iphitus

ouch that's a pity. seeing as the computer doesnt have usb support in bios, it can't be too new, so do you have the original PS/2 keyboard about anywhere?

You need USB support in bios, to use usb keyboard at grub. Most microsoft keyboards still come with an adaptor for PS/2. That'll work. James

Pretty miserable. As for Mandriva, they should be handling customer complaints themselves, NOT redirecting them to a company they outsourced production to. James

its a name, like it matters. It's also in uppercase everywhere, maybe its an acronym.

Depending on what the site requires, and what server you have available, you could use an out of the box cms like e107, drupal or joomla. If its a bloggy type thing, theres such things as wordpress, and then theme it yourself. James

and on that, what are it's dependencies? A google shows its included in kdelibs, which is a real disappointment as it seems to be a step toward more intelligent file management. James

flightgear is awesome though you could also check if mandriva have an fgrun rpm, fgrun is another great GUI frontend. James

Meh? In english... it seems that it allows you to tag, comment and rate files. So the idea is adding metadata to a file. Which isnt a new concept, see extended attributes, though they've chucked a gui in front of it. James

I can't stand documents on a screen either. What I would like though, is a tablet pc or one of those ebook readers, that'd make it much more bearable. For notes and todo: I use a small, A2 sized book split into categories with some tabs. The one i have atm is spiral bound, so i chuck a pen in the spiral. For dates: I try to use my uni diary, but usually I end up remembering them myself. Going to print out calendars and glue them into the aforementioned notebook instead. For email: I bought myself a dreamhost account on sunday, and download all my email accounts to the one place and read it via imap or the webmail ui. I wouldnt mind a pda, but I can't afford one, and the above setup works pretty well. James

Guess that depends on how it's scheduled. There are ways to tie processes to a particular processor. In this case, it sounds like many of those threads are idle, and what is running, isnt overstressing the active core, so theres no need to schedule it to another. Under linux "threads" are practically seperate processes, except they share some memory with their parent process, thus they may be scheduled to run on any processor. No. The program needs to be explicitly designed to via the use of threads or multiple processes. You could though, split the movie you want to encode into two pieces, and then have a mencoder process encoding each. Though then you need to find a way to join them. James

Yeah, hopefully the triage is improving. It's hard to tell from the outside. I disagree though ianw1974, they do need a new one badly. The current one is *miserable*. Searches literally take minutes. I've written this post in the time it's taken it to load up the list of bug reports i've made. Given that to do any triage, they need to search for new bugs, and existing bugs, that'd really slow them down, and a new one should drastically improve the triage effort. The triage is just the first step, the important bit is having the bugs *fixed*. We'll see the results of this effort in the next Mandriva release. James

A process will only operate on one, unless it's a process with multiple threads. So it's just a matter of tallying up the processor usage of each app, to gain the total for each cpu.

if he doesnt respond soon, ask paul, he knows all this stuff inside and out. James

Such major changes should be made in a 2.7 cycle. NOT a "stable" cycle of 2.6 I understand that the development of the kernel is a different process than it used to be, and that 2.6 isnt really a "stable" cycle as it once was. But it's becoming clear that it isnt feasible. Since adopting this new style, stability has gone *way* downhill. This is acknowledged quite globally by developers such as Greg KH[1], Dave Jones[2], and others. To try and remedy this, the y (2.6.x.y) release was created, and is currently maintained by Greg KH. It's become a great way of distributing security fixes quickly, though it still fails to cover many bugs that exist upon each release and is more of a band-aid than a solution. Adrian Bunk is *still* distributing the 2.6.16 kernel, now up to 2.6.16.52 [3], including many bug fixes and security fixes. This is a pretty solid kernel, and worked well on my laptop, excepting a resume from sleep bug that was fixed in later kernels. Distributions now need to include ridiculous amounts of patches, far far more than they ever needed to. This has inherent faults (see [1][2] again), many patches arent as well tested, and induce problems for others. What do the distros do? they're damned if they do include them, damned if they dont. This LWN subscriber article[4] describes the situation for some distributors well Take a look at this subscriber article from LWN which explains the situation of many distros quite well. [4] A 2.7 cycle would make more sense. Such changes as, libata, tickless kernel and hrtimers, overdue new suspend system, new scheduler, sem2mutex, and other major changes could have been developed far more agressively and in a better environment. This doesnt prevent them from being merged back to 2.6, as backports have historically been common, with many things being backported to 2.4. Along with an accellerated 2.7 cycle compared to previous odd numbered cycles, this is one possible solution. Maybe it's not an ideal solution, but changes do need to be made, and I'd rather criticise constructively and offer some sort of alternative, then just badmouth. I could rant for ages on the kernel, there's a host of other issues with the current development style. It works, but I think the talent of the kernel developers could be used better, and the kernel could work far better. James [1] http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/enterprise_kernel_future.html [2] http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/82610.html [3] http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ChangeLog-2.6.16.52 [4] http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/239036/76e19bbb9ff0acd8/ - Subscriber only article, though lwn allow and encourage subscribers to post links to non-subscribers. LWN is an awesome resource, it offers a great summary of the weeks news in Linux, as well as many good articles. It's not expensive, and is a worthwhile investment if you spend plenty of time reading up on RSS feeds, checking news sites, or are a developer of a project.

That's not grub, it's the kernel. As of 2.6.21 or 20, i cant remember, the kernel moved to the new libATA subsystem, which has all devices, sata and IDE named sdXX. If the installer spat out a bad grub.conf, you can hardly blame grub anyway, that's an installer bug, not grub. One of the criticims of grub, and things fixed in grub2, is it's naming. it uses it's own naming, different to the kernel, and this tends to cause confusion.

grub v lilo's also a bit of a religious flamewar. I've used both successfully for extended periods of time, and most errors or criticism for either that I see, were caused by the user, not the bootloader. in reality, both suck in different ways because of their design. Once GRUB2 is released, I think we'll see a lot of these issues solved. GRUB2 is a redesign, and shares nothing with it's previous version. http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-2.en.html

could only really help, although I doubt you'll see astronomical changes.

there is no wireless security by the name of WAP. Check whether it's WEP or WPA. James

oh but it is the point. it's too late to separate home now. so we need to identify where the space is used, using tools like du, and filelight.

Your audio driver is snd-hda-intel. Try killing all sound apps (esd, xmms, arts, whatever) and removing it. The other thing it could be, is a noisy capacitor. I have a similar whine that is audible on my laptop when running a kernel that operating at a high hz. For that, the fix is to either run >=2.6.21 or build a kernel with a hz of 100. James

The partitioning isnt going to fix anything, though it might have been nice if done at install time. If he had a seperate /home, he'd have less space everywhere, his remaining space would be split between the two. So now, there's no point moving home, it'll result in less space for / and /home. It's the same amount of data, in the same space, but now the remainder is split. James

Grub doesnt interfere at any level that would prevent windows from acknowledging a reboot. Windows does not know it even exists. Try cleaning out temp files in your windows install, and the temporary installation files. James

in a shell, do hdparm -y /dev/xdx where xdx is your hdd, be it hda, sda or whatever. Does the whine dissappear before it spins back up (you should be able to clearly hear it spin down and up). Additionally, if you can, try and identify where in the computer the hdd is located. It's often not too hard as they tend to be user servicable in most laptops. See if the sound is coming from there, or elsewhere. Could also be coming from your sound system. Unload your sound card's driver with rmmod (post the output of 'lsmod' if you don't know which it is and we'll point it out), and spin the hdd down to see if you can hear anything. James

coulda been doing anything... sending spam, participating in a botnet, ddos attacks, infecting documents... maybe it might be good if you get one of those virus scanners for linux and make sure you've left no traces :) James

i was a bit fancier, i made /etc/profile.d/sbin.sh and added the PATH change there.