iphitus

won't make a difference. It's the other way around. It tells ndiswrapper to call the wireless card wlan0, rather than the next available ethX. So it's more aesthetic and isnt required. James

mandriva should include madwifi, as it's license regarding distribution is fair and allows reasonable distribution. James

Get something intel based, the intel cards have wonderful drivers, as far as drivers for integrated wireless goes in linux. Work out of the box on any decent distro. James

Looks like I'm a bit out of date with mandriva too :)

And it's taken them more than 3 years to realise they can write a tool to do this. Woooooo! Go Mandriva, about freakin time! James

No, don't use ndiswrapper. This card has a fully developed NATIVE driver. All it needs is those firmware files placed in the firmware folder and it'll work fine. James

In an hour or so I was booting off the CD, which was burnt from the ISO image included in the DVD. Well, what can I tell that you don't know? I did not even get to see what all the fuss is about .... Mandriva started OK from the second attempt; the first boot was a fiasco because for some reason it did not like the monitor connected to the laptop, and I had to disconnect it. I was presented with I bright and shiny yellow/orange GUI, the mouse was moving OK, but... the system was responding at a speed of one click per second! There was absolutely no way I could check anything, or start an application! I somehow managed to start firefox just to find that it couldn't load the welcome page. Graphics drivers? 'Selling' or charging for the intel firmware, is very severely against the license for the ipw2x00 cards. I find this hard to believe. On top of that, any distro may freely distribute the firmware, so long as the user is presented with the license before use. James

Very dated though. Put simply, your system will work fine with the current kernel, you just won't get the full 1gb. After you've rebuilt the system and put the new mem in, and it's working, *then* upgrade to the other kernel. It was enterprise last time I used mandriva.... someone check that. It'll be in urpmi/rpmdrake. James

And as for the 3 weeks shipping, depending on where in the world you are and mandriva are, method of payment, how it was shipped, shipping delays out of their control, 3 weeks isn't too bad - i've had worse. James

Some urls would be nice, if it really is a problem in firefox as you say it is. James

oh, didnt have sound on :)

not really, it's only a minor difference. cdrkit is a recent fork of cdrecord by a debian dev afaik because of maintainer issues. Currently, there's no practical difference between them. It's also been adopted in many other distros rather than cdrecord. James

Just yet another beryl video, what's so special?

Ripped -- Sorry, blatantly ripped from the tango project: http://tango.freedesktop.org Do I get a prize? James

orrr just urpmi keytouch and if keytouch isnt in the repos, double click it, and it will launch gurpmi, a GUI front to urpmi that will install it's deps and then install it. i have one of these too, i can post my .Xmodmaprc if you like. James

Looking good :) Yay for reporting on roguelikes ;) James

Went with ubuntu here too as it was the only debian based distro there, and I prefer the ways debian works to the others. Arch would be nice, but there's no way in the world dell would choose it, and i'd rather set it up myself. James

A lot of talk, but not so much substance under it. It just seems like he wants more marketing... as the major user friendly distros provide what he wants. -> Ubuntu. -> SuSE. -> Mandriva. -> Fedora. 1) Applications All of the above have huge repositories of packages, and all have DVD releases available with huge amounts of applications. 2) Security Um. Mostly secure out of the box with no/little need for end user interaction. It seems he just wants a fancy clicky GUI that pops up and irritates you with messages like 'Your virus scanner is not running. You are insecure!' or 'You have a firewall'. Developers have better things to work on. 3) Something to be proud of If the above two really matter to users, then the above two points are a starting for something to be proud of. As well as that, the cost - free, the quality, and the huge choice available. Beryl is a nifty toy to show off too ;) James

"Article" is a load of sensationalist trash. For a start, it quotes a known troll as a reference. Ciaran. The article loses all credibility on this alone. Seriously... that's like quoting a porn film as a scholarly reference in a theology assignment. Then read comment 2, even if you ignore the fact that it's by a Gentoo developer, it's a sound response. Third, the loss of one developer, doesn't neccesarily indicate the project is in 'crisis'. Within any organisation, disagreements happen, and arguments do escalate. Sometimes this turns personal, it shouldn't but it happens. To take the moralistic high ground that any such developer should be removed, is utterly impractical. In the end, it's more beneficial for the project that they *stay*. For example, if Arch lost developer Y, who has an important role in maintaining the kernel and KDE, the rest of us would be stretched to cover these, and not all of us have the experience and expertise that he has. James

Not quite. It's pretty much standard for users to be allowed to run executables from wherever they are able to store files. If you can make files, you can execute files. I run my window manager from ~/projects/dwm/dwm as I frequently update the snapshot I use. I made a ~/bin directory for useful scripts, although I could install and run an executable anywhere in my home directory, or any other directory I have write access. The difference is, the executables are only run with the privileges of the user who ran them. So if an exploit were found in firefox for example, it could wipe your home directory contents, though would not have enough permissions to affect the system. The reason why viruses are not common, is GNU/Linux systems are a more difficult target to attack, for a range of reasons, including variances between distro's, it's a true multiuser permission operating system, and many distros already have very solid security practices out of the box that Microsoft is catching up on now. James

It's not uncommon for standards to be used before they're complete. Take 802.11i, it was hurriedly implemented in devices while it was in draft stage, under the name WPA when people realised WEP sucked. The final 802.11i spec is out and known as WPA2. There's fortunately no incompatability as this constitutes a driver update at most, or a software update at least. Many of the -n vendors put out guarantees their hardware would be compatible, and unless there's some core changes -- unlikely at this stage. Any changes that could occur, would generally be fixable at a driver level, as the tendency nowadays is to develop soft wireless cards, leaving the driver to do most of the work. You're only going to see any benefit with 80211n hardware, if all of your wireless infrastructure is n based, or at least, the wireless point, and if communicating to other wireless clients, their wireless. Then many people won't notice the difference between 802.11b and n. n is no 'faster' it just has more bandwidth. Web browsing doesnt max out my laptops' 80211b connection, so it's not going to appear any faster on a 80211n connection. You'll only notice the difference if you need the bandwidth for things like large file transfers between local computers, or if you are lucky enough to have an internet connection > ~11mbit James

As said above, the 'best' apps are subjective So given that, the most complete list I know of is, http://packages.debian.org Other than that, you're not going to find a list with everything, nor have a hope of building one that's even half the size of debian's. But if you want additions, IM: bitlbee, irssi, pebrot, browser: elinks, w3m, editor: vim, news: raggle, snownews, 'wm': screen (ok, not technically, but those who use it know what i mean :) ) And that's actually the system im running at the moment. elinks is a better browser than i thought! James

mandriva doesnt "automagically detect" any changes to your hdd's, that's mostly impractical. it only automatically adds windows to the bootloader, if the windows drive is already present at the mandriva install time. this is the preferred method. just leave them connected and stop this disconnecting stuff. if you connect it after installing mandriva, you need to go into MCC and add windows yourself in the bootloader tool.

urpmi shouldnt return anything for a search for broadcom, as the firmware is licensed etc. To use broadcom, follow the instructions on it's site (easily found with google) and use their fwcutter tool to cut the firmware out of the windows drivers where it is embedded.

There's ways around this. For example, bootloaders can be installed to the start of a partition. When I install a secondary distro, I install it's bootloader on to the start of it's partition. Then in my host/primary distro, I add the secondary distro to the main bootloader. In mandriva this would be as simple as going to the bootloader config menu, and adding another entry. James