DragonMage

240 MB Update?! Sigh.. with my slow connection, it will take days to get those.

Coolness.. now if only it is available in Indonesia

Good for you. Those internal winmodems are more trouble than its worth I always say.

For OpenOffice.org, there is a bug in it that makes OO slower and slower to open as you use it more and more. I am not sure whether that bug is fixed in the version Mandrake 10.1 uses, but here is the explanation of the bug and how to fix it. In your /home/<user>/.openoffice/user/psprint directory, there is a file named pspfontcache. As OO is started more and more, the size of that file will get bigger and bigger, thus making OO slower and slower to start. The solution is this, delete that file first. Then, start OO. The file will be rebuilt, but smaller. Then make that file read only to keep the size small.

I'm afraid you are out of luck in this part. US Robotics Winmodem are not supported in linux since nobody (not even US Robotics) made the driver for it. However, if you are lucky, you can search http://www.linmodems.org to see if someone make a progress with that modem. Personally, I ditch that modem and buy an external serial modem instead.

Definitely cool. :) Anyway, is there a way to extract the content of the dvd and then make iso cds out of it?

If you are using ATI's proprietary driver, I don't think suspend works. Are you using regular Radeon driver? I am not at my Mandrake box right now, but in kernel 2.6, the name of the module is changed from smc-ircc to something else. Install kernel-source and then search for the module name by su as root, go to /usr/src/linux directory and type make xconfig or make menuconfig. Now the slowness is weird. Is it an upgrade or clean install?

It seems that from "file truncated" error, the file is not extracted as it should. Try deleting the slmodem directory, redownloading the driver, then extract them as root.

If 180 dollars is nothing for him.. I suggest he donated it to those needy people in Indonesia, where you can feed a family for a month with it.

What?! Now that's cool.. Anyway, tell me how good it works.. Then after that, send a copy of the dvd to me? :)

If you search http://www.anandtech.com about the battle between MS Media Center and Linux based MythTV, it shows that MythTV bested MS Media Center because of its versatility and availablity.

OUCHIE!!!!

Yeah... I need that "try a new Mandrake release" fix..

There is a known bug in Mandrake 10 OE that doesn't load the modules needed for pcmcia cards. To work around it, edit your /etc/modprobe.preload file and add these two lines yenta_socket cardmgr reboot and check whether your pcmcia card works. Don't forget to install the pcmcia rpms and turn on the pcmcia service in drakxservices.

Actually, it is retrieving the CDDB database, just very very slowly. Try closing KSCD and then reopening again. Sometimes the CDDB listing will come out.

No acpi is still on. It's apic that is disabled. (note the difference between the two).

What distro are you using? Are you talking about linux in general or Mandrake in particular? Anyway, if you are using Mandrake, there is a way to do it. Go to Mandrake Control Center, Select Security, then Permissions. In that section, press the button Add a rule. Drakperm window will come up and you can set up the permission for your /home/megiddo in there. This setting for that directory will be permanent until you change it or you delete the rule. Hope it helps.

I think Linux 64 bit in general has a bit of pain in installation and maintenance. Note that I say Linux in general.. not just the Linux kernel. Most of the problems come from applications and drivers I think. I think I will wait for 2005 to try Linux 64 bit (that is, if I am lucky enough to get an AMD64 by then :) )

It's all about what you have and what you need. 1. Suse is better if you buy the box set. not only the manual is good, but the box usually contains all the apps you will need/want, including something like epsxe (psx emulator). However, it is more closed than Mandrake in terms of development and patches. Until recently, they don't give you free ISOs (I think they still don't) like Mandrake does, so if you don't want to spend a hundred dollars for the box set, the only way is ftp install (or use the 1 cd GPL version to install basic suse and get the rest from ftp). 2. Mandrake is much more open in terms of development and patches availability. However, their box sets and business need work. They provide free ISOs so you can get a working desktop with full applications without spending a lot of money. Since I live in a nation where a hundred dollars can feed a family for a week or more, and broadband penetration is very very limited, suse is not an option for me. However, I can buy a Mandrake downloadable ISOs for about 5 dollars (complete with a book). Also I can use the broadband located at work to make a mirror of the patches repository and burn them to a CD, so I can pretty much keep all my Mandrake installations up to date, no matter where that computer may be located.

I think it's the RAM problem. If you only have 128 MB of RAM (that is total RAM without any subtraction caused by shared video or things like that), then Mandrake 10 with KDE, Mozilla, and OO.o will crawl. Runnable, but crawl. Now if you can up the memory to something like 256, then you will see a great improvement in speed. If you can't try something lighter for your apps, such as XFCE, IceWM or Fluxbox for your Window Environment, Firefox for browsing, and Abiword for Word processor, etc.

There is another way to delete those unused Virtual Console by editing the /etc/inittab file. The full information for that can be found here. http://www.linux.com/howtos/Small-Memory/vconsoles.shtml Now I did that a couple of years back (during the time when 256 mb of memory is pretty huge). I find that it doesn't save that much memory really. Also after getting used to typing ctrl-alt-f7 for my X session, removing the Virtual Consoles confuse me a bit if I want to go to my X session. So I just leave them alone.

Hmm.. it's using Intel 865 graphic card right? (the new one for P4) I think I heard that XFree 4.3 (the one used by Mandrake 10) doesn't support some Intel vidcard chipsets. It could be this one since it is too new for the really old XFree 4.3. Do yourself a favor and try some distro with X.org installed as standard X Server (for example, Mandrake 10.1). X.org may support the vidcard since it is a lot newer and much more active in development than XFree. Now, I am not really sure if the VESA driver for XFree86 4.3 can support 1024x768 resolution. Try using XFdrake to change the driver to VESA and the resolution to 1024x768. If it works.. then good for you, too bad it's slow though.

I'm going to put wild stab in this problem since ACPI always work for me. Now.. do you put the "noapic" and "nolapic" option in your /etc/lilo.conf? I find that the combination of acpi=on noapic nolapic always work on most computers.

Hold on.. doesn't changing resolution to something lower will make things looks bigger?

I have similar problems with urpmi and CD based repositories. Then I updated my Mandrake 10 up to date (since there are several updates to Mandrake Control Center and draktools) and the problem disappear. Try updating it fully before installing additional software.