teledyn

No need, installing from the new alsa packages worked just fine, headphones and speakers, using options snd-hda-intel model=auto

and here it is: edit /home/share/applications/screensavers/xscreensaver-webcollage.desktop and change the single -root option to include the -directory option as specified in the man page. /home/share/xscreensaver/config/webcollage.xml is apparently ignored, not precisely sure why, and fwiw, I see this same issue was also discussed on the FedoraForum.org site.

this discussion is very cute and all, but the situation remains that, as shipped, the default behaviour of the screensaver is to serve up screenfulls of explicit sex, and who knows, maybe that is the Mandriva target audience, and that's fine too, though I would expect the penguins above to be, well, doing something a bit prior to what we see in the family-scene that Mandrivausers.org takes as their banner ;) however ... I have read the docs for webcollage and as I explained in the very first post that heads this thread, the situation is fixable by simply adding in the appropriate command line options to the launching of this program, and with a screensaver like the original XScreensaver, that was very easy to do, the configuration files for that program even persist in Mandriva 2008 however the Mandriva Gnome installation chooses not to use those default configuration files. So what I am really asking is not that Mandriva cease to serve up the porn by default, but only that I would really like to know where the Gnome Screensaver controls have been hidden in this new release because I'm apparently in that minority user-class of people who don't want my kids seeing wide open beavers every time they visit my office. I'm just funny that way ;)

I thought that topic title might get some attention :) but it is true: as shipped, straight off the CD/DVD, if you turn on the WebCollage screensaver module, Mandriva instantly serves up some astounding porn to any user, and I don't think that is a Good Thing, in general ... but anyway, back to my question: webcollage may fill the screen with porn by default, but there is a -directory command line option that will do the vidwacker magic on your personal photos instead, and IMHO that would be far more fitting in a family/work environment but I cannot find the place to make the edit that would add this option to the webcollage command line. I had edited /home/share/xscreensaver/config/webcollage.xml and inserted a <directory> tag to contain the path to my photos -- a more general solution would just use the photo directory specified in the general gnome-screensaver defaults -- but even after restarting gnome-screensaver it still runs webcollage with only the -root parameter -- it is getting the "-root" from somewhere, but I can't locate where that is. can I add -directory to the webcollage command line, either globally or per-user?

The wireless issue was 100% solved by carefully adapting the instructions on Ubuntu Forums; the gist of the advice is to grab the very latest ndiswrapper to replace the distro version, and to grab the very latest firmware EXE off the Dell website, then just put two and two together and hope its not "five" ;) That now leaves the Suspend mode as the only outstanding showstopper!

the HDA detect problem appears to be an ALSA issue, and it is almost fixed in the current snapshot releases (Aug 2007) of the ALSA drivers; you get sound, but only through the headphone jack.

Here are the extra Inspiron drivers which are added to the base windows by the second re-install CD: Chip Set Drivers: Ricoh R5C833 Communications Drivers: Conexant D330 HDA MDC v.92 modem Network Drivers: Broadcom 440x 10/100 Integrated Controller Dell Wireless WLAN (US and Japanese versions) Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN minicard (windows says we have a Broadcom 802.11n Network) Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Module (windows says a Dell Truemobile 355 with RFCOMM Protocol TDI and EDR) Video Drivers: ATI Radeon Xpress 1250 (interesting, I wonder why I had to tell X it was NVIDIA?) some relevent URLS: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...l=dell+inspiron http://ubuntu1501.blogspot.com/ some possible tips on getting the WiFi to work: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/1390 also the http://support.dell.com has all the drivers you need (no need to reinstall Windows) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/l...6.15/+bug/17695 suggests the APCI problems may be fixed in the newer apci packages; I'm going to upgrade to 2008 RC1 today and see if that does a better job.

The laptop reviewers tell me the Dell Inspiron 1521 is a top-selling machine, and the 3-week backlog at Dell for delivering this unit would seem to support that; this thread will be my open public notebook on the installation as it progresses, and certainly I haven't solved all the problems yet -- if I had, it wouldn't be much fun! ;) Before Beginning You'll laugh, but I tried Windows. For the first time in nearly 10 years, I tried to use the Windows as it came straight out of the box, I set up the login and tried to play an AVI file off the dvd. It tanked, it crashed. That was the end of my Windows refresher. Many friends and colleagues jumped up and down insisting I should install Ubuntu; 6.06 LTS couldn't get through the install process (although it did boot from CD) and the new 7.01 aborts unable to draw a fb screen. That was the end of my Ubuntu adventure :) I inserted 2007.1, answered the initial questions, and only a few moments later the machine declared itself done and installed. I removed the CD, clicked for the reboot. Troubles Begin On booting, X.org fails saying there is no fb device; the error cycles through showing the log reports and then ends at the X configuration where the default is set to ATI Radeon Xpress (x1270), but none of the offered settings would work; the hardware specs in the manual give the max resolution as 1660x1050, which is not offered in the ATI option, so I took a gamble and set the video card to the Inspiron 1520's value of NVIDIA GeForce Go 8600M and the X.org test worked, even in the highest resolution mode. Could Dell have shipped me a different card than the usual? I did ask for a medium option in the video choices, so maybe that is what makes the difference; bottom line, even if your install says you have the ATI, try the NVIDIA, and maybe vice versa too. Presto! Mandriva! Reboot, X.org comes up, the login screen comes up, so far so good. I have ethernet automagically coming up, an inserted CD or DVD shows up immediately. Outstanding problems I click on a video AVI file, and I get the film, but I get no sound. The player behaves as if there is sound, the Volume control Ctrl-O (I use Gnome) shows we have an audio device on ALSA and on OSS, but there is no sound at all out the speakers. I went through the configuration wizards in the Computer Config app, and it all goes well, but still no sound. -- UPDATE: I do have sound, but only in the headphones! Same problem is reported on the Ubuntu forums. The Wifi configuration only offers using the ndiswrapper, and then asks for the original drivers. Oops -- perhaps I shouldn't have been so quick to unload windows; I'm currently reinstalling so I can snarf the needed bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys windows drivers, although there are rumours I could perhaps use the bcm43xx-fwcutter-006-1mdv2007.1.i586 -- UPDATE: I re-installed Windows Vista into a minimal partition (11G!) and cannot find any bcm* drivers at all!! The wireless is listed in the config pages, but it also doesn't work in the Windows side; the Windows reinstall also failed to detect the Synaptics pad. If I can get it going with the fwcutter files, maybe I won't need to lose that 11G of deadweight on my drive. Perhaps the biggest show-stopper, and hopefully someone has a quick fix, if I close the lid, nothing suspends, but when I reopen the lid, the keyboard is completely dead. Something appears to be amiss with the ACPI configuration or a misconfiguring of the laptop-mode settings? That's the story so far; I'll keep you posted of my progress, and of course, any and all tips, hints and guesses are very welcome :)

Yes of course! I should have thought of that ;) Just tried it now, loading a whack of mp3s across, and it appears to have worked; I yanked the card the instant sync was done (and it paused several seconds) but the card appears to be un-trashed. plus the status code result will be a useful bit of knowledge to have at the end.

Yes, and maybe this is changed, but in 2007.0 when I did this, the device would no longer be auto-mounted when a card was re-inserted, and I would be stuck with doing manual mount/umount until the next reboot. But clearly whatever program it is that is managing the above mentioned USB-drive icon must have some sort of benign test it can do, a /proc pseudofile it can check or something passive that can deliver the status answer without imparing the system. what program manages that icon? there may be a clue in the sources (which is what open source is all about ;) on a related question, whenever I insert a blank CD I get a dialog that says "blank CD inserted: ignore, burn data, burn music" or something like that, only, no matter which option I choose, it does nothing. clearly I'm missing some essential bit of software or config but beyond that, when I insert a CD I already know what I wanted to do with it as I have been inserting CDs into Linux machines since InfoMagic introduced the box-set ;) Can I turn this auto-alert off?

Excellent! Thanks -- good to know. So it is possible to detect, so now my question can be better phrased as How can I do the same 'busy' test on the command line? -- I don't have the system resources to run Nautilus all the time, and while I do get a notification when a blank CD is inserted, I don't get any notifications or icons about USB devices. All my programs for accessing my camera and my phone-card are all shell-scripts. So is it possible to do the same 'busy' test from a shell script?

I have a Blackberry phone that uses a memory card formatted as an 1980's vintage MSDOS FAT drive; because RIM is also staunchly anti-Linux I must remove the memory card from the phone and use a USB adaptor to transfer files to my computer. Unfortunately, USB FAT writes are quite slow, and when I remove the card from the USB reader before the writes are finished, the FAT is trashed, all data is lost and I have to reformat the card before I can use it. in pre-2007 Mandriva, before the /media/disk convention, I think there was an fstab mount option to mark MSDOS partitions synchronous and block any processes accessing the drive until the write operation was finished. I need something like that now so I can tell when the writes are finished and it is safe to pull the card from the reader. Is there any way to do this with a USB-mounted drive? Is there any way to detect if an MSDOS partition is still 'busy' and should not be disconnected?

Before you leap into this advice, be aware that setting cdrecord suid=0 can give unauthorized users root access to your machine -- before you do this, check a Google for the security implications for setting cdrecord as root

Good news: as posted in the bugzilla: http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=30719 I cracked this one and it was a bug, a bug in the 1.6/1.7 hplip package that slipped by undetected by the packager; if you go to the HPLIP Sourceforge Page, you can download the latest update .run file that will detect your Mandriva version and install itself over the RPM ... or you can wait until the packagers sort out who really owns the package and an updated RPM is released. This workaround probably fixes problems with several HP printers.

Doh-- Thanks for fixing that. Not that it helped any; I checked in /etc/sane.d and both the 10.1 machine and the 2007.1 machine have the same collection of HP files. Besides, the above results show how the sane detect test did find the printer, but the scanimage test did not. Where would scan image get its files? Is there a potential there to copy something over from the 10.1 machine to enable the scanning from the PSC scanner?