Darth Wong

It's not the linux desktop itself that is rough around the edges, so much as the applications being developed for it. Commercial developers who provide a linux version often do so as an afterthought, and it shows. Open-source developers tend to produce apps that work, but lack the fit and finish of the commercial product, especially in terms of interface design. As for "keeping your system clean", the very nature of Linux makes that sort of operation much less necessary. System files are segregated from user files, and it's generally only the user filespace that gets cluttered, not the system. So the only reason to worry about it is disk usage, unlike Windows where the filesystem and registry can get completely borked over time due to user additions.

I paid full price, and I suppose I should be annoyed, but it's really not that much money in the grand scheme of things, and somebody has to help keep Mandriva afloat.

How popular is Opera? I mostly use Firefox and Konqueror, myself.

OK, so if that's not it, have you tried watching some of the log files? Maybe you can get some clues by watching /var/log/messages, or doing the same with smbd.log, log.nmbd, or <hostname>.log in the /var/log/samba directory, where <hostname> is the name of your Windows box. Try opening up a bunch of console windows and using the "tail -f" command to watch all of those logs simultaneously, and then try to access the box and see if anything comes up.

Hopefully this question doesn't come off as an insult to your intelligence, but ... you did set the Samba passwords with the smbpasswd tool, right? Samba ignores the Linux system username/password combinations.

Huh? I use that feature all the time. It doesn't permanently modify your grub config; it does a one-time menu pre-selection, sort of like the old lilo -R command. The next time you boot up, it's back to normal.

Ha! Youngsters ... I started browsing the Internet with Mosaic. Anyone remember that one? That was the real pioneer; it was the first browser that made web pages actually look visually appealing. Netscape took it to another level, but they also invented a bunch of their own extensions to the standard, like frames and blinking text, both of which are evil. Having said that, I do feel some nostalgia for the days when Netscape was a powerhouse. Microsoft made a lot of money riding on other peoples' coattails.

I'm pretty happy with Mandriva 2008 in the sense that it basically works out of the box without too many problems. Internet browsing in particular is much less painful than with older versions, thanks to improved media support. However, there are certain annoyances which I can't really understand, like shipping Mandriva with LinDVD as a recommended DVD player software but not recognizing that it conflicts with artsd, which is in turn set by default to seize control of the audio hardware indefinitely. The result? An "out of the box" installation of MDV2008 won't have any sound when playing DVDs until someone reconfigures artsd to auto-timeout. That's not hard to do, but how many newbies are going to think of that? Other than that, I find that it works nicely without too much effort on my part. One of the biggest problems with Linux has always been the fact that you need to do so much reading in order to get up to speed on how to configure your new OS, and any improvements in that area are welcome.

I just installed the latest kernel update (kernel-server-2.6.22.18-1mdv-1-1mdv2008.0) from Mandriva Update and my USB mouse promptly stopped working. Just to make sure it wasn't an X configuration problem, I tried viewing the output from /dev/mouse and there was nothing. It's definitely a kernel problem, because when I rebooted with the old kernel the mouse worked fine again. I'm going to stick with the old kernel for now, but I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem. Hardware: Asus A8N-E (NVidia-chipset Socket 939 board) Athlon64 3800 X2 4GB PC3200 RAM Twin 74GB WD Raptor 10k SATA drives Software: Mandriva 2008.0 for x86_64 The mouse is an ordinary USB wheel mouse (actually, it's a Dell, cannibalized from an old Dell machine we no longer use).

I'm using KDE 3.3.2, which came standard with Mandriva 2005LE. That's the nuttiest thing; with a completely stock install off the DVD, the user list doesn't show up in kdm. It always did in previous versions with a default install.

Hello, I'm terribly sorry if this is a stupid question but I've been banging my head on this for a while and I can't figure it out. Why won't kdm display the list of users at the login screen? My wife and kids are accustomed to that list of users and ever since I installed 2005LE, it's gone. I tried going into the "Login Manager" section of the KDE config program and sure enough, the settings all look as if it should show the user list; it just doesn't. What am I doing wrong?