lavaeolus

I like the theme as it is now, especially the menu looks very good. For the chocolate color, it looks definitely tasty, but it could lead to frustrations when you realize that you can't eat your screen :D

If you have a Mandriva Installation CD you can boot up your system from it, select rescue mode and in the rescue mode "GUI" you can choose reinstall bootloader, after restart you should be greeted by the mandriva bootloader (it should contain an additional entry for windows)

Mandriva has the LiveCD called One and an Installation-CD-Set/DVD (called Mandriva Free), while it has no proprietary drivers like the LiveCD there is no problem installing them later from the non-free repositories. Since I don't use the LiveCD much (I always install from the Free-DVD, because I can choose what I want to have installed) I don't know if you can install a Raid from it, but as Ian already said a raid does only make much sense for a fully installed system. With the Installation CD/DVD I had no problems installing raids, neither when I set up the raid at installation time nor later. An already existing raid was properly detected by the LiveCD.

don't know if this helps but the screensavers are in the following packages: kdeartwork-screensavers kdeartwork-screensavers-gl (screensavers using openGL) these were the KDE-Packages for Gnome the packages: xscreensaver xscreensaver-gl should be the right ones, possibly there are more the standard Mandriva Slideshow Screensaver is named Krozat (it is a package of its own)

it needs to be set to run at startup, on my computer it is shown as not running in the services section of mcc, but my raid works without problems, the main function of mdadm is to initialize the raid at startup. normally in mcc/diskdrake you need to format the partitions you want to include in the raid as "Linux-RAID" then you can specify which partition should belong to which raid-array (you can use more than one simultaneously if you want), the raid level (1 and 5), the raid can now be partitioned in any way you want. the ram-usage seems to be the live-cd, installed it uses around 300-400 MB on my box (with gnome/kde) do you try to activate the raid from the running liveCD ?, I'm not sure if that would work

if it's a software-raid, you need mdadm (look if it is started, you can check it in MCC > system > manage your services it should be checked as run at startup), if you have chipset-raid, you might need the dmraid-package (chipset-raids are not really hardware-raids, so in the end they are mostly a waste of time), if you have a real hardware-raid (3ware or something like this) then you might need a driver/configuration-program from the manufacturer.

Seems that someone has the same problem: http://www.imagemagick.org/pipermail/magic...ril/012579.html there seems to be a package named ppmtompeg, don't know if this is the case with mandriva, after some googling I found someone referring to netpbm, maybe it's part of this package, haven't used this so far, so I'm not really sure.

the reason is, while the quake II engine is open-sourced the game content is still under intellectual property rights, therefore distributors can NOT include any of these files, they can offer the engine, but you need the game-content files for the game to run (this is not only the case with mandriva and not only with quake II). Hey after all there are enough good free shooters out there: openarena (free Quake III Arena, mandriva ships the actual version), tremulous, nexiuz and sauerbraten, just to name a few.

logrotate takes care of your logfiles, so not much to do there symlinks and etc-update might be worth looking at, they take care of dead symlinks and unneeded conf-files in /etc. they are not neccessary but nice to have

was not intended, it just happened :D

If I looked at the right place the native resolution of your LCD is 1280x768: http://support.jvc.com/consumer/product.js...elId=MODL027238 JVC LT-23X475 High Resolution W-XGA (1280 x 768) LCD Is this your LCD ? Seems to be a bit similar to the wxga problem with some notebook-panels, I think the way to solve this was installing an additional package (i915resolution ?), the problem was that many graphics-card-BIOSes didn't contain the neccessary modelines/resolutions, but I don't know if/how this problem was fixed with newer x.org drivers. ...

Maybe you could try to define your Panel manually in Mandriva Control Center, there try the generic flat panels, on my notebook with 1400x1050 screen I only get the right resolution when using the generic flat panel.

so far I haven't encountered them on 32 bit, but lately I'm using mostly 64 bit, which is otherwise rock-solid, the lockup is mostly accompanied by a short loss of my wireless connection but it always reconnects (and as I already said, these lockups are wery few and the system always recovers)

Best for your laptop would be to use the laptap-kernel, since it is specifically designed for notebook-use (it should detect your full RAM). you can install it with urpmi kernel-laptop-latest

on my x86-64 Mandriva I have encountered these lockups that ian mentioned, but they are sporadic and if I wait just some 10 to 15 seconds the system is responding again haven't tested any other x86-64 Linux so far

external modems should work without problems, internal modems on PCI-Cards might be a problem, since they are mostly controllerless modems, which need a driver to work and these drivers are mostly only available for windows, these PCI-modems are basically the same chipsets as the so-called winmodems in notebboks. an external modem connected to your serial port will likely produce no problems, you just need to tell debian to which serial port it is connected

you either could give it an IP that is in the same range as the others, or if your Wireless router has dhcp enabled just let it configure it automatically. example: router has 192.168.1.254 other computer has 192.168.1.10 Mandriva Box: 192.168.1.20 that should work (don't forget to tell your Mandriva box, the IP of your Gateway and your DNS-Server, these "services" are propably managed by your router, so in the shown case both would be 192.168.1.254). just a question, have you MAC-filtering enabled on your router ? then you should allow the MAC-Adress of you Wireless-USB-Stick to connect to the router (must be configured on your router).

you can do this in the Mandriva Control Center > manage disk partitions there you select the empty ntfs-partition and tell it to format the partition, it will then format this as ext3 (the default file system for Mandriva), after that set the mountpoint of this partition to /home, Mandriva might ask you if you want to transfer your data from your current /home to the new one > klick YES, then close the partitioning tool, when Mandriva asks if you want to save your changes to fstab, again click yes. now your former empty ntfs-parttion will be your /home and your former /home will be a free ext3-partition, which you can use for installing another Linux, as artee suggested.

resizing can be done in the mandriva control center > local disks > Manage disk partitions, or you could install gparted or qtparted, these are graphical partitioning tools (gparted > gnome, qtparted > kde). just another idea, you said you have a free partition on your sata disk, that is unused as of yet, why not format it with a linux file system like reiser or ext3 (just examples) and use it as your home ? btw, with the ntfs-3g-driver you have read/write access to your ntfs-partitions (if you wish so), you can mount them read-only if you just want to read the data and don't want to risk accidentally deleting something. as / 7GB should be enough for a normal desktop system, while it is never bad to have more space :D

task-gnome will install all that beagle and #/mono-crap, which I don't like hey that's nearly real-time communication :D

good to know, thanks, so far I was lucky enough not to need it :D although menudrake was one of my most-hated applications in mandrake, I must admit I sometimes miss it

afaik it does not remove the libraries, the ways I know are rpmorphan or rpm-find-leaves. if I remember correctly only aptitude removes un-needed libraries, there seems to be an aptitude-for-rpm in the contrib repository, haven't tested aptitude so far (not even on debian). in your case gnome is not installed, but you can install gnome afterwards, just select task-gnome or task-gnome-minimal (the latter will just install the basic gnome-desktop, while the former might install additional programs which you might not want), you can use the search function in rpmdrake (aka software-management) to look for the packages you like. to select gnome and kde at installation time you need to choose custom installation personally I prefer a leaner system, therefore I would suggest install task-gnome-minimal and then install programs you might miss btw. found the update-thingy, it's mdkonline, I just ignored it for long since it was a payed subscription service until some time ago.

I suppose you have WinXP installed on the first hdd and mandriva on the second ? Maybe then grub (it is the bootloader) got installed on the second hdd, but the boot-order in your BIOS is setup to boot from the first hdd and therefore never looks for the installed system on your second hdd. Maybe just change the boot order, so that your system tries to boot from the second hdd, if it then boots into mandriva you might not need to reinstall. Welcome to the Board !

maybe by starting kmenuedit with root-rights ?, menudrake had the option to edit the system-wide menu or only the user menu.

yes the updater only installs updates for already installed packages (although I must admit I don't have this Icon, but then I did a custom install from the Free DVD, so maybe this is only in the Powerpack). slightly OT: if you want to know if there are unneeded packages (sometimes after deinstalling packages there are unneeded libraries left on your system) there is now something similar to deborphan, it is called rpmorphan Kpowersave is mostly of interest for Notebook-users, but since newer desktop-processors can do frequency-scaling it might be of interest for you too, but yes the plugged-in makes only sense for notebooks.