iphitus

Another left field post! The Arch community isn't what it used to be. There was always an expectation that users at least make some minimal effort to resolve their problem and those that didn't ("how do i install arch? what is pacman?") were politely directed to the relevant wiki page. But you're right, people are faster to respond with RTFM, even when people have made an effort and RTFM'ed - it's a shame. It doesn't help that Arch isn't as simple and minimal as it was. I remember first installing it - everything was simple bash scripts, rc.conf, rc.sysinit, etc. Initial configuration was done with a text editor, no wizard. You manually specified which kernel modules to load and pretty much wrote your own grub/lilo config. Back then, any automation eschewed any automation of those things. But linux has grown since, and generally for the better - I wouldn't give up udev to be manually loading kernel modules again! Some of that minimalism has been lost. Arch is more "vanilla" than "minimal" these days. It'd be interesting to roll a new distro and tear things back down to the bare basics again. ianw1974: It's not trivial to make a one-shot perfect install that will result in a perfect boot on all hardware and configurations. I haven't actually used the newer installer, so I can't comment on it specifically, but it was a long needed rewrite - for a long time the installer needed developer attention. Eventually someone stepped up and gave it the rewrite it needed, but installers take a lot of testing on a very diverse range of configurations before they can be considered stable. Unlike some of the larger distros, Arch has no corporate backing, so this testing falls on the community. Testing an installer properly is time consuming and few users actually spend the time. I'm running Debian on my main box these days, Arch on the raspberry pi.

Chakra is just Arch/KDEmod with a few addons, all of which you can install straight onto Arch, If you've installed Arch already, you might as well persist with that.

Nobody is saying the hardware itself is terrible, just that their driver support is... pathetic. As you found out... Just because a company says something - wait until you see the code. It's like people who buy software and expect updates to provide the features they want - and then the company goes out of business or simply stops providing updates. Media releases aren't binding.

punbb/fluxbb. A decent forum without the useless cruft most have.

It doesn't seem a widespread bug. A quick search of the archlinux bug tracker shows only one bug reporting crashes, with only one reporter, who has ATI. http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/13018 I know you're using KDEmod, but if it's really a KDE bug, then it should be just as common on both. James

Exactly, if they had K3B, then they had kdelibs3 and QT3

Many big windows virii don't depend on user action. They spread through exploits in windows processes and simple methods like storage device. The recent Conficker outbreak is one classic example of this. By doing something as innocent as connecting to a wireless network or using a storage device they're exposed. To take a real world example, I discovered a virus on my girlfriend's flash drive yesterday. By chance too, I plugged the drive in on Linux and noticed some odd files which would have been hidden under Windows. This one silently infects the computer when the usb storage device is plugged in. It then silently infects any future storage devices. By analysing which of our storage devices had this, and when it was used we discovered the path of the infection. I tracked it down to 2 flash drives, 3 ipods, 2 SD cards, 3 laptops. What's most interesting, is what _didnt_ get infected. My brother's windows desktop, despite being exposed not pick the virus up as it's a pretty heavily modified and stripped copy of Windows. A different environment. My recently installed Windows SP3 desktop did not get infected either, I suspect as it is more up to date than any other here. The point of this is that different environments were enough to stop the virus, and this is the big advantage that Linux has. How many distros are there? Even if you attempt to target one distro, how many different programs are people likely to be using? There's far too much variation to create a successful virus. Combine this with the strong security ethos amongst the Linux development community. Security has been a concern through the design of most components of Linux and the desktop right from the start. Compare this to Windows, where security wasn't the policy and now things we take for granted under Linux like permissions have to be shoehorned backwards. The first real application of permissions to the consumer windows desktop environment - UAC came in Vista. 2007. Permissions under Desktop Linux? From the start. Similarly, servers out of the box. Windows had no firewall out of the box till XP (2001), and ran a large number of exposed services. Under most Linux distros, services are fewer and typically only accept local connections unless designed otherwise. Another example of security being shoehorned backwards into Windows. The Linux desktop was built with security in mind, Windows was not. The above are but two examples of this, do you think there's more? So while Adam is totally right in what he says and there's always the human loophole, "CLICK HERE" the design of Linux and the large variety of the install base help reduce the type of virus that I discovered infected computers around me, or at the very least help reduce the vectors a virus may use to spread. Helping stop a virus spread is pretty important isn't it? A virus that doesnt spread fails evolution 101. James * The virus on our computers was a minor one that attempted to steal MMO game passwords, none of us play MMO's, nor used the infected computers for anything financial/personal.

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again

Some of inkscape's exports can be a bit dodgy. I never had any luck with it's .ai exporter. Safest bet is PDF.

the data loss issues will be gone by the time it's stable. btrfs is a terribly experimental file system presently. It's not completely implemented or even a complete filesystem yet so data loss is expected.

I still have the CD's :) scarecrow: lol, look at the original thread date, I don't need 9.1.

Nah, that'd be slow too, if not terrible. *shrug* got the torrent going now, plodding along at 27kb/s. I just thought it'd be fun to revive an old thread, and terribly coincidental that I stumble across it while trying to find mirrors... again.

oops, I edited my post, yes 9.1 was a typo, i meant 2009. I'll probably end up torrenting, but local mirrors are usually quicker than torrents. 0.5-1MB/s vs 50kb/s... anyway, I just thought it was funny, I was searching for mirrors and found a really old post of mine...

I've got this problem again with 2009 :P aarnet, pacific, planetmirror, iinet, linux.org.au, internode, none of the mirrors I know of have ISOs yet. internode and pacific did have package repositories for 2009 though, and planet mirror seems to have ditched mandriva entirely.

ffi: Keep trying new versions and update your experiences. There's nothing worse than someone going around saying "this app sucks" and they last used it years ago. Apparently the KDE setup in 2009 is awesome... though that's coming from a Mandrake beta tester I know. Downloading Mandrake 2009 now. It's been a loooong time. edit: Would be downloading, can't find a local mirror.

You could use cron and configure it to start/stop the squid daemon.

Try using gksu/gksudo or an existing GUI password dialog box (there's a couple more, a gnome one and a kde one at least) that's designed for this.

Seeing as I need to do stuff for Arch in 64bit, my desktop has been running Arch64 for a few months. It's been pretty straightforward really. Everything works natively except... Flash - Easily fixed by installing some 32bit library packages and setting up nspluginwrapper. All available in repositories/AUR, and easy to follow docs on wiki. X-Plane - Runs fine after installing 32bit library packages, all available in the Arch repositories/AUR.

It's not as simple as hw raid vs software raid, because many "hardware raid" cards are significantly dependent on software and are not true hardware raid. I just posted about this in Ian's new computer thread. A lot of Linux kernel developers advocare full Linux software raid, unless you know that you've actually got a real hardware raid -- and they're expensive. After all, what's the point in wasting money on a fakeraid card if it's just doing it all in proprietary software and using your CPU anyway. You might as well use regular Linux software raid that's open, well supported, and easier to deal with when something goes wrong. https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...st&p=498284 Though... you're using windows too, and that complicates things a bit. Linux software raid probably won't work with Windows. The linux ATA site has a great deal of information about what is and isn't supported: http://linux-ata.org/driver-status.html http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

I've used ram>swap before for s2disk too without any problems. For most laptop use cases it works fine, you'll probably be finishing up doing something, so there won't be much running, and cache's are all flushed before suspend freeing up plenty too. The whole swap = 2xRam rule of thumb is totally obsolete. ian: For the raid, a lot of Linux kernel developers advocate using software raid instead. Many of the cheap "hardware raid" cards out there aren't actually full hardware raid cards - they depend heavily on software too - aka "fakeraid". Unfortunately, yours is on the fakeraid list, hence the need for the closed source drivers -- that's where a lot of the work is really being done. http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html Why software RAID: http://linux.yyz.us/why-software-raid.html

There's an app called wmctrl that might do this.

You can look for yourself if you like. Setup an unencrypted wireless network, and have a computer dumping all the packets using 'kismet'. On another computer, just go through a normal browsing session. Once you're done, pull up wireshark and have a look at what kismet dumped. It's pretty interesting. If you want peace of mind, setup a VPN, or go through an SSH tunnel to somewhere else.

Recent computer or older? It could be one of those mythical real hardware power buttons.

The developers know about it. Implementing CMYK in the old GIMP code base (pre GEGL) was too difficult/problematic/complicated/impossible/yucky (pick a few). Now they have GEGL, CMYK is possible. It's finally going to happen. http://archives.free.net.ph/message/200806...4d59.pt-BR.html I dont think this is useful, but it might be interesting: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CMYK_support_in_The_GIMP

Interesting, what cpu architecture, and what price (AUD)? Ashamed of Mandrake? No, just moved on to other things. I don't really have any time for other distros nowadays unfortunately.