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Hi I have some annoying KDE bugs I hope someone could help me with. The first one is one that has been bugging me since 9.1. Randomly new windows that pop up will not have any of the content. It has the title bar and that's it. Resizing it doesn't help (if you maximise it, you still just have the title bar) and it's not shaded. If you close it and re-open it it's usually fine again but it is very very annoying (and sometimes potentially dangerous - like the times it occurs in a dialogue box in Mandrake Control Centre, effectively locking the whole thing up because I can't click OK if there is nothing under the title bar...). It's still occuring in 9.2. The next problem has only come into being with 9.2. When I use Matlab, cut and paste doesn't work. I can't copy stuff from Matlab to say xemacs and if you look in Klipper the stuff you just copied from Matlab isn't even listed. Now if you exit out of Klipper it works fine, but does anyone know a way I can fix this permanently? A config file setting? Anything? Something I have to live with? Thanks!

Hi! Well now that Texstar has taken an extended break, does anyone know of any good rpm repositories that provide up-to-date Mandrake RPMs like he used to? The official contrib folder looks like it is only sporadically updated.

For some utterly strange reason if you set themes in Gnome 2 using the Gnome theme manager, the themes don't work anywhere else put Gnome 2. I don't seem to remember this happening in Gnome 1.*...In order to get GTK2 themes in working in KDE, Enlightenment etc. put a config file named ".gtkrc-2.0" in your home directory with contents like this: gtk-font-name = "Arial 10" include "pathtotheme/gtk-2.0/gtkrc" You don't need to put the themes anywhere special. For GTK1 put a config file named ".gtkrc" in your home directory with contents like: include "pathtotheme/gtk/gtkrc" style "Whateverthenameofthestyleis" { font = "-adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-p-*-iso8859-15" } If you use these in Gnome 2.* however it screws things up. The GTK2 config file conflicts with the Gnome 2 theme manager and the GTK1 config file doesn't work at all leaving you with the nasty default GTK1 theme. So if you are actually using Gnome 2.* be sure not to use these config files. BTW, does anyone know how to define the icons you want for GTK2 programs?

That's right, 2.2 doesn't have that feature. Didn't really bother me, but 2.4 that I'm using now has it, and I use it. Gnome goes about things in a different manner - let's do a little bit perfectly, and KDE does a lot half-assed. Well, that's my general opinion anyhow. :) Well, Linus said something similar, though he put a different spin on it :) In a recent interview he said: "But for some reason I just noticed that the KDE people consider it more important to have it working, and sane. Instead of trying to aim for perfection, which the Gnome people are trying to do."

I also prefer KDE over GNOME. I used to use them both equally, both with the 3.* series, KDE just seemed to pull ahead of GNOME in terms of usability. It's the little things, like having a decent file manager, integration with all the KDE programs, a decent save file dialogue, bookmarks in the terminal and save file dialogue that just make things easier. Also initially the GNOME terminal didn't have tabs. This was also around the time GNOME 2.* came out and it was initially a mess. Rather than being a transition from GNOME 1.* to a new version it was like they went and re-invented how to do everything from scratch. I don't mean in code but in terms of UI consistency. For example the KDE options have always been in the same place from KDE 2 onwards. But having used GNOME from the 1.* days to GNOME in Mandrake 9.1 (and I used each one for several months, not just a day) it just seemed with every new release of GNOME they keep on changing what options there are and where they put them (not to mention what the GNOME control panel looks like). I noticed that they did this *again* in the GNOME version in Mandrake 9.2. I keep on getting confused with the button order as well. The problem is, if it was all programs I'd get used to it. The problem is I use OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE and GTK1 programs as well, and so you keep on getting confused as to the button order. I understood they put it in because they thought it was easier than the other way round and that may be the case - if only they could convince the OpenOffice, Mozilla and KDE people to follow them, otherwise it just makes things more confusing. KDE also used to be much uglier than GNOME, but with KDE 3.* some very beautiful themes and options came into being whilst with GNOME 2.*, it still looks nice, but there just doesn't seem to be the range of different themes and styles that the old GNOME had. I heard a reason for this is that with GNOME's lack of an option to change colours easily, so a lot of GNOME themes are just a single theme re-coloured. And Nautilus has to be the buggiest, most resource-hungry, featureless file manager program I have ever used in my life. Everytime I use GNOME I try using Nautilus for a while before I give up in disgust. I can't think of a single good thing to say about it except I prefer how the thumbnails look in Nautilus over Konqueror. The Windows 98 file manager was better than Nautilus (except for the lack of thumbnails). Anyway with Mandrake 9.2 I had a look at the new GNOME and I had thought of trying it again, but then I thought, going from KDE to GNOME I'd lose a good file manager (to be replaced by that pile of rubbish known as Nautilus), I'd lose the file saving dialogues and bookmarks and I'd have to learn where they decided to put the options (and what options are available) this time round and I'd lose the tight integration that's a hallmark of KDE. And there's nothing in GNOME that I can't do in KDE. And now I've worked out how to get GNOME themes to work in KDE, I can use GNOME apps happily in KDE.

This probably won't help but I run Mandrake 9.1 with the Mozilla 1.3 that came with it (never upgraded) and I've never had these problems. Does Galeon have the same problems? If it does it means there's something wrong with Gecko (both programs use the same HTML rendering engine). If not it might mean there's something wrong with Mozilla. About email - there are other email programs besides the ones that come with the browsers. If you want an Outlook clone , evolution is an option. I don't use it though because I don't run Gnome and because kmail is a much nicer email client (just for email purposes). Evolution has some things which really annoy me, eg. not allowing you to read text email in variable width fonts like Arial so you're stuck with fixed width fonts which I hate. Not allowing you to change the size of the fonts for HTML w/o also changing the size of the headers so if you want a decent size font to read HTML email you get a huge header. (BTW anyone with any suggestions on how to get around these problems are more than welcome to make them) Kmail is a native KDE app and for pure email is very nice especially for keyboard navigation and it's fast. Kmail also integrates very well with Konqueror (both being KDE apps).

What error message does urpmi bring up if you try to run it on local files?

Find someone with a Windows partition, copy the fonts folder onto a CD and then use the Mandrake drakfont tool or if you don't have access to it or don't have root access the KDE font installer. Of course that does still require you to have access to a Windows partition somewhere, though not necessarily on your machine...I think the problem with the fonts being included with Mandrake are some copyright issues.

Strange. Just a couple of weeks ago I installed mplayer from the Mandrake 9.1 CDs. All I did was run a search in Install software found it and installed it. I'm certain of this because I've been using it every day for the last couple of weeks. Hated the interface though so I installed kmplayer.

Are you sure you're not talking about Nautlius? Galeon is a stand-alone web browser with very limited file management capabilities.

My first thought was the HD, but then I remembered some of my recent experiences. I'd strongly advise you doing a memory test before being sure it is the HD. I had similar problems - refusal to boot but could boot find from Knoppix etc., heck I even had massive file system corruption, everything seemed to point to the HD - and in my case it turned out to to be the memory (found this out after replacing my HD *twice* >_<) It'd probably end up being the HD, but a memory test is easy to do and at least it'll rule one thing out.

It's not as simple as that. I've heard too many stories of "Distribution X didn't detect all my (insert hardware) but distribution Y did." or "Distribution Z was able to use hardware B after I did this and this." And the difference is not just between distributions but different versions of the same distribution. In order for a vendor to put "supports Linux" on their box they're going to have to test it first. There are only a few different versions of Windows, if we take into account the different versions of each distribution as well as different distributions, how many different versions of Linux distros are there? Also the manufacturer will not only have to test for compatability, it will also have to train its call centre staff because if you say your stuff supports Linux you're going to have to support it. Of course the problem now is that each version of each Linux distro does things in different ways (and puts files in different places too). Basically the question is, when you say "supports Linux" what do you mean by "Linux". Do you mean Red Hat? Debian? Mandrake? Gentoo? Red Flag? Linux From Stratch? Slackware? SUSE? Turbolinux? And which *versions* of these as well? I imagine this is reason ISPs and banks often don't "officially" support Linux as well (as my bank says, we support IE and Netscape 4 on Windows. You use anything else, we won't stop you but don't bother to ring for help). It is in situations like this that the fragmentary and diverse nature of Linux distributions hurt it. To a company looking to test its hardware and write support scripts, each different version of each different distro requires a separate test and that means more *money*. You can't test something on Red Hat 8.0 and also be sure that it will work on say SUSE 7.0 let alone Slackware 9.0 or Debian. Likewise any support scripts you write for Red Hat 8.0 will probably need to be changed for the other distros. OTOH when you say "supports Win98SE" it's pretty obvious what that you mean it supports Windows 98 SE.

I don't really see what the problem with that. If you're a Club Member then no problems. If you just download it for free, well, Mandrake has to make money somehow right? It seems to be putting a lot of emphasis on the Club so they have to give people some incentive to join. Actually if you look at it, Mandrake is one of the increasingly few commercial distros that still allow free ISOs for people. And if you buy the Powerpack - actually with Mandrake's very bad delivery services (I've been bitten myself with this) you might have something to complain about. You pay to support Mandrake AND it's late. Maybe they've improved...

I'm not sure, but I don't think this is a problem. It happens on my system as well. Here is the excerpt from /var/log/auth.log (edited to remove my user name and computer name): EDIT: Decided to remove this since it might not be a good idea to have it on the web... I think it's just part of the normal msec security procedures.

Something very very strange is happening with my computer. First of all it has been playing up for the last few weeks. I thought at first it was a dying hard drive because the symptoms seemed to be that of a dying hard drive (I noted them in a previous thread - basically tons of bad blocks, continuous very bad file system corruption etc). However I replaced my hard drive and whilst the first replacement reported bad blocks, the second replacement did not report bad blocks. Yet the same problems were occuring! Tons of Signal 11 crashes, file system corruptions etc. I finally figured out that it only seemed to be occuring when I rebooted. If I could get it working at all, it would usually be stable for ages and ages until I rebooted. One of my friends then suggested that it could be bad RAM that was syncing badly with the data on my hard drive when I rebooted. So I used memtest86 to check my RAM. Bingo - >60 errors. OK, so time to check which RAM module is "bad". I checked the 2nd and 3rd slots. Tons of errors. I put the 1st module back in and took out the 3rd one. Tons of errors. Took out the 2nd one. Yeah! No errors. So I figured the 2nd module was bad. I put the 3rd module in the 2nd RAM slot. Passed memtest86 with flying colours. Then I put the 2nd RAM module in the 3rd RAM slot and...that also passed memtest86 with flying colours. Huh? The only thing different from my previous unstable >60 memory errors configuration was that I had placed the RAM module that was in the 2nd slot in the 3rd slot, and the RAM module that was in the 3rd slot into the 2nd slot. How on earth could that possibly have fixed the problem? My system is much more stable now (touch on wood). At least it hasn't been dying every reboot (I've must have rebooted it half a dozen times just to check) and I ran memtest86 again on all 3 modules and it passed. I guess that I could be putting the "bad" module on a higher bank so it is accessed less, therefore making my system more stable, but that wouldn't explain why it is now passing the memtest86 tests where before it was showing > 60 errors. I am truly confused. I checked memtest86's documentation and it says that all swapping memory modules should do if one is bad, is give you RAM errors at different pages.

What works for me: Go to Software Sources Manager. Click "Add" Click "Security Updates" (I only do security updates) In the URL type in what the URL is for your server. In Relative Path type: ../base/hdlist.cz And that's it. Also note if you are going through a proxy you need to define the proxy settings in the option it gives you in the Software Sources manager.

I'm guessing here, but it looks like the *nv* drivers are still the ones in operation not the new *nvidia* ones. Did you make sure that "nv" was replaced by "nvidia" in your XFree86-4 config file?

Hi! Thanks to all the people who gave me advice on hard drives. I eventually bought a Seagate. I looked at their home pages and WD seems to be fairly stand-offish about Linux (their sole thing line We do not support Linux, so you're on your own) whilst Seagate seems to be fairly Linux enthusiastic and provides diagnostic tools etc. which can be run in Linux. Anyway, a weird thing. I bought a Seagate 2MB cache 7200rpm 80GB hard drive. Now the label on the HD says 80GB, the BIOS says 80GB but Mandrake says its capacity is around 75GB. Well its not like anyone actually *makes* 75BG hard drives so it can't be that someone slipped me a 75BG hard drive (besides the BIOS says it detects an 80GB HD). I tried 2 different (new) Seagate 80GB hard drives and both of them say the same thing. Any ideas?

I've tried it and it works. I have tons of bookmarks nested in lots of folders and it seems to work fine.

I'd just like to chime in that I have the same problem too (I want my Arial and Times New Roman fonts damn you!!!!!). Strangely the fonts I install from my Windows partition using DrakFont work in OpenOffice but nothing else (Mozilla, KDE etc.). But I use Control Centre and everything is fine. Weird. Though I wonder how Control Centre installs the fonts considering you have to be root to write to /usr/share/fonts...

Hi! I'm thinking of getting a Western Digital HD. I remember reading about problems with WD ATA100 HDs and Linux a couple of years back. Does anyone know if these problems still exist? Thanks!

I've found the solution to the problem. Booting into Knoppix I ran reiserfschk. Basically it said I had 2 fatal corruptions on my root partition and 1 on my home partition. These had to be fixed using --rebuildtree. I did this and the problem is now gone (and a good deal of the instability I had been experiencing is gone too). That's the good news. However I had memories of seeing bad sectors when formatting my HD a few months ago. Booting into windows I ran Norton's Disk scanner. It didn't find any new bad blocks on the FAT32 partitions this time, but I was suprised at the number of bad blocks there were already. There must have been a dozen or more bad blocks on the FAT32 partitions. And of course I am now starting to discover "fatal corruptions" on my reiserfs partitions. So is it safe to continue using this HD, or is this a sign of a dying HD?

Unfortunately I tried that in the past (well actually starting konqueror from the console where I was logged in as root, but it's the same thing really). However I can't see netreport or runlevel.dir at all in the directory (even with hidden files on). In the console it says: WARNING: lstat didn't work on netreport WARNING: lstat didn't work on runlevel.dir WARNING: lstat didn't work on xfs.pid Wait a moment. xfs.pid was fine before. (Checks previous output). Yup last time I did an ls on /var/run xfs.pid showed up fine. Yikes I just did another ls on /var/run and ls seems to be unable to see xfs.pid as well now. Wah! Things seem to be getting worse by the minute!!!!!

Unfortunately, I was root when I did the chmod command.

Hi! Unfortunately when I try to use chmod I get the following error message: chmod: failed to get attributes of `/var/run/netreport': Permission denied In reply to anon, I've tried using emacs to look at netreport. All it does is create a new file called netreport.