iphitus

Overwritten or removed? Either way, your chances are pretty poor, and I know no software capable of recovering from reiserfs, leaving your only hope to be a professional data recovery service.

most distro's have only complied in the last year or two as they have moved from crappy automounting solutions to DBus+HAL based solutions. Mandriva's typically terrible at keeping up with anything new anyway. James

maybe it's ntfs. Admittedly it'd be most unusual for usb disk of any sort to use ntfs, but it's not unreasonable... I've setup sd cards with ext2 :) Windows can read write any reasonable sized FAT32 partition, it just can't create them bigger than ~36gb. I've got a 131gb partition that windows reads quite happily. What's the disk? and external drive, or a flash card? Got any other networked computers? Otherwise....... we could try and work something out when/if we meet up. James

That's critical, has someone filed a bug? For windows, just google, there's countless applications she can use to copy music to and from the ipod. Google and you'll find some to try in no time. James

Look around on http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page James

ahh, but perhaps the users don't :D I know I would have looked at you like you had 2 heads if you gave me a tar.gz, and probably asked for a 'real' file instead ;) Most people I know wouldn't even know what a tar.gz was. depends :) a lot of users wouldnt look at the extension and would just see an icon the same as a zip file and thus not think twice. But in defence of AussieJohn, most would just be using windows' inbuilt zip support, not having winzip/rar/ace. And I was kinda a bit tongue in cheek suggestin the tar.bz2 ;) James

winzip supports tar.gz, if that's what they happen to use. :)

Be a true linux user and make a tar.bz2 instead ;) Mandrake need to radically change the way they develop. They need more experienced users, and reason for those users to remain on Mandriva. After learning the ropes, many find Mandriva a hindrance and move on to other distros, Gentoo, Arch, Debian, or even Fedora. It's just an entry level distro. Cooker exists, but it's not publicised -- it's very behind the scenes. Development of the distro, and major decisions, as far as I know, are handled internally. It's almost a closed development system. If you look at fedora/redhat, there's a lot of kernel developers, lots of application developers, and a large community of experienced users willing to test. Likewise for ubuntu. The result of this, is a high amount of bugs, that could easily be found with a proper development and testing scheme. New users don't want to use testing/unstable versions, and as a result, it's silly bugs like those in this release that get through. * SD cards are extremely common. How was that not picked up? * Beagle is a big feature is it not...? How come nobody noticed? (and im not even going to go into how they could have screwed that up in the first place) * Missing menu entries? Cmon. * Nexiuz out of date? That would mean nobody even tried it, as an out of date game can't connect to latest servers. Also implies problems in Mandrivas system of keeping packages up to date. * Incomplete dependencies...? Amateur mistake, I could quote tomboy's dependencies off my head. * OOo Writer not on MDV Discovery menus? * GTK Apps crashing due to theme? Mandriva have a history of stupid bugs. They need to improve their development system, and possibly also the distro... James

still on arch? pacman -S madwifi? Though you'll need to Syu to 2.6.19. I find that on my computers, holding back the Syu causes more problems than just Syu'ing.

rt2500 chipset based ones work pretty well. my method for finding wireless cards, is to go to a vendor's page. pick a couple of cards, and then just google them until im sure what chipset that they have, and then pick the one with the better chipset. surprised you havnt had luck with the atheros, madwifi is a half excellent driver and is finally at a stable release. (excellent because it works, but only half because of a crap design stopping it being merged) James

dbus has nothing to do with it, except some applications *may* (and should now, but not all do) query HAL (via dbus of course) to find out what CD drives exist on the system, rather than looking themselves. Could mysti do an "ls /dev/hd*" ? I'd like to see the permissions on the drive. James

oh...... then permissions? is the user in the 'optical' group? "gpasswd -a username optical" to add, then relogin.

so it's mounted, look in /mnt/cdrom? what app are you trying to get to recognise it anyway? James

oops. i meant apm was too old for that laptop :)

what do you have to do on windows? login or anything? or does it 'just work'? try setting it up just as an ethernet connection for the network card you're on. James

just a word of advice, don't use the disk manager app from windows when dealing with linux partitions. it's not particularly friendly.

ianw1974: that laptop is too old for apm. It's bios simply wouldnt support it, which is why it caused problems -- it couldnt use standard acpi routines to address things. as for the CD theory, what's the CD? audio? data? self burnt or otherwise? James

ok, hdparm always barfs on optical devices, they dont support as many settings as hard drives do. Take a look at your kernel, are you still running -mm? 2.6.19? There's been a huge amount of changes in the ide/pata scene recently, so it's quite possible you've run across a bug or problem. Are you using the new pata_xxx drivers for your ide device? These can be pretty experimental in some cases, resort to the older ide/ driver. There's also been a few changes in the latest cdrecord (or whatever it's called now) versions -- so there's a few things that could be at fault here. It's not a hardware fault given the above changes, and that it still works in mandriva. I can cause those errors above on demand by sending invalid hdparm values: hdf: set_drive_speed_status: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } hdf: set_drive_speed_status: error=0xd0 { LastFailedSense=0x0d } ide: failed opcode was: unknown James

There's two acpi things here at play. acpi, which the kernel provides support for and involves power management and other things, and acpid which gets this information and makes it easy for desktop apps to access. You can shut down acpid, but leave kernel acpi on -- being a desktop, you probably dont need acpid anyway, it's mostly used for battery/power/lid information/actions. Go to the mandriva control center, or "configure my computer" and find the services panel. Turn off 'acpid' or 'acpi'. Can't remember the exact name. James

Not quite. Guess where I first saw the scroll wheel, or the optical mouse, or the tilt wheel (<->). Microsoft Mice. While Microsoft did not invent these, they brought them to the mainstream. Not innovation, but a greater change and effect than those who invented them. that's fine :) I'll take your word, but i doubt it. Yup! Ultimately, I'm a consumer, and just care for getting the best product -- the politics and religion behind the company has no impact in my hardware choice. Software? If linux didnt perform to my needs, I wouldnt use it. But it does, and fulfills them better than windows can. James

reference? I call bull :) I'd buy logitech if they made the MS Natural Ergonomic Pro 4000. This keyboard is just awesome. I'm more than happy to buy microsoft hardware, they're actually quality devices. This house runs on intellimice. Between all the computers we've had over the years here we have had: Original IntelliMouse, Original Optical Intellimouse, 3x Intellimouse Optical V1.1, Wireless Intellimouse Explorer V2.0, Intellimouse Laser And they all still work. assuming the optical v1.1 that my brother lost last year still works too. My current keyboard, the aforementioned ergonomic model is just awesome, I can't reap enough praise on it. I no longer experience any discomfort in my wrists, nor pains that I had on standard layouts, it's more comfortable than any other keyboard i've ever used, and because of the great layout of the keyboard, I type faster than ever too. All the extra keys work in linux too. Any name brand - with very few exceptions (I can't think of any, but a small handful probably exist) - uses the standard usbhid or psmouse interfaces, and widespread, well supported protocols, so they all will work with linux. Whether they advertise it or not shouldnt really matter because of that fact. Got a microsoft wireless mouse here, 2 AA batteries, i've only replaced them 2 or 3 times with cheap supermarket brand batteries, and it's about 10 months old. So say 6 batteries for a year, that's a pack and a half, 7.50 bucks, that's bugger all. We keep a stash of these spare in the cupboard, because so many devices use AA, so that's removed any inconvenience here. Of course, I could just pull our battery recharger out of the cupboard, but the disposables last longer and are more convenient Range? great. 10m line of sight easily, and a good few meters when blocked. As much as I dislike Microsoft, I can't fault their input devices. They're quality hardware. They don't break, they work damned well, great to use and are all I will buy as long as they remain as such. James

hrmm, i'm still looking for the "new concept" that "changes the way we use computers" the goals on http://www.ulteo.com/main/sirius_alpha_announce.php are noble, but extremely lofty. The sort of goals every user friendly distro has been aiming to acheive for years. If they were as easy as they describe, it would have been done a long time ago. I wish them luck, but from what i've read of their use of unionfs -- it seems a bit of an overengineered solution that only solves a small part of the problem. Phoning home? No thanks. And so far in, that breaks their hardware compatibility on a huge amount of hardware from the last year. For me, that's no usable wireless or ethernet support - and my computer's motherboard is already well over a year old, the wireless card the same. SATA would be pretty poor too unless there's a huge amount of backporting and fixing done - which is just beyond impractical for a kernel that old. And security? going back to 2.6.15, that's a helluva lot of bugs and security flaws to fix. I wish them luck, and I do realise it's an Alpha, but it's a pretty uninspiring start for 6 months work. James

not quite, it's just the newer module is loaded instead, which means they have to update their bootloader and fstab to the different syntax of /dev/sdxx where it used to be /dev/hdxx for PATA devices on a PIIX controller, as well as correcting any renumerated sata devices. nothing we could really do, it's a change thats been coming for a while.

Being fair I don't think that was Gael... leastwise in recent years! back then he was in charge mandrake hardware support was very good... probably the best back in 8.x days... pick a really old post to quote why don't you :P that's June.

Sure, just go to the mouse options in the "mandrake control center", which is normally under "configure your computer" in the menus. There try and select a different mouse model, one which describes your mouse more appropriately. The wheel often doesnt work because the wrong entry has been picked, resulting in the wrong X configuration. If this doesnt work, then we might have to manually change X's configuration file and add a line or two in. As for the X confusion, Xfree86 and X.org are both X servers, which implement the X11 protocol. In simple terms, Xfree and X.org both allow programs to draw things on your screen. Xfree86 used to be the main one, but it was forked and all the development is now on X.org. Mandrake 10 used Xfree86. You'll probably get a lot of people reccomending you to upgrade, which might be a good idea -- but as long as Mandrake 10 is working without problems and fulfills your needs, the upgrade may be more trouble than it's worth. James