ianw1974

I'm liking it very much, my hardware has been so much more reliable now since the change from the stock firmware.

No, reboot not normally necessary. I got mine working without the reboot, but sometimes a logout and login is required if you add yourself to new groups. Incidently, maybe the closest to yours would be "Deskjet F300 series".

I have a Deskjet F380 as well, but never had to select a model for scanning. Where was this? I just ran xsane and then started using the scanner. Sometimes I had to add myself to a few groups first to get it to work. Usually plugdev, and some others as well.

I was expecting it to take on it's own identity, but after install, just different colours but looks the same as Mandriva.

From here: http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Quanta_plus_under_KDE_4 Some people are using KDevelop instead.

Could be, but I have 4.0.x anyway so should have been OK. Downloaded the DVD just now, so building a new machine with this, and will see what happens. Not given up so easily :) But that post does confirm that unless you have the DVD you don't have the ability to install the system under VirtualBox, because you're missing the relevant kernel-devel packages, etc, which enable you to build the guest additions. EDIT: It seems after install from the DVD, everything works fine. So, the Dual Arch CD is certainly missing something which doesn't allow you to use this particular CD for installing in VirtualBox. The DVD is required, which is kind of sad, since it means I have to download 4GB, instead of 700MB. So now can do a bit of testing now.

Sadly, Mageia for me in VirtualBox was a complete showstopper. Installed fine, but wouldn't start a graphical environment. Had what I expected was going to be the login screen, but no login box appeared. Disappointing. Maybe because it's the RC? Doubt it though. Tried installing guest additions, but cannot because no kernel-devel available. Can't download it, because from the console, no way to get the mirrors set up to download packages and install without having to spend way too much effort, than if the GUI had been available, I could have logged in and clicked to set it up. Had downloaded the Dual Arch 700MB CD which should have been sufficient to have a system working. Sadly it seems, not. If it cannot give a working graphical environment, it doesn't fill me full of hope. Every other distro I've tested in VirtualBox works fine. Will try the full release in a couple of days to see if it's any better. The 700MB should have been enough to get the system working. However, seems I will have to download the full DVD so that I've got all packages available, including a kernel-devel. Kind of defeats the object, and that I have to jump through hoops to get a working system. Disappointed.

I'm currently with Linux Mint 10 and Linux Mint Debian, and it's as sweet as. Ubuntu 10.04 was perfectly fine, but the upgrade to 10.10 and then 11.04 caused me so many problems even after a clear out of the gnome config, it was still bad and buggy. Gonna download and try Mageia, haven't used an rpm-based distro for a long time on the desktop, so will have to see if it impresses me.

You're using a beta which is unstable and expected to have inherent problems. Running Windows in qemu is generally bad in performance anyway, even more so if your machine is using a disk-based image file instead of using a partition. Disk-based image files will work better on a filesystem, such as xfs or jfs where large files perform better than say ext3 which performs like a dog with disk-based image files.

For a desktop, really only /, /home and swap is required. I would have combined your / and /usr and just had a 20GB / partition. As 6.5 + 2.2GB = 7.7GB, it's well within the 20GB limit of / and you have space for your /tmp files and /var growing. 2GB swap is OK, and allocate the rest to /home. Mine for example: Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/vg-sysroot 20G 6.4G 13G 34% / tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /lib/init/rw udev 1.9G 480K 1.9G 1% /dev tmpfs 1.9G 104K 1.9G 1% /dev/shm /dev/sda1 228M 34M 183M 16% /boot /dev/mapper/vg-syshome 446G 246G 201G 56% /home disregard the /dev/mapper stuff as I'm using LVM partitions. They could just as well be /dev/sda2 for / and /dev/sda3 for /home.

If you have Debian Stable, then yes, but then the packages available and versions are far higher than that of let's say, Red Hat, CentOS which would be classed at the same level. But if you have Testing, then you'll find it's much better.

Mint has two versions, one built on Ubuntu, but far more polished and finished off. There is also Mint Debian, which is faster than the Mint Ubuntu, but has far more updates as it's based on Debian Testing, but you never need to reinstall or change repos anytime, because it's constantly updated. Testing is pretty stable. If you know Debian, there are three versions - stable, testing and unstable (what they refer to as sid). Stable has far less updates, testing has more but I've never experienced problems with stability, unstable will have. I had this once and when I updated something broke, but after a day or two it was fixed again in the next update. Wasn't a serious bug, but could have been. So I would recommend Mint Debian if you don't want to keep reinstalling.

I'm using Linux Mint, as Ubuntu annoyed me after an upgrade called all sorts of problems and deleted all my emails (.evolution folder disappeared). Currently Linux Mint 10, but Linux Mint 11 is due at the end of the month. And my laptop has Linux Mint Debian, and it's really cool :)

As it's using the uvc module you can install guvcview and also the webcam can be opened and viewed with VLC.

It was nice to read your info on the comparison between Mandriva and Mageia John. Many thanks, I appreciate it since I've not installed either and this kind of information helps people choose based on all of our experiences.

It's not the kernel, it's completely unrelated to the kernel. It's power management configuration within the desktop environment.

I doubt very much the CD thing would work with Linux - sounds more like a Windows idiosyncracy

Aliases can be made system-wide with /etc/bashrc. That way you would only need to edit this, and every user would get your customisations as scarecrow mentions.

I normally install java versions from sun ending in rpm.bin, because it does it system-wide and thus you don't need to manually export JAVA_HOME or anything else like that. The .bin just extracts and then the rest is a case of manual configuration. It would be messy moving the java executables and all the other java directories under /usr/local/bin.

No, definitely not breaking the system.

I have a backup of my important data off-site, but using Dropbox. It's good because it has a Windows client. It can also be used from the CLI as well, so without the need for X and Gnome/KDE or whatever. It's just basically synchronisation of a particular folder/directory. You just drop all your stuff in here (I store in here by default) and it's automatically synchronised. I then have other computers with Dropbox installed also, linked to the same account, so that when I turn them on, the files are sync'd, and so I have the same content on all my drives. Normally dropbox would use /home/username/Dropbox, but you could change this to just be /home/username and then everything under here would be sync'd, including all your user config files which might be a bit too much in the first place. You can even use Dropbox to revert to previous versions of the files. By default, it keeps these for up to 30 days on a free account with 2GB, but if people refer each other, each referal earns 256MB, and so effectively, you can get up to 8GB free through recommendations. There are paid offerings for more space like 50GB and 100GB. Data is encrypted as it is saved to the server at the other side via a HTTPS connection and AES encrypted. Data will only be encrypted as it is saved, it won't be done in the connection - that's why the connection is via HTTPS in a way encrypted as it moves from your computer to the destination server. Ubuntu One also works in the same way, in that you have 2GB free, and can pay for more as you need it. Personally this works good for me. In terms of other backups, I haven't looked but if it was a server I was doing, then I'd do it differently. Probably with VPS Hosting, and then I'd use DRBD or glusterfs to synchronise the files from one machine to another so that I've got a live working backup immediately accessible. Or make an active/standby cluster to automatically switch over to the server in the event of failure of the first server. If you're after offsite backup for data, then this might not be for you it might be a bit overkill. With your particular requirements outlined above, that kind of backup won't come cheap.

Yes but the TP-LINK USB thing is wireless adapter right? So it's the same principal as it's wireless :) Incidently, just noticed today my wireless connection between the houses was 5.5MB and upped the TX power from 17mW to 34mW, and now I've got 54Mbps between the houses. Not all firmwares have the ability to let you do this, I could do it because of DD-WRT which I installed on my devices. My Netgear has 71mW but I did it on the ASUS which was at 17mW, but you cannot increase the TX power too much as it will increase the noise, which will also affect the performance. Which was why I left the Netgear as it was.

Your internet speed and wireless speed are separate issues. Something is wrong somewhere with the wireless if it's not getting any more than 5 or 10Mbps. Are you sure that the wireless cards are capable of Wireless N? Not all are. You may wish to try different wireless configurations, B, G or N and see which performs better. If you wireless cards are not N, then there's no point having N enabled on the router, because it will interfere with the Wireless G cards working at their optimum performance. Therefore you might wish to change the wireless config on the router to just B/G with no N support. I've got 40-50% wireless signal and getting perhaps 35Mbps. 54Mbps would be at 100% or almost 100%. That's on Wireless G. Either that, or you've got some big interference going on there.

Have you got the hplip packages installed? There's a post on here where someone had the same problem as you, I'll try and find it and link it so you can take a look at trying what they did. EDIT: Links: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?/topic/105279-hp-photosmart-b109a-multi-unit-solved/page__st__15__p__695397__hl__hplip+scanner__fromsearch__1#entry695397 and: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?/topic/107967-hp-all-in-one/page__p__696375__hl__hplip+scanner__fromsearch__1#entry696375

Well, wireless will be slower than cable, this is normal. Wireless G speed is 54Mbps, Wireless N speed is faster and up to 150Mbps. Standard Fast Ethernet would be 100Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet 1000Mbps. I'm guessing you have a Wireless G (54Mbps) as you mentioned speed is by half. Generally for internet this will be fine, but anything intensive between computers locally will be slower than compared to using an ethernet cable. Your signal will be dependent on distance from the wireless router, type of walls in between. Windows generally have a metallic layering on them, but the signal will be better going through this than a wall normally. When I'm in my office, I have wireless connectivity of about 50% or slightly higher to the lounge which is the next room via the corridor. Between two houses of 25 metres apart I've got a signal strength of between 42% and 48% but the link is fine as it's just for internet and my telephone (VOIP).