add this to the bugzilla but qa.mandriva.com appears to be down at the moment.

In the meantime I'm sticking with 2007.1.

Yay, the digikam problem seems to be fixed now: http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=35642
It's mentioned in the errata list as only affecting Canon but the summary mentions also Olympus and I couldn't connect to either Canon or Panasonic cameras. I'll try the fix tonight if it's up on the mirrors already.
Thanks to spiny for the "errata" heads-up!

I wrote the errata entry based on the security team's advisory, I'll update it to be less specific. thanks!

Nah, on second thoughts, leave the description as it is! After getting the libgphoto2 updates, I could connect to my Canon camera no probs, either through Konqueror or through Digikam. But still nothing with the Panasonic (unspecified error, can't connect). I then did a "urpmi -auto-select --update" which even after disabling non-free and urpmeing firefox and openoffice, still downloaded a metric s__tload of updates (no binary patches, anyone?). But still no Panasonic.

So maybe the symptoms are the same for Olympus, Canon and Panasonic, but maybe this fix is just for Canon?

oh dear, I changed it already. I'll just make it something vague.

did you report your problem?

AdamW. Sorry for the long delay on this but have just become a little more understanding of the problem and thus was able to put into effect what you suggested as per your earlier post quoted below. The line I used was....... /usr/bin/imwheel -k --rc /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc.MX500 but had to run it as root to work though..

As of 10 minutes ago the back button now finally works in both Konqueror and Firefox. HHHHooooorrrrraaaaaayyyyyy.

Now if only Mandriva can make this automatic again as it used to be and it should. This is not something a newbie should have to do least of all anyone who has been using Mandriva for a long time such as myself. It seems to be a case of Mandriva not dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's when it makes changes to already working programs. Not good.

But I will say this.......If Final Mandriva2008-Spring is even better than rc2 then it will be a fabulous release. .

But these minor problems must be fixed to make it near perfect out of the box. A user should not have to make black list entry's.
They should be able to select the Sound source via Gui as a default and that should be the end of it.

For example I had an onboard audio source that I disabled in Bios yet the darned thing still showed up in Mandriva. I also have a Video capture card and its audio source was also active so all three were active and competing on top of which the onboard unwanted audio, disabled in the bios, was the first up source. No wonder sound wouldn't work properly until somethings were blacklisted. I have since removed the Creative Sound card (Won't ever use Creative products again) and now use the Onboard Audio but the Capture card still has to be blacklisted by manual text entry.

The Mouse thumb button thing is another example.

Any comments welcome. Thanks Adam and everyone else who came in on this. Cheers. John.