VeeDubb

I will keep that straight from now on. Since you're poking in adamw, what's the deal with hotplug in 2005? There's many devices, that as far as I know, still don't work without hotplug, but hotplug and udev/hal/gvm don't seem to get along. Since hotplug is mostly scripts, why were the scripts not edited to ignore devices handled by udev/hal/gvm? You may not have the answer here, but I figure if anyone did, it would be you.

it's a pretty well know tip at this point, to use noapic, but it's an important one to remember. Glad things are working for you, and welcome tot he board.

I would dissagree a litle bit [with aioshin]. Certaily, no OS is perfectly safe, adn certainly a great deal of the security of linux comes from it's relative obscurity, but I believe linux is more secoure on a fundamnetal level, for the simple reason that only the root user can do anything to important system files, and only someone with your user password has access to user level files. This is very different from windows, where the defalut setup givers universalpermissions to everyone.

I totaly agree about shorewall. It's a very good firewall imo. I'm not sure what firewall the Mandriva Control Center uses these days, I'm nehind a hardware firewall.

[edited by spinynorman for clarification after merging threads]

All I can say is that with any luck, you may find a solution. The upgrade problem simply caused by installing non-mandrake rpms. It sucks, but that's life.

If you are running hotplug, you might try dissabling it. I found that hotplug and magicdev don't get along unless you do some serious editing of the hotplug scripts to make them ignore all the stuff that magicdev handles. Why mandrake doesn't do this for us, I may never know. I can only guess that it's because they haven't used it for long, and assume some people may not want to.

The answer to this question is far more complex than you might expect.

First, in terms of commercial software like winodws and PC games, there is always pressure from the publishing companies to get the product out the door.

Mandrake has the same problems. At one end of the comapny, you have honest hard working programmers, who want nothing more than to make the best distro in the world while paying their rent. And at the other end of the company, and this is true of ALL such venturs, you have people who's sole, short-sighted concern, is getting the next release out the door, to keep money coming in to start work on the next release which they will try to rush out the door to get money coming in for the next release and so on. This battle never ends, and usualy, it's the programers, and not the corporations who take the heat. For example, google "vivendi closes Dynamix"

As for the specific issue of the handleing of CD's, it is because we are in a transitional period of the handleing of removeble media. At first, when linux first became able to handle removable media, it was simple, efficient and reliable, but a pain in the ass. You mounted everything manualy, and unmounted it manualy. Only root could mount or unmount, and life was simple, if a litle annoying.

Various distros tried to address the issue, and the first idea that stuck at all was supermount. The idea with supernount, is that it always thinks there's a disk mounted, but that doesn't stop you from removing the disk. For some folks this worked well. For me it was just like winodws (one of the true high points of the Windows line of OS's) almost 95% of the time. But it was problematic, and despite the best efforts of thousands of programmers, nobody ever figured out how to make supermount work properly for everyone.

With mandrake 10.0 and above, we have a program that replaces supermount called MagicDev. It automaticaly mounts things, and it 'really' mounts them, so there is a lock file on the device. MCC will still probably still bung your CD burn as it's always run as root, and the root user couldn't give a flying f about lock files, but the easiest way to fix that, is to put the CD burner as the secondary drive if you have 2 CDrom drives, and mandy will just ask for the other one.

Also, if you have trouble with your usb key or card reader or external hotpluggable zip drive, I highly reccomend installing the latest version if you haven't yet. Mandriva Linux Limited Edition 2005 has the best handling of removable media I have personaly ever seen on any linux distro.

It's the only one that has instantly reccognized and mounted my hipzip mp3 player, and it allows me to hotplug cards into and out of my card reader, where before, I had to put them in the reader, then plug the reader in. This means I can now use one of those readers that sits in the front of your case like a floppy drive.

Sorry but I didn't realise we were discussing the inadequacies or otherwise of the Mandrake/Mandriva club.

You are right. I won't hijack the thread further.

But, like Sophgoat, I'd still like to know more about how these places offer these disks. The thing about charging for the disks, and the free ware is not shraged for makes sense, especialy since I believe it is all free ware. But so far, we've only heard conjecture one way or another. I'd love to know for sure.

If it is in fact legal as I believed, I will contiue to partonize CheapBytes, as IMHO, it's a very good value, so far I have always bought CD's and DVD's from them ever since a very bad experience with the mandrake store.

However, I have stronger and stronger fealings about piracy these days, and if I were to find out that it is in fact illegal, or only legal because of being in different countries, or some such non-sense, then I will not ever shop from them again, unless they stop selling the offending products.

Again, sorry for the topic high-jacking

If you are using kde, right click on the Desktop and select "Configure Desktop"

On the left, click the link for Screen Saver

At thed bottum of that screen is a box labled settings. You will see a check box that says start automaticaly with a dropdown below that which has the time for the screen saver to start.

Below that is a Check box for "Require Password to Stop" This 'should' be checked if your screen is locking.

Right beneath that is a dropdown to select the time until the screen locks. Jsut set it to whatever you want and you're runnin'

I agree about 3.4. I don't really blame them for not including it, but it would have been nice if they'd found a way.

As for being wortht eh trouble of upgrading, I agree. 3.4 is very nice, and t'hac and crew' have done a splendid job with it.

Also, my error with removables not getting unmounted when I unplug them, was taken care of by turning off hotplug, which is off by default anyway. Frankly, you really odn't need hotplug for most situations now that magicdev is so nice.

AussieJohn, I agree with you to a point, but I also think the price structure of the Club is badly fractured. Obviously, there are support options available to those willing to pay $55/month that are not available to the rest of us, and for someone running a company, those options may be worth the money.

However, the pricing structure is badly broken, and completely lacking in appropriate options for the consumer. We all want to support linux, and mandriva specificaly, but there are a lot of peopl out there who are not going to support them unless they feal it's a good value, and since every bit of usefullness that can be gotten out of the lower-end club mumberships, can be gotten here and at cheapbytes for a fraction of the cost, those people are unlikely to ever join the club.

The Club, which is marketed to consumers at least as strongly as to companies, has very little to offer in terms of services and extras for those community members. The mandrivaclub forum, last time I was there, was a hellish nightmare of rude people, confusing layout and slowness. I have even seen moderators on that board make fun of people who were there with serious concerns.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing club members or the club in it's entirety, I just feal very strongly that mandriva has failed to provide real value in the 'consumer' level club memebrships, and getting anything worth-while out of the club, normaly requires a huge investment.

I'm posting this in softtware, for those who are thinking about installing 2005, and wonder about the quality of new sotware involved.

Personaly I'm impressed. I just finished repairing my DVD image with bittorrent last night. For the reccord, I bought the DVD from cheapbytes, recieved the disk cracked, ripped a broken 3/4 size iso, then repaired the iso with a bitorrent.

Anyway, after that process and a hard drive isntall since I have no dvd burner, I must say I'm impressed.

Installer: The installer seemded much smoother, and for a rare change, actualy installed what I told it to. In the past, it's only installed more than 2 or 3 games if I left the box for game workstation UNchecked. This error has been fixed. I found it was generaly a very smooth install. I did not however, attempt an upgrade. The one problem I encountered in the instalation, is that my mouse, which is a Wacom Graphire 2 tablet, is not supported by the installer. This required me to navigate the menus with the keyboard. This is something I'm comfortable with, but some may not be. In any case, if you have a mouse that does not run with the universal drivers, be ready te nav the installer the hard way.

First boot: The actual boot up process went very smoothly. However, kde encountered problems on first boot. I inst6allerd by formatting / but not /home. This i a common method for a semi-clean upgrade. On boot however, despite the use of the same username, I didn't have access to /home/stephen who's ownership was given to 501. This may have been because /home/stephen is where the iso I isntalled from was located. If you encounter this problem you can log into X as root (I know, never log into X as root........) and change the ownership of your home back to you.

KDE: Well, it's kde3.3 We've seen this before. It's not as nice as thoupter's kde 3.4, but if you're not the type to upgrade dke yourself, it's a welcome update to 10.1 Generaly smoother/faster. Nothing huge. It does not include the nifty newer features in 3.4 like the auto hiding sytem tray icons.

Auto Mounting: Starting back in, 10.0 I believe, mandrake includes magicdev. This app actualy mounts and unmounts CD's and DVD's. in 2005, it also handles removable mass storage like flash memory cards and external zip drives, as well as digital cameras. This highly robust app is a must if you use a lot of removable medias. This is the first version of mandriva/mandrake to successfully auto mount my iomega hipzip MP3 player. On connect, it mounts it in a matter of 5 or 6 seconds, and the icon then shows up on my desktop as "Iomega Click! 40" which is the media my m3 player uses. This is of course a god-send. It did NOT however. properly handle the removal of my mp3 player. It remained mounted, and ahd to be manualy removed from /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab. Judging by the successful automount, I must assume that support for card reader has indeed been improved as adamw said it would be, but I cannot test that at this time, because I have loaned my cardd reader to my mother.

Firefox: This one is a no brainer. Firefox=better than original mozilla.

gimp: Very dissapointed here. In this slight revision, the controls for pressure sensativity have been greatly simplified, and in doing, have lost 90% of their functionality. I will be removing this app, and installing the version from Mandrake 10.1If you don't have a pressure sensative tablet, like the above mentioned Wacom, you won't know the difference.

Under the hood: As many people know, the under the hood updates to mandriva, usualy are constrained to standard updates, bugfixes and security fixes. It's usualy newer versions of the same apps. That's not always a bad thing, but it's not always good either. This time, judiging by poking around in the running services, there are some real and significant changes under the hood. Lot's of new proccesses, some replaceing old ones. By all apearances, much better support for, well, everything. Especialy bluetooth. The one thing that still bothers be is that bluetooth should not be running on a computer that isn't capable of bluetooth. Just wasted cpu cycles.

Stability: This is where 2005 realy shines. My desktop, is KNOWN to have either bad memory or a bad CPU. I've checked it with memtest, and it's dying. However, Mavdriva has been running all night and all morning and it has yet to lock up on me except once, right after install, I managed to lock up kde by deleting /home/stephen/.kde not really a big shock.

1-10

sqeaky clean new fealing 8 (if you're still using a 9x series, this will be a 25 out of 10)

stability 10

newfeatures 9

updated software 6 (would be higher, but I'm upset about the gimp, and with a stable 3.4 out there, kde 3.3 seems old)

improved hardware support 10

A simpler solution.

I dont' have kppp installed right now, but I used to use it when I was on dial-up. There is checkbox somewhere in the options for kppp that says disconnect on Xserver shutdown. If you simply uncheck that box, kppp will stay connected.

Like I said, if you're on a budget, go with ebay. You can get internal or external hardware controlled modems very cheaply. Just make sure the seller has a good rating and all that.

As far as external serial modems, I haven't used many, but the CreativeLab ModemBlaster External is fantastic.

So not to beat a dead horse but two quick questions on this subject:  first, does this mean that online vendors who are offering 6 CDs are likely selling "pirated" versions of the commercial release?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

You know, I've wondered that myself. The odd thing is, I don't think there's anything in those CD's that isn't freely distributable, so I'm not sure that it is technicaly pirating to redistribute them. It's still all freeware (in the free beer sense of free). I'm sure Mandriva would rather they not be redistributed, but as several well known sites I know of have been giving out what must have been 'club' versions for quite some time, for the usual price of a CDR, including cheapbytes. The 10.1 DVD I bought from them said power-pack in the installer. You'd think mandriva would do something about it if this were the case.

Of course, if their pricing structure wasn't so insane, they'd have 10 times as many members in the club, and nobody would ever bother with places like cheapbytes unless they had dial-up. It just seems stupid, especialy now that they are on an anual release to charge $760.00 to download the powerpack, when you can buy it from cheapbytes for $10 or Mandriva in a pretty box for $60.

My $.02

Buy a hardware modem.

Don't get me wrong, there's a number of winmodems that can be made to work, and once you've gotten one working, getting it working next time you install a new version of linux will get easier and easier, but IMO, it's just not worth it.

One of the frequently overlooked advantages to hardware controlled modems, is that they work better. It's not just a matter of driver support. If you are stuck on dial-up, a pitiable situation, you may a well get the most you can out of your dial-up.

In my experience, hardware conttrolled modems, connect faster, in fewer tries, and have few dropped connections as well as better mainained speeds while connected. They are better in every respect, and if you check around, and do some internet shopping, you can pick them up for as litle as $10 for a hardware controlled PCI modem. That's right, I've seen them for as little as $10.00 plus shipping. Try ebay.

Externals have their own mix of good and bad, but hardware controlled is what counts.

personaly, I prefer to just use bittorrent from the command line. You can install it (and a basic GUI for it) from the contrib mirrors.

once it's isntalled

btdownloadheadless.py filename.torrent /destination/

Well, I can 't give you specifics without knowing your motherboard, and probably wouldn't know even then, but you need to disable the built in card in your bios.

Usualy, when you boot, there is a prompt that will say "press f1 to enter setup"

Or delete or f11 or esc or some other key. Hit that key and poke around untill you find the option to disable your built in sound. It's there somewhere.

You also might poke around and see if there's a better way to use that tablet than with the generic HID driver. If not, you might consider getting yourself a Wacom tablet. They are pretty well supported. MAnrake has never set them up perfectly on it's own, but they are ususaly not too bad to configure and once they're working, they work with full functionality including pressure sensativity and the ability for the computer to tell what kind of tool you're using on it, which is very useful for the gimp.

The GF4 ti series is great. You problem is the default driver.

Let me guess. YOu installed mandrake, but you haven't installed the drivers for that video card.

if you're confident with linux, just head to www.nvidia.com

If not, take a look around these boards and find instructions for isntalling nvidia drivers. I'd normaly post the instructions, but there's already better instructions than I could manage posted al over these boards.

I know you weren't being ugly, and since I was planning on being a teacher when I started college, I've heard that too. I should have had my [sarcasm] [/sarcasm] going for that one.

Well, I have a Wacom graphics tablet, and have had various problems with it. What I can tell you is that if it worked at any point durring or after the installation, it 'is' possible to make it work.

With the wacom tablet (I know yours is different, but this is the help I can offer) there is a conflict between the module that the tablet uses and the usbmouse module.

A place to start would be to google and find out what kernel module your tablet uses. Then unload that module, and usbmouse, and reload your module. If that helps we can move on from there. If not, well, I dont' know.

They're pretty much what they sound like.

Mini, is the mini-install. It is a minimal version of mandrake, important software only, sinlge disk. It's not for the average home user.

xbox mini, same deal, meant for instalation on the xbox, not something I'd really reccomend to any one, but that's a seperate discussion.

xbox boot, could be wrong, but pretty sure this is a live DVD for Xbox. ANyone care to correct me?

Oooooo...... this could get ugly. No. Actualy, you are right in sense, I shouldn't have said things installed there will never work. That was wrong of me, but I maintain that is equaly wrong to overload a new user with complicated junk when what they really need to know to start, is avoid binary installers like the plague and just use rpm's for important stuff untill yo ufigure things out.

Prograssively lying to students is wrong, but teaching them arithmatic before you teach them algebra, is kind of obvious, know what I mean?

My $.02

Amarok is my eprsonal favorite desktop music app.

I know, adamw, and I have several programs, including UT2004 and Majesty gold. However, as that's not the normal environment, it's really innapropriate for a new user, as it would require numerous symlinks, and a lot of work.

Whenever dealing with new linux users, it is always best to take the Occam's Razor approach. All things being equal, the simplest explanation is the right one.

It's far simpler to tell someone to delete the program from the folder it realy shouldn't have been isntalled to, and point them to an RPM that can't be installed wrong.

mada726, let me be more fare. It IS possible to insatll software to anywhere you darn well please, and make it work. However, it is not as simple as just running a binary isntaller and pointing it at /home/mada726/ or even worse, just pointing it at /home/

To install things to unusual locations requires changing system variables, which may change the operation of other programs, or logging in as root makein symlinks from all the important/executable files the the standard location.

As a new user, you would do well to stick to RPM packages whenever possible, and it is unlikely that you will ever find something that you need, but can't find in an RPM. And when you do, it will probably not be the sort of thing that gives you options about where to install.