liquidzoo

I agree that a LiveCD version of Linux is a good way to 'get your feet wet' so to speak, without running the risk of truely stuffing up a working install. There are always risks, but it is generally safer that way.

If you decide, however, that you do want something that you can install and muck with; I suggest either Mandriva or Ubuntu

You will have to do some partition resizing, unless you have a second hard drive lying around that has nothing on it. Those are, from popular opinion (but not necessarily everyone's opinion :P ) the 2 most user-friendly and newbie-friendly distributions out there.

Oh, and welcome to the board!

I prefer KDE, but some don't. To each their own and I have no intention of arguing over desktop choice. Each have their own positives and negatives; but I have to wholeheartedly agree with bvc about the lack of anything new for KDE over the past year or so. It's sad, really. The theming engine is really powerful, but no one is taking advantage of that to make anything innovative. It's just copies (mostly bad) of other successful themes and styles.

Still, having said that, I will stick with KDE because I like it and I'm used to it. Linux is all about choice.

If you can supply us with the text of the error message you get when you type startx (as your user), we can help you troubleshoot it and get everything working.

For most purposes, you won't want to log in to a graphical interface as root (I recommend not doing it at all, others have no problems) When you get to that prompt, type this:

startx

And see if the GUI starts. If it does, great.

One thing I'm concerned about is the fact that you can't log in as root via the command line. Is it giving you an error? Are you typing the password correctly (case-sensitive)?

Right click on the panel, select Add > Applet > Pager (or something with Pager in the name)

That should be what you're looking for.

What are you using to set the volumes? If you're using Aumix, make sure you go to File > Save Settings after you set the volumes to where you want them.

I've never had an issue with xmms distorting my music. It might have to do with the driver you are using for it. Are you using the OSS or the ALSA driver?

I have had good luck using beep-media-player, which is basically xmms built for gtk2

Never really used any other players.

Is it the wireless cards that you are having an issue with? Try searching the Tips and Tricks and FAQ forums for a howto on ndiswrapper. It's worked for a lot of people.

But the above references are correct for removing Mandrake and returning to a Windows environment. On a side note, your friend might be better off just installing XP Home than upgrading from 98 to XP Home. IIRC you can install from an upgrade cd as long as you have an older version of Windows for the installer to pull some files off of.

I think your download might be bad. Try downloading and burning the iso again from a different location and see if that fixes the problem. You also might want to check the md5sum of the downloaded iso before you burn it to make sure it matches. The second post in that thread will tell you how to do it in Windows.

Fluxbox all the way

I used flux on my laptop and loved it. Lightweight, fast, you name it.

Our FAQ Section has some useful posts on a lot of subjects. Some are out of date slightly, but the urpmi FAQ still has all of the information you need to get urpmi set up and information on how to use it.

Well, it's been a while since I've posted something here

New Gentoo Desktop

...you heard right, I've gone Gentoo after my cooker installation b0rked out somehow.

I'll get more up when I have the time to get some theming done.

I have not used Mandrake/Mandriva in a long time (cooker crash...nasty stuff), but I had this same problem when they added that star. I wanted to get rid of it. I figured out that Mandrake/Mandriva was now using menuk-mdk.png as their kmenu icon. Not sure with the release of LE2005 if it's still the same or now. I wrote up a tutorial on how to change the icon back when I discovered this problem. You can find that here: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=12628

I had that same problem. Did you update the kernel as well when you ran your updates?

I had to do that before it would boot properly.

It's a well known fact that M$ takes open source software and repackages it as their own. They usually take the GPL license out though :P

Strange that the bug was closed then...

I have kernel 2.6.11-2mdk and Alsa 1.0.8. I use the patches that were made available in the bug report for my emu10k1 based card. Anyone else using this same kernel and driver can pm me for the modules, I can't find the bug report.

I have no problem on boot, just on shutdown...

Also, from what I've found on the bug reports, upgrading to kernel 2.6.11-5mdk seems to fix the issue with alsa. I cannot confirm this myself as I have not tried it yet.

No, 10.2 is not out yet.

Actually, there is a rather pressing bug with the kernel in 10.2 rc1 that is holding up development.

I'm not entirely sure if this new release will be called 10.2 or if it's going to follow the new naming convention and be the 2005 Limited Edition. That remains to be seen.

Menus: After the latest pakages that some items on my menus have disappeared, specially drakconf and kcontrol. If I open menudrake I can see the entries listed in the menu but even after saving the menu in menudrake and / or doing update-menus -v those entries still don't appear. Also iafter installing software (for example superkaramba) the only way of making the menu entry appear on the menu is to use the update-menus command.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Follow my instructions for this one. Open a terminal, mv ~/.local/ ~/.local-bak/ then run update-menus -v

After that, your menus should be complete.

And from what I can see, you need to remove mdkkdm and kdebase-kdm then reinstall mdkkdm (and the other files that are removed during the removal) and everything should work.

Alternatively, if you have it installed, you can switch to gdm. That's what I did and I have no problems with the dm

Step by step:

open a console or log in via cli

type: mv ~/.local ~/.local-bak

Run update-menus -v

Once that is done, everything should work for you

Do you mean 'end session only'? Mine came back when I did the fix above.

No. There is supposed to be a command to start a new session without leaving the first session. Like the Switch user command in Windoes XP. I can't find it anywhere.

During the boot process it says Unable to mount /dev/sda1: Special device does not exist

That appears during the Mounting local file systems phase of the boot process.

There are 2 partitions on /dev/sda: sda1 = /home, sda5 = /var/www/html

sda5 mounts just fine.

/home does not mount. I have to log in as root and mount it manually. Once I do that, no problems at all.

Any ideas?

ok...update menus -v didn't work, until I mv'd ~/.local/ and did it again. Now my menu works!

Anyone know how to add the 'Switch User' like command to the kmenu? I know it's supposed to be there but mine doesn't have it

Well, moving ~/.kde/ didn't fix anything. Trying to update my menus now to see if that helps...

There are a lot of changes between 8.2 and 10.1. If you haven't used the system in a long time and you don't have anything on there that you can't lose, I would say wipe and start brand new. You'll be far less likely to have major compatibility problems that way.

It did that for me too. Let me know how it works out for you