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jboy

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Posts posted by jboy

  1. At the low end, the ECS GeForce6100SM-M motherboard is probably competitive with the MSI you are looking at.

     

    http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Products/...D=1&LanID=9

     

    You can probably get it for $50 US or less. I built a machine with it using a CPU/motherboard deal I got from a local Fry's store (their website is http://www.outpost.com)

     

    Like the MSI you mentioned, onboard it can accomodate 2 PATA devices and 2 SATA devices and has onboard video, audio, and LAN.

     

    I had no problems with it, but it is at the real low-end of Socket AM2 motherboard choices.

  2. Found a fix, which I got from this link on the ubuntu forums

     

    I had the same problem as others reported - video would stop after the ad played.

     

    The fix that worked was to download the firefox User Agent Switcher add-on and set it to 'Netscape 4.8 (Windows Vista)'. After that the cnn.com video worked perfectly.

     

    There was a report that the user agent needed to be set back to default to get fox news video to work. So you may need a different setting for different sites. Changing the User Agent is a quick 'Tools -> User Agent Switcher' selection from the firefox menu, so it's no big deal to switch it to other settings if you need to.

     

    I installed this firefox add-on on both ubuntu feisty and mandriva 2007.1 and after that cnn.com video worked. It was not working on either one before this change.

     

    When I get a chance I'm gonna try it on my fedora 7 install as well.

  3. Yes, I love SQLite, too. I'm trying to develop some thoughts now on making more use of it with the builtin interfaces in php5 and python.

     

    As I'm frequently working on different machines with different OS's, I'm putting more and more stuff online these day - Google Docs, Zoho Office, gmail, Google Notebook, etc.

     

    So I'm not really trying so much to synchronize back to an offline app, so I just copy and paste when I need to.

     

    Regarding organization and productivity issues, are you familiar with the excellent site http://www.lifehacker.com

     

    That entire site is devoted to productivity tips and getting organized. They have lots of good ideas and excellent reader suggestions as well.

  4. ex-kde users that come to the better DE...... :unsure: (/me puts on flame resistant suite.)

    I may be one of them.

     

    I've been a KDE guy all along. But I recently installed both ubuntu (feisty) and fedora 7 and find that gnome does have its charms.

     

    But here's another observation: one day after firefox 2.0.0.4 was released, ubuntu and fedora had it available as an update. We're still waiting for the mandriva firefox 2.0.0.4 update. I love mandriva 2007.1, but I do wish they could get out an update like firefox quicker. I know I can install it myself, but why should it take so long?

  5. With this command, you will be prompted with a list of all updates to be applied and a prompt as to whether you want to proceed (y/N).

     

    'urpmi --auto-select' will find all newer packages from all your configured sources (main, contrib,updates, non-free, free, plf, backports (if you've enabled it, etc etc). To be sure the hdlists are up-to-date, you could do an 'urpmi.update -a' first. Check that you've got all the repositories with easy-urpmi.

     

    If you just want those new packages from the updates repositories, you would use the command: 'urpmi --update --auto-select'

     

    Yes, the plf versions of mandriva packages typically (always?) will have a version number such that it will replace the base mandriva package.

     

    Is it safe to do so? Always check the list before proceeding. Also, you could always use the MCC packages tool. Make sure you know what repositories are configured and that you have all of them (there are a lot of new ones with recent Mandriva versions). Easy-urpmi is your friend.

     

    Also, see this excellent thread started by the brilliant arctic:

     

    https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=40552&hl=

  6. However what I want to know if how to find out what I am currently running on (DHCP or Static) before modifiying.

    You should be able to get this from file: /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

     

    For instance, here is a sample content where static networking is configured (BOOTPROTO=static):

     

    DEVICE=eth0

    BOOTPROTO=static

    IPADDR=192.168.1.115

    NETMASK=255.255.255.0

    NETWORK=192.168.1.0

    BROADCAST=192.168.1.255

    ONBOOT=yes

    METRIC=10

    MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=no

     

     

    For more info: man ifcfg

     

    EDIT: Oops, jaraeez had already given this same answer, which I missed.

  7. pmpatrick - thanks for the info. I will look into the apps you suggested. I need to have both Windows and Linux support of the same encrypted files so that's good that LUKS may have Windows support.

     

    Here's an update on building and running Truecrypt 4.3 on Mandriva 2007.1. I got a successful build today from source code. It took 54 MINUTES! The build was done in the foreground, not as a background process. I needed to execute the 'modprobe -f truecrypt' command to get the kernel module loaded.

     

    Yesterday I mentioned that a Truecrypt 4.2a build took about 5 SECONDS!

     

    So if you're building Truecrypt 4.3, let it run and go watch a movie!

     

    EDIT: I'm running the standard 2007.1 kernel-2.6.17.13mdv with the corresponding kernel-source.

     

    /var/log/messages contained the following message.

     

    truecrypt: no version magic, tainting kernel.

     

    Perhaps that was why the modprobe -f was needed?

  8. Sounds like you did not configure and test your video driver correctly during the install.

     

    From your boot menu, select the failsafe boot option. This will boot you into the command line as the root user.

     

    Then enter the command: XFdrake

     

    You can then select and test a video driver and monitor setting. You can try compatible nvideo drivers if your specific card is not listed. If you're having problems getting a driver to work, the VESA video driver will probably work.

     

    Be sure to select the "Test" option after you make the driver selection, to be sure it works ok.

     

    That should get you up and going. You may not get 3D support, I'm not sure. If not and you want 3D, you will have to install a proprietary nvidia driver. There's lots of posts about that here, so Search for more info.

     

    EDIT: Oops, forgot to mention. After you finish the configuration with the XFdrake wizard, to reboot enter the following command at the command line:

     

    shutdown -r now

  9. I never had a problem compiling or running Truecrypt 4.2a on 2006.

     

    On 2007.1, I got the following error trying to mount a truecrypt volume after compiling it:

     

    insmod: error inserting '/usr/share/truecrypt/kernel/truecrypt-2.6.17.ko': -1 Invalid module format
    FATAL: Error inserting truecrypt (/lib/modules/2.6.17-13mdv/extra/truecrypt.ko): Invalid module format
    truecrypt: Failed to load TrueCrypt kernel module

     

    Based on a tip from a post in the Club forum, I forced the module load with the following command:

     

    modprobe -f truecrypt

     

    After that, it worked. The man page says that the -f option tries "to strip any versioning information from the module, which might otherwise stop it from loading." So the -f option must be stripping out something from the truecrypt kernel module that is causing the above error.

     

    Now, for the latest Truecrypt version 4.3 - if it compiles at all, it apparently takes a really long, long time to compile. The Club forum post mentioned that. On my machine, Truecrypt 4.2a compiles in about 5 seconds. I tried to compile version 4.3 and after at least 10 minutes, it still hadn't finished. I got no error messages. So I killed the process. Either it's getting hung up or else it's taking an amazingly long term to compile compared to version 4.2a.

     

    Has anyone else got a successful compile of Truecrypt 4.3? If so, what was your experience? Did you need to do a modprobe -f to get an encrypted volume mounted or created?

  10. I had a partition with 2006 installed that I thought I'd try doing an upgrade directly to 2007.1 using the install DVD.

     

    Worked great. No install problems. Everything came up fine. I am very impressed with 2007.1.

     

    There was no separate /home partition - /home was part of the root partition. As far as I can tell, all my stuff in /home was preserved (files, firefox config, bookmarks, etc).

     

    I had some multimedia plf packages installed on 2006 and they were left intact. So I configured the plf sources for 2007.1 and installed the plf updates via urpmi. I was concerned whether video in Yahoo News, CNN, etc would work ok, and it did work fine.

     

    After I configured all the urpmi sources, an update (from all sources, not just the update sources) installed a bunch of new packages - around 150! Are there that many new packages since the iso got created? I got the iso yesterday from the psu.edu site. (EDIT: Oops. Some of those updates were plf packages, maybe about 20, but it still seems like a lot of packages that are either updates or weren't installed via the DVD).

     

    Now I need to check the .rpmnew config files against the original config files that were left in place.

     

    Machine has an Athlon 2500 CPU, 2 gb DDR 400 memory, ATI 9200 video, and 2 SATA/150 drives. The 2 gb RAM was detected ok using the default kernel. An external eSATA drive is also detected ok.

     

    Plugging in a USB pen drive results in a KDE Daemon dialog box popping up with default choices and the flash drive mounted to /media/disk - very nice!

     

    I think I'm gonna really like this new 2007.1 distro.

     

    Another fresh install on a different machine went uneventfully also.

     

    EDIT: Also, there were left some old directories from 2006 that are no longer used, so I went ahead and deleted them. For example:

     

    /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox-1.0.6

    /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox-1.0.7

     

    I also checked for any remaining RPMs that had 2006 in the name, and deleted them after checking that it would cause no dependency problems.

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