ianw1974

Bit extreme, doesn't sound like his problem. They occurred in 2009, he bought in 2010 so I expect Seagate fixed everything by that time :). I've got Seagate 500GB disks with 32MB cache, and I have no problems and I don't intend on upgrading the firmware.

Anyway, don't attempt to upgrade the firmware on your drives unless you feel you really need to. I think your problem is somewhere else than the firmware, considering they've been working perfectly fine up until now.

I did a search on failed command: READ DMA

This hints at motherboard failure:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1497742

and this one gives you a test you can run with smartctl and look for re-aligned sectors to see if it's a drive problem:

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5933.0

reseating your SATA cable seemed to help, but you could also completely change the SATA cable if you have a spare, to ensure that you rule this out of the equation, suggest changing that first, then run the disk check. Your disks are new, but then that doesn't mean that they cannot fail. Your motherboard is much older, but then that is not always to say that your motherboard is a possibility.

Head into your BIOS also and do a load optimised defaults in case of misconfigured BIOS as well, then run the disk test. If there are no re-aligned sectors, then it's not your disk.

Try with Ubuntu you can run as a live cd and see how things work.

Doesn't look too exotic, so should be fine with most distros.

Problem with module for your network card. Maybe a newer kernel is available instead of the stock Mandriva one. Googled a few posts with that error message and generally looks as that is where your problem is.

You only needed to switch temporarily to find out if the nvidia driver is the problem. Not asking you to do it permanently. If we then find that the nvidia driver is the problem, then we need to check the version and if there is another version of it newer or something that you can use.

Hehe, forgot about that option ;)

Video driver? Like I mentioned, maybe change to vesa, and see what happens? Did you not try this yet? :)

CTRL-C can stop the ping. If it's replying then that means you have connectivity. But when you lose your internet connection, check with ifconfig, the route command to see if you the 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 line, and see if it replies when you ping the router, and also the google address I gave you.

OK, so they're not using nm-applet, but they have it bound with network-manager. I can see that NetworkManager daemon is running and the ifcfg-eth0 is controlling it. Seems a bit of a weird implementation to me, but then it is Mandriva so anything is possible :)

An:

ifconfig eth0

should at least then show the IP address that eth0 has which was provided by dhclient. Also:

route -n

will show the default gateway which should be the address of your router. When internet stops working, run these two commands to see how it looks. We can ascertain if you have connectivity by the ifconfig meaning you have an IP, and the route command to see if it knows to go to your DSL router. You can then try pinging the router (maybe 192.168.1.1) depending on how you configured it. And then pinging 8.8.8.8 which is a google DNS server, which should reply if the ifconfig and route commands show the information we're looking for.

Looks like you have Network Manager managing your ethernet connection, and so that is why you got that error that it passed the ifup command.

Anyway, if you've ran dhclient eth0, you don't need to do ifup eth0. Because the interface should already then be active.

ps aux | grep -i nm-applet

should show if Mandriva is using the Network Manager applet. And also:

ps aux | grep -i network

to see if network manager is starting at boot. We can also see:

chkconfig --list | grep :on

which should show the services that are enabled at boot, one of them is probably network manager. If network-manager is doing it, then you should just be able to click the network manager applet by the clock and then selecting the eth0 connection will automatically give it an address anyway, or refresh it if you lost the link. This usually works fine for me, it seems now they have got ridden of the crappy MandrivaNetwork program which was always being used to control the network, and network manager is far superior and less buggy than this was.

Finally, I'm glad if Mandriva has decided to move to network manager, because this was one thing I hated about Mandriva. You couldn't even switch to network manager without a host of problems, so I'm happy to see them dropping that program finally.

I'm guessing that's the only error that is shown when you launched gnu backgammon from the console window? No other text?

The only real way of diagnosing that would be to run an strace as you play the game, but it will generate a load of info, but would be ideal to add to a bug report as that strace would show exactly what is going on.

Could try switching from your Xorg video driver to vesa and see if it would settle down a bit? Before doing an strace with your existing video driver.

Providing the router was powered on when you turned on the Mandriva machine, it should have worked and obtained the IP address. Ticking the box for allowing users to manage, just lets them bring the connection up and down without root privileges. Had you renewed the connection as root, chances are it should have worked also :)

This could be easily checked if you really wanted to. First check that /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 is set to use DHCP - it should be if that is how you configured the ethernet connection. Secondly, you could then go into MCC and disable the option allowing users to manage the connection. This will revert it back to how it was before.

Next, to find out where the problem is, from a console su to root and provide your root password when asked. Then do:

ps aux | grep -i dhcp

this should list something with dhcpcd or dhclient pointing to eth0. You can then kill this process, because running dhcpcd or dhclient again on this connection would cause some issues. This can be killed with:

killall dhcpcd
killall dhclient

depending on which one is in use. It could even be something else. But you can post here with the results from the ps aux and we can verify. Then to bring up the connection:

dhcpcd eth0
dhclient eth0

again, depending on results from ps aux. Or, if you want to use the parameters from /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, then:

ifup eth0

should run dhcp and start the interface. As you were doing this normally before, it would be better to just run the dhcp commands to rule out some Mandriva mis-configuration with ifcfg-eth0. Alternatively, you can just forget about it as you now have it solved :) but I thought for completeness, I'd provide extra steps for you to check it and find out exactly where the problem was.

First of all, PPPoE and PPPoA are completely different. You will have to use the exact one as per your internet service provider. If your connection is via PPP over ATM then you need to use PPPoA. If it's PPP over Ethernet, then you need to use PPPoE. Please configure this exactly how it should be for your connection first of all. You mentioned you use one or the other, so I need to make sure you're using the correct one - as I wasn't able to ascertain why you mentioned using one or the other?

Are you using Mandriva to initiate your connection with PPPoA or PPPoE? If so, are you sure you really need to do this? This modem should have the ability to connect to the internet itself. I would then just configure Mandriva to use a standard ethernet connection. There is no need to do bridging for your ethernet connection if this is what you are doing? If so, change it, so that the router manages the connection, and you just have the modem giving you a DHCP address to each computer connected by the four ethernet ports, or via wireless.

I'm expecting some mis-configuration on the router. Either that it's not giving a DHCP address to the machine, or that it's not responding in a certain amount of time, or that MCC is giving you false information with the errors - it certainly sounds that way as you are able to connect to the internet without any problems. Most likely instability with Mandriva.

Ensure you've set up the repos correctly and that they are up-to-date. Use easyurpmi, or alternatively in MCC I'm sure you can add everything you need. Then try again to install the ndiswrapper kernel.

http://easyurpmi.zarb.org

I would expect it created a /etc/X11/xorg.conf. What you can do is open up a console window and then:

su (enter root password when prompted)
cd /etc/X11
mv xorg.conf xorg.conf.backup

then restart your system. Then it will auto-detect your xorg settings and give you perhaps a better looking desktop. As for the NOFB - No Framebuffer is what I'm pretty sure it stands for.

We can also blacklist the kernel module for the ethernet card that way the device will never appear. Usually under /etc/modprobe.d and create a new file but of course we just need to find out what module is being loaded for that particular card.

I'm not sure how the connection is being managed, but check /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0. In this file there will be an onboot option or similar which can be set from yes to no and then it shouldn't become active. That should at least let you get around it if the option in the BIOS doesn't exist as not all computers have it.

Alternatively, configuring the eth0 connection in MCC should give you the option of disabling it without it enabling onboot.

I would say it's down to some kind of codec problem. I have a JVC camera with a 20GB hdd drive in it, and mine also have the lines on when I play back in Linux. In Windows it's not a problem. When I make DVD's from the movies, they are even worse than when you watch them as standard mpeg files. I've also yet to figure out the solution, and it's not distro specific.

Sorry I can't help more than that John, I could do with fixing mine also, but so far I lived with it my using Windows because I never got to the bottom of the problem.

An easier way maybe is to generate a new one for your machine. If X is not already running, simply:

X -configure

will generate /root/xorg.conf.new and you can then copy this to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. You can also let Xorg detect everything automatically by completely deleting /etc/X11/xorg.conf and see if it's any better.

I don't seem to be able to find a Mandriva rpm for pspp. Are you sure that the one you found is for Mandriva? And if it's for Mandriva, are you sure it's for 2010? I expect one of two things. Either it's built against a newer version of GTK+ or that it is an RPM for another distro and not Mandriva that has a newer version of GTK+.

You could always download the source from the PSPP website and compile it yourself it sounds like this is the only option you have since the RPM you downloaded is not compatible for Mandriva 2010.

Going by what I see, you could disable the following:

mandi
mdadm
netfs
nfs-common
openvpn
pppoe
resolvconf
rpcbind
smb

mandi is the firewall, so if you want and need this because your internet connection doesn't have a firewall, or is directly connected to your computer, you can leave this. mdadm is for raid arrays, so if you know you didn't install raid partitions, etc, then you can disable this. netfs, nfs-common are NFS so if you are not using NFS then you can disable these. smb is samba, so if you are not using samba, then disable this also. rpcbind is used by samba and nfs, so if you are not using both samba and nfs, then you can disable this. If you use either nfs, or samba, then leave this enabled. resolvconf you can disable, as it's a pain in the backside. pppoe can be disabled if you are not using it for your internet connection on this machine. If your machine connects directly to the internet, then there is chances you are using this maybe? If your internet is via a router or not connected directly to your machine, you can safely disable it.

I'm not sure about portreserve, so I cannot tell you whether it's safe to disable this or not.

These are links to Mandriva 2011 DVD ISO's. And as I just said, they are 1.6GB ISO which means they are DVD and not CD. So to be clear, no you cannot burn a CD image. You can burn a DVD only. And if your machine doesn't support DVD, then I think you're out of luck as there does not seem to be CD images.

They are 1.6GB ISO's, so I think they are DVD images.

There's no way of configuring akonadi to disable the popups completely? Never seen this app, so no idea how it works, but hate the way you are forced to use something as a dependency than not being able to disable it from popping up. Sounds kinda Microsoft.