DragonMage

I think the downloadable DVD only have Firefox in there, but no Mozilla.

Hmm.. I have never been able to play audio CD digitally. Just now I tried and it says something about permission problem. Went back to analog (with the CD-ROM cable) and it plays CDs perfectly.

Hmm.. that could mean that there is no smartlink modem at all in your computer. Can you list the components of your computer? Or is it a laptop? If it is a laptop, what kind of model is it?

Athlon 800 you say? Socket A version right? That could be Thunderbird core, the second hottest CPU core in history (the hottest is Prescott). Definitely need new heatsink/fan. Also buy case fans if you can to improve air circulation inside the case. If you have extra money, buy a good thermal paste like Arctic Silver. BTW, you don't need to spend a lot of money for good and silent heatsink/fan for Athlon Socket A. A Maschool/Spire/Speeze WhisperRock is only about 15 dollars from newegg. I am not sure where you are located, but you should have similar brands in your area.

Hmm.. is that the new ATI board with built in video? That chipset is probably too new to be recognized properly (especially in term of video). Now, I am not sure whether you need ATI's own driver for this, but I have a feeling that it's not supported by current ATI driver anyway. Maybe you need to make sure you put plug and play os option in the bios to off. Or maybe update to the newest bios.

Probably it's the setting in the bios or something. Can you tell us the exact specification of your machine?

It should be fine. In fact, I am using it right now. It's as stable as any version of Mandrake.

Here are some questions I need to ask you first. 1. Are you using the Mandriva RPM version of the smartlink driver? (From the Powerpack or commercial edition?) 2. Have you updated the kernel? Because that particular driver is compiled toward the exact kernel name when you upgrade the kernel, you need to recompile the driver. My suggestion is this. 1. Uninstall the driver rpm (but not the service rpm [slmodemd]). 2. Download the source driver from http://www.smlink.com 3. Install the kernel-source rpm that has the same version as your current kernel. 4. Compile the source driver, and then install it. Search this board for instructions of how to install the smartlink driver. There are plenty of posts and threads about it. If you have any further questions, let us know

You may be right. There may be no such thing. I guess the USB ports I have seen in some gateway routers are either for configuration only or it's actually a cable/dsl modem with both usb and ethernet ports. See, this is why I hate USB everything.

I haven't checked this extensively. However, all the basic utilities you mentioned (such as cat, chmod, and others) can be found in coreutils rpm. So you should download the coreutils source rpm, unpack it using the command rpm -Uvh <name of rpm>, and then go to /usr/src/RPM/SOURCES directory to see the source files. Good luck

If all you want is just to share connection, you can use Windows XP's Internet Connection Sharing Wizard. But the security is really really iffy. I notice that you have a USB ADSL modem. They are somewhat hard to support in Linux. If you have an ethernet ADSL modem, you can use your Linux box to act as a gateway/router so that your WinXP box connected to the Internet via your Linux box instead of the other way around. For the least amount of headache, it may be better to buy a hardware gateway/router instead. I am not sure what brand of gateway/router that support USB connection but they shouldn't be more than 50 dollars in cost. Add this to the flexibility of adding more computers later that want to share Internet connection (just in case).

OpenOffice Draw doesn't have the templates (that is, premade pictures/symbols). That is, if you want to draw a resistor you have to create 5 lines zig-zagged yourself.

Usually, in Windows, there are some tricks or programs that makes your laptop into "low power mode" as soon as the adaptor jack is plugged out. This includes lowering the CPU speed, darkening the screen, etc, etc, etc. Linux usually don't do this automatically, so it's still using "plugged in" mode even though the adaptor jack is plugged out. I am not that much of an expert in Linux power management, but I know that ACPI needs to be enabled and acpi and acpid service need to be turned on. To slow down the cpu speed, there is a program called cpufreqd. Other things such as darkening the screen requires a little bit of more work.

Athlon 64 doesn't really have FSB anymore. It's Hyper Transport now. The Venice Core can handle 1000 MHz Hyper Transport, compared to older Socket 754 stuffs whose HTT is only 800 MHz. Trust me, current A64s doesn't even fill the old 800 MHz HTT, much less 1000 MHz. The bigger HTT is only favorable if you are using multiple CPUs or Dual Core CPUs, even then it's not fully used up now.

It's not the technology, it's the quality of the components. Back before the year 2000, I find that computers are built like bricks. Unless there is some catastrophic disasters like lightning strikes or the like, they usually can take a lot of punishment. My office is filled with older "junks" such as Pentium 2s and 3s. Heck, I still have a Compaq Presario P-166 MMX desktop that has built in LCD screen and 6 disk changer. Usually it's the physical/mechanical components that break down first such as fan or hard drive. This is especially true in laptops since most of the laptops I see my co-workers uses are still P2 and P3s Toshibas that are really really well built. One old laptop is I see that is still working is an old IBM Thinkpad, it's over 8 years old, the casing is ugly as sin (so beat up you want to shoot it dead :) ), the hard drive is having problems and the CD-ROM is not working anymore, yet it still runs windows 98 SE no problem whatsoever. Now fast forward to the year after 2000. This is the date where computers got "cheap". In order to be cheap and still be profitable, something must be cut down somewhere. Usually they use Chinese components who are barely passed the QC test. I have two Fujitsu laptops whose built in sound cards failed within the first year (since sound cards and modem is usually the same component, that means that those computers cannot use dialup). The toshiba laptop I am using now have a non-working Ethernet port (within the first couple of months), and after a little bit over a year, the DVD-RW cannot even read DVDs anymore. An Acer laptop that is just a bit over a year old have broken LCD. My old Epox NF2 motherboard died of 11 (count it) busted capacitors. And so on, and so on. No, the technology is actually good, but the component quality went down hill in the quest for profitability while selling them cheap. Why do you think the standard HD warranty is now only 1 year compared to 3 years a few years back?

DVD-RW is really cheap now. Doing a price scan in Newegg, I can get one for under 50 dollars easy including shipping. If you have a spare computer, you may borrow it to temporary house your data while you are rearranging your hard disk space.

Gkrellm is usually the one I use to monitor hd usage. Anyway, what kind of messages does your firewall give you? If you are being DOS'ed, then maybe your networking/security problem is bigger than your Mandrake problem. If it is just bandwidth log, then maybe you can disable it.

No, I am not kidding about my statement. Look at this graph from anandtech. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2382&p=7 Although the Pentium M is highlighted, as you can see in games, that Athlon 64 3200+ is in between P4 3.4 and 3.6 ghz in Wolfenstein, and even higher in Doom 3 Also see this graph http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2330&p=2 In Half-Life 2, A64 3200+ beats even P4 3.8 GHz. Now you can see that I am being conservative in my estimate in terms of AMD's gaming prowess

You know, I just installed xmms (the same package) in my Mandriva 2005 LE and I experienced none of the problems you experienced. xmms runs as snappy as before. Have you try running it from a console? Maybe there is some library that is not loaded properly. Xmms I think requires libgtk+1.2 I think. Also, have you tried creating a new user and see if xmms is having similar problems in that user?

Another thing is that Linux seems to be a moving target as far as development is concerned. Gcc, libraries, all the stuff seems to be improving at a steady rate. Compare this to Windows where nothing seems to move at all. Also, the thing that makes Linux so secure (user permission, user habits, etc) makes it damn hard to install software, especially games. Just think, most games require you to have Adminstrator privileges in order to install and to play. You also see that very few Windows users login as a less than Administrator account. Heck, they don't even know there is a limited user account in the first place. In Linux, we are trained to "DO NOT LOGIN AS ROOT" from the beginning. Unfortunately, that makes it difficult to install software. Also the fact that multimedia-wise, Linux is very lacking. While Windows users can boast surround sound, we are lucky if we can get stereo sound working without a conflict with arts, alsa, or oss driver. Finally, it's a bit of a chicken and the egg. Nobody will develop for Linux because there is no demand. And there is no demand because nobody develops for Linux. Some brave souls tried to create games for Linux, but either they find out it's too hard so they gave up, or they fail business-wise. Game developers right now, sadly, do not have the creativity nor the bravery to try something new, especially in the age of Industry giants like today. They all want a sure thing, something that can bring out tons of sequels and expansions. Compare this to the 80s and 90s while it seems that games are fresh and fun to play, even though they don't have the whiz-bang effects of today. I heard that the Sims was almost not released at all because EA believed it wouldn't sell. Now look at it, it's a franchise with tons of expansions and sequels. This is why I usually play old or emulated games in my Linux box. They are much more fun for me than playing newer games.

Roughly, except in games. In games, an AMD A64 3200+ is more like P4 3.5 GHz :)

A few years ago, I would've picked Maxtor no question, especially since they use Quantum components as part of their buyout (now Quantum imo is the best hd maker ever). Now, I am not sure, Maxtor seems to dip quality wise. The two maxtor hds I bought were experiencing click of death after one month or so. On the other hand, the seagate I bought is still running pretty. Also, upgrade your DVD-ROM to a DVD-RW. I mean.. DVD-RW is really cheap now (probably under 50 dollars). Seriously, you gain tons of capabilities for only a small premium. Anyway, I notice you are using newegg for your shop. If I were you, I will look for motherboard/cpu combos from Monarch Computer instead. They will be cheaper since you don't pay for separate shipping and everything is pre-tested so it works. I like newegg, but I find that the tax is quite high if you are living in California.

Actually, while the 20% rating is a bit too high, I actually somewhat agree with what wilcal said. Some laptops (like IBMs) are built like a brick so failure rates is less than 5%. Other brands seems to have 50% failure rates (in my experience it is usually Toshibas). It seems that every laptop is built in China with unreliable Chinese components, so only the brands that actually have high specifications have better than average failure rates. Also remember that laptops, by nature, are portable. But the components inside may not be as strong to be carried around. I have my filll of seeing things like bad LCDs, non-working ports, broken HDs, broken CD-RWs, broken keyboards, batteries that doesn't hold their charge, etc, etc. My rule of thumb is that a laptop bought after year 2000 will last probably 3 years at most, while a laptop bought before year 2000 can last for 5 or even more.

In theory, for Athlon 64. The AMD rating is about equivalent to the GHz rating in P4. Hence an Athlon 64 3200+ will be similar to a P4 3.2 GHz in terms of performance. There will be some things that Intel will win (such as multi-threaded applications [due to Hyper-threading mostly] and media encoding) and some that AMD will win (games, compiling, compression). However, in real life, the picture is fuzzier according to core of the CPU, other components, whether it is overclocked or not, etc, etc, etc. Right now, it is widely agreed that AMD Athlon 64 brings the best bang for the buck in terms of performance, price, power drain, and cooling.

Smiley, From your description, it seems that you fall into one of the simplest mistake in Linux command line use. Capitalization matters. You see, this is what you typed The problem is that the directory is supposed to be named Desktop (that's right, capital D) So try typing tar -xzvf /home/wyman/Desktop/evolution-2.2.2.tar.gz instead. That should work in your case. Of course, it's a lot easier just typing tar -xvfz Desktop/evolution-2.2.2.tar.gz if you are in your home directory.