neddie

Thanks for the tips. After doing some searching around, I find it incredible that it's SO difficult to find a 4:3 screen on a laptop now! I understand that for watching films widescreen is better, fine. But I don't watch films on my laptop, I look at photos and write documents and develop code and read web pages and lots of other things that are just better on a 4:3 screen. So why's it so difficult to find one? I guess it could be that all the laptop manufacturers buy their screens from the same source, so the souce just has to make screens of one format - but I still see a huge variety of sizes, resolutions, finishes, coatings, glare, non-glare and lots of other jargon so it's not as if all the screens are exactly the same... so why don't they want to make 4:3 screens any more? Is it just so they can save money by making fewer pixels - make a "short" screen with less height and then market it as "wide" to make more profit?? My old (sadly deceased) laptop had 1050 pixels vertically. Now, over 4 years later, it seems very difficult to find any over 800 pixels high (many only 768 high!) and then they're much more expensive. Whatever happened to tech getting better and cheaper over the years?

Is that your CAD code running there? In which case you might want to: s/symulation/simulation/ s/swich/switch/ s/srep/step/ s/MENUES/MENUS/ s/controll/control/ Looks cool though!

Sorry, I missed that you used the "-a" option. I only use this option with urpmq, never with urpmi! That explains why it wanted to install loads of stuff. Hmmm, after looking at wikipedia, it seems I may have to retract what I said, scarecrow... I was under the impression it was in the repositories, but I've only used unrar before and that's a simple install. But it looks like the situation for rar is a bit more complicated and awkward. Sorry, scarecrow, I was wrong. Be aware though that this is only a trial version for 40 days, and after that you'll need to buy it for 30 Euros. Maybe you can consult your other software which requires rar, to see if there are any other options?

You're right, but it's fairly easy to view the description of the package to check that it really is what you want. You can do this in the GUI or from the command line if you prefer. I'm pretty sure that this rar package is actually what you want, but it certainly shouldn't pull in 200 megs+ of dependencies, are you sure?? :unsure: The list of dependencies should be tiny and you should already have most of them. Maybe your system wants to pull in those 200 megs of updates anyway, regardless of whether you want to install rar or not? Have you updated your package list and done an update? By the way, scarecrow, please don't advise everybody to install every package from source. We have repositories for a good reason.

Yes I know people have moaned about yet another such thread, so I'll try to keep my questions a bit more specific. It looks like my current laptop is too sick to be made better (according to the shops I've taken it to so far), so it looks like I'm reluctantly in the market for a new laptop. My most important requirement is the screen, it should be around 15 inches and preferably non-widescreen (but that's looking difficult to satisfy) and preferably non-shiny (ditto), and preferably around the same resolution I've got now (1400x1050). I don't care too much about speed, or graphics speed, but it should be decent build quality and reliable. Obviously it should be linux-friendly too. So I'm looking at a few different models like Dell Latitude (business model), Lenovo Thinkpad (probably R series), maybe Samsung, but I wondered if you lot have any particular advice. An advantage of Dell is that I can choose every aspect (including which keyboard I want), but of course the disadvantage is that I can't see them or try out the keyboard before I buy... interestingly though I've been told I can buy a Latitude without an OS if I do it by phone! In particular, I have no clue about the graphics cards - my old laptop had integrated Intel graphics and was fine for what I use it for. In the higher end laptops you get one of the two other major brands, am I right in thinking this only has a noticeable effect for fast 3d games? If my 4-year old laptop could run Google Earth fine with a cheap graphics system, is there any reason to go for a more expensive one? And between the two big brands (Ati, Nvidia), would I be right in thinking that there are just as many people saying "don't buy A, buy B" as there are saying "don't buy B, buy A" ?

The answer seems to be no. Unless this is a separate problem, now I don't get those funny "eastern arabic" numbers but I (intermittently) just get squares instead. (Those squares should be 4 and 2). Must be a related problem. The only solution seems to be to carefully check every equation of any pdfs you make with Open Office, and if any of them look screwy then just generate the pdf again - lather, rinse, repeat until it works. This bug has caught me more than once now and it can be quite embarrassing...

Woah, never mind. I was trying to fsck /dev/hda6 (which is where my root partition usually is), but for some reason at that particular prompt it should be /dev/sda6 - so I fscked it and I can at least boot again...

Nuts, this just gets worse and worse... It died again while I was following Greg's link (thanks Greg!), and when I tried to reboot it complains about an unattached inode on my / partition which it can't fix. So it says I need to run fsck (which of course I've never had to do before) and when I obediently try "fsck /dev/hda6" from the given prompt it just says "The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem... you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock" what the? I realise this is veering wildly off topic now but it seems that the latest crash has now spread its tentacles onto my hard drive as well as my ram and maybe my motherboard. Not a happy camper. :sad:

Looks like they are three button batteries wrapped in plastic, but unplugging them for a few minutes and plugging them back in again didn't do anything obvious apart from require the date and time to be set. After a whole weekend of being switched off and unplugged (yay, holiday!), it booted fine, ran fine for 21 minutes and then froze with a mangled screen. The base (around the RAM and the wifi hatch) seemed rather warm for only 21 minutes use but I really don't know if that's the problem. I've switched off the Wifi in the BIOS anyway so that definitely shouldn't be warm. As for the 1st and 2nd slot, I've only got one 512MB stick in there now anyway and as far as I can tell it has to be in the first slot. Ever since I bought the laptop, the 256MB was in 1 and the 512MB in 2, and it ran fine for years. When I took out the 256MB stick it didn't boot at all, and when I then moved the 512MB to slot 1 then we get to where I am now. Bottom line - unplugging the reserve battery definitely hasn't fixed it. :sad:

Apparently I've got a "reserve battery", is this it? http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/syst...sm/reserve2.jpg It'll have to wait until after the weekend now but it sounds like something I can at least easily try.

I'll have a look... it should be like a small coin battery, like for a watch or something?

Normally I would agree but when it happens several times in one day, it doesn't have any time to corrode between spasms. And if the contacts were that damaged then I'd expect the remove/replace trick to not work at least once... Yes, the RAM is shared, and no I can't live with it, it's driving me potty. If it's the motherboard then the laptop's presumably a write-off, but if it's contacts I guess cleaning them should be possible. It would have to be the laptop's contacts though, because the same happened to the brand new memory. And all the contacts I can see look pristine. Here's another data point - with two 512 MB sticks in, it was happy for a while, then switched itself off. I removed one of the sticks, but didn't touch the other one. Then it booted. Yeah I know it doesn't discount the contacts theory but if it couldn't get a contact with the second stick any more then it should just ignore it and run with the other one. I guess. Thanks for all the ideas, guys!

You're right, I'm just going by the way it feels. And I've got other problems with the laptop (regularly failing to boot, as I described earlier) which I'm thinking may be connected to the temperature if indeed the temperature is higher than it was. I did say I was guessing :) I have gkrellm which tells me THM 40 degrees C, which sounds quite cool. And /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM/temperature tells me something similar, around 43 degrees C (and apparently ktemperature just reads this location anyway). But I've only just switched it on a few minutes ago. I tried running hugin to stitch some big pics, and that forced the CPU up to max power, and the fan came on, sounding normal, the temperature rose but the number didn't sound alarmingly high (50s). Anyway, something's not right, and I'm guessing about the temperature because it does feel hot, especially on the base where the RAM is (not near the fan which I assume is where the CPU is). But what amazes me is how repeatable it is, if it fails to boot (just lights two leds, doesn't even get to the DELL logo), then it's 100% repeatable, by taking out the RAM and putting it back in again, it boots next time. If I do everything else (take out the power, take out the battery, turn it upside down, unscrew the cover, unclip (but DON'T take out the RAM), clip the RAM back in, shut the cover, battery in, power in, press the button), it will refuse to boot. Every time. Something about taking out the RAM and putting it back in again does something, but I've no clue what. @daniewicz, what did you mean about CMOS? I've no real idea what CMOS is or how it could go bad or what the effect of it going bad would be... or how I would clear it given that it's a laptop and I've never opened the guts of it. Would CMOS failure/corruption be consistent with the weird RAM fix?

I installed kima, but I don't know whether to take it seriously or not.From the docs in /usr/share/doc/kima: :unsure: Anyway according to the urpmq -i it's an applet for Kicker, so I go to "Add Applet to Panel" and Kima's not in the list. Is this another KDE3/KDE4 directory mixup or is there another way to start Kima? Also I installed powertop from the repos, it's just confirming that I'm running at 600 MHz most of the time which is good.

Thanks guys. Yes the laptop is fairly old now, getting on for 4 and half years old. But the fan does come on and doesn't sound like it's got faulty bearings. And if it wasn't able to run at full speed due to gunk or whatever then it should run more often I'd have thought. Yes the cpufreq is running as I said, and steps down from 1600 to 600 MHz as it should. But I'm not actually sure whether there is a temperature problem, it just feels hot and I seem to be having ram problems so I'm putting the two together. Maybe I'm wrong and it was always so warm, maybe the ram problems have nothing to do with temperature, maybe I haven't got a clue what's going wrong... Anyway I've now got just one stick of brand new ram in there, and weird things are still happening - last night it just switched itself off for no reason (under low load, not too high temperature, propped up on a book for ventilation, hadn't been on for more than an hour) and refused point blank to boot again, despite several attempts. I took out the ram, put the same stick back in again and immediately it (seems to be) fine again, at least until the next time. memtest didn't find any problems with my old 512 MB stick, but didn't even acknowledge the old 256 MB stick. Sigh. So I'm now thinking maybe power, maybe motherboard, maybe something to do with graphics (because I get white flickery dots on the screen when it fails to boot). Maybe time for a new laptop? Thanks for the powertop tip, is that in Mandriva repos or does it need compiling from source?

If you don't mind using the command line, try pdftk - see here. You can merge pdfs into single ones, ignore certain pages and a boatload of other options. About Foxit, thanks for the tip, I thought it was windows-only. Shame it's closed source though, I thought the open-source pdf tools could do everything these days...

My laptop (with Centrino processor) seems to be running hotter underneath than usual - either it's the summer heat or something different with 2009.0, but whatever, the base of the laptop feels hot. This may or may not be the reason why my RAM died this week, but I'd quite like it if the new RAM I just bought didn't go the same way... Frequency stepping certainly seems to be enabled, gkrellm shows 600MHz when I'm not doing anything, which is good, but I'm wondering if there's a way to control the fan settings so it comes on at a lower temperature. The fan does come on if the processor really has to do work but I'm wondering whether that fan cools the RAM chips anyway. Any ideas? [moved from Hardware by spinynorman]

kpdf - shows yellow marker but doesn't show the text associated with it Document viewer / evince (double-click in gnome) - same, just shows the marker but no text gpdf - no such package for me OOo 3.1 - doesn't load the pdf properly, just shows binary rubbish pdfedit - same as kpdf pdftotext - just extracts my text, nothing from the annotations Kate - just opens the pdf with the binary rubbish, but if you search for /Popup (at least with this particular document) then the annotation text appears as plain text and can be read (but of course you can't see where in the document it was attached) Okular - don't know, don't have KDE4 Acrobat - don't know, don't fancy a 40MB+ closed source download with its "upgrade now!" nags and reputation for security problems.

Sorry to hear about the soured relations, wobo :sad: I hope Mandriva reacts to your statement and smooths the waters. Then again, I'm not holding my breath. If it helps, mandrivausers.org isn't listed on the mandriva forum either and that has never seemed to be a problem here.... I think? Good luck keeping positive!

I made a pdf from OpenOffice, and after sending it for review I got it sent back to me with "sticky" yellow notes on it with feedback. When I viewed it in Adobe/Windows, the bubbles popped up to show what the comment was for that part of the pdf. Then I got home and opened it in kpdf, I can see that there's a yellow thing there but can't get it to pop up... Is this just a feature of pdf that's not (fully) supported by kpdf yet, or am I missing something obvious? Is there another free pdf viewer that can show these yellow stickies?

I did look before I modprobe'd but all I saw was usbcore. Thank goodness my panic is over because I got the data I needed with good ol' Knoppix and I can carry on working on another machine. I just thought it was weird that it's probably EXACTLY why you're booting into Mandriva safe mode (to rescue stuff) and then the very things you need to work (ie, USB peripherals and network), don't. PS/ Looks like the reason for my laptop barfing its guts up WAS the ram after all - I took out one of the ram chips and now it actually manages to boot properly again - phew! :)

Well the same system used to recognise USB drives when they were plugged in, when it was capable of running in full X mode, so I suspect it's a limitation of the safe mode. For anyone else with the same problem, it works ok if the devices are plugged in BEFORE booting, and then my SD card appears as /dev/sdb1 and my USB stick at /dev/sdc1. But I couldn't get them to be recognised at all if I plugged them in after boot. Maybe that'll help someone... As for usb_storage, no it didn't appear in lsmod before, but even after I modprobe'd it, it still didn't create sdb1 or sdc1 when the stick was plugged in. But when I booted WITH the stick in, now usb_storage appears in lsmod. Okay, so the solution is, either use Knoppix booted to level 2, or make sure the USB stick is plugged in before booting Mandriva safe mode. Now I got to find me some more RAM to see if that fixes the laptop... :unsure:

Neither nor... I have no /dev/sdb anything, no sdc or sdd. I also plugged in an external USB drive, and I still don't get any such things in /dev... :unsure: Tried also with an SD card in the PCMCIA slot but also no joy... FORTUNATELY I have an old Knoppix CD and when I booted from that the USB stick appeared as /dev/sdb1, so I'm now THANKFULLY sorted :D But it's still a mystery why I was completely unable to mount anything in Mandriva safe mode. Maybe something critical wasn't loaded? :unsure:

I feel dumb. I have exactly the same problem, my laptop suddenly won't boot properly any more and my only hope is safe mode to resuce my files from yesterday :sad: So I'm trying to mount my USB stick, but can't find it. dmesg tells me that it's recognised the stick (New USB device found), tells me idVendor, idProduct, device strings, SerialNumber, but not the device name. fdisk -l just lists my sda devices, which are all the partitions on the internal hard drive. in /dev I have scd0 (presumably the CD), sda* which are all on the internal drive, sg0, sg1 and a few others. So I tried to mount sg0 and sg1, but it just complains about "/dev/sg0 is not a block device", same for sg1. I'm hoping that the laptop's problem is broken RAM, and hopefully can be fixed by replacing the RAM, but in the meantime I need my files I was working on yesterday and can't figure out any way to get them out! I can't even seem to ftp from the safe mode console

Nice detective work, coverup! I'll have to try this out with debian, it was something which always annoyed me but not quite enough to make me figure out how to fix it. Thanks for the tip!