DragonMage

There shouldn't be any problem with pci-express stuffs if you are using nvidia cards.

I mean, there are no complaints yet for NVIDIA pci-express cards. ATI is a different problem entirely :)

You do know something about tab completion don't you?

That is, press tab to complete the file name you are typing. If pressing tab doesn't do anything or point to the wrong file, that means that the file you are looking for doesn't exist in that directory.

I find out that Firefox's own download manager is quite lacking if I am trying to download big files. Add to the fact that my cellphone connection is not exactly stable either.

That's why I use flashgot extension for Firefox coupled with d4x. I can even download isos this way.

In my opinion, no journalling file system can handle continous/frequent reboots/poweroffs.

While I was still having an overclocked Athlon XP 1700+ for my desktop, I suffered frequent poweroffs and reboots due to the bad capacitors in my motherboard and due to the bad power lines. After a few of those reboots/poweroffs, I find that no matter what Journalling File System I use, some files are always corrupted. A journalling file system helps if reboots/poweroffs are rare (maybe once a week or so), but if it is happening as much as 5 times in 10 minutes, then your filesystem will be corrupted.

So a UPS and good power supply is a must for me.

If it is regular IDE CD-RW, then it should be detected in linux no problem. There is only one thing to do is to make one CD-RW as master and the other as slave using the jumper at the back of the CD-RWs. Don't use cable select since it can confuse Linux, making it unusable.

In my opinion, a distro is only as good as your experience with it. I have made servers using 3 distros so far, Mandrake, Fedora Core, and Slackware. Yet if I have to choose between the three, I would choose Mandrake no question because I am familiar with its quirks and things, so I can get it working/fixed quite quickly.

If you have the Linux expertise in house and you don't want to shell money for commercial support, I find that the best distro is Debian.

If not, or if you want commercial support, I prefer Novell / Suse to RedHat. The all-in-one configuration utility (YAST) really makes it easy to configure your server.

BTW, if before you shell out money for RHES, try CentOS first. It's basically RHES without the RedHat's involvement (i.e. pricing, and support). See if you are comfortable with RedHat's scheme of things. Then you can shell out the money for RHES if you so desire.

Stay away from Solaris, especially Solaris for X86. While Sun and some analysts are harping about how Solaris is more robust than Linux, there is one thing it lack severely which is hardware support. The list of hardware compatible with Solaris X86 is very thin, and most of the compatible hardware are pretty much sun hardware.

BTW, have you considered any of the BSD flavors?

Good luck in your endeavour. Tell us what you find out.

sftp protocol is available in konqueror. At least in my Mandriva 2005 LE.

Now, there is this protocol named fish. Seems to be similar to ssh. Try it, maybe you can use it.

I find that 2005 LE handles USB storage devices much better than previous version. I have a Nexus USB flash drive that has a problem mounting automaticlaly in previous version (it doesn't unless you restart the computer while plugged in or you go to MCC and run diskdrake). Needless to say that 2005 detected and mount the drive automatically.

If you have the money, I say.. YES!!!

I mean look at the newest Anandtech's benchmark in Battlefield 2. Running that game at high resolution with everything turned on works really great in 7800GTX.

Of course, you could wait a little bit and find a more affordable version of the Nvidia 7xxx series. By the time it is released, BF2 will be playable in Linux.

That two processors thingie means that Mandrake detected (rightly I think) that the P4 you have is HyperThreading capable. Since what HyperThreading does basically tricks your computer into thinking that it has two processors (just check it in MS Windows), Mandrake install the smp kernel for it.

Anyway, to install your modem, first check your kernel version by typing

uname -r

The result will be something like this (this if for Mandriva 2005 LE in my case)

2.6.11-12mdk

Then install the exact same version of the kernel source (in my case it's kernel-source-2.6-2.6.11-12mdk).

Then download the source rpm version of the HSF driver

http://www.linuxant.com/drivers/hsf/full/a...-1.i386.rpm.zip

Unzip that file, and type this

rpmbuild --rebuild hsfmodem<blahblahblah>.rpm

There should be a line somewhere that the resulting rpm can be found somewhere in /usr/src/RPM/RPMS/i586/ or something like that. Go to that directory, then install the RPM by typing

urpmi <resulting rpm>

Then finish up by typing hsfconfig

Good luck

I have heard that there will be trouble installing Mandrake when you plug in some USB devices (like keyboard). However, they all work fine after installation is finished.

Wait a minute, is this HP Printer a network printer (that is, a stand alone printer with its own IP address and such?) or is this HP Printer connected to a computer that acts as a print server?

Or even worse, is the Linksys router acts as a print server (there are several models of routers that can act as a print server)?

Usually, Printerdrake is smart enough to detect network printers if it is connected to a computer acting a print server (if it is Windows based, make sure you enable the print sharing). If the print server is linux based, cups will automatically make it available to all Linux based computers in the network. Stand alone network printer is a bit tricky, but doable, as long as you select expert mode in the Printerdrake menu. Now router acting as print server is a lot trickier so you have to read the router's manual in order to find out how to configure it.

Well, the only way to know is to try it :)

But try the newest version of Mandrake just in case. It should be more compatible for laptops.

Maybe the external display cannot handle the resolution given in xorg.conf. Usually, monitors have much less maximum resolution than built in lcd. My toshiba's 15 inch lcd can handle up to 1600x1200 resolution while as far as I know, only good 19 inch monitors can handle that.

Anyway, I never gotten the Fn function to work in my toshiba laptop. The easiest way to handle external display (like projectors) is to reboot with the external display plugged in. The harder way is to edit some files in the /proc directory.

Good for you. Now I can recommend usb external dvd writers for linux users.

Now, I have forgotten what version of Samba in 9.2 and 10.2, but it is possible that they are different in a major way. My suggestion is to use webmin or swat to change the samba configuration. Make sure that the samba configuration makes it readable and writable for the right users (for example, guests).

Try something simple like burning to a CDRW first. If the resulting CDRW works in all the drive, then I guess it's the fault of K3B or cdrecord, not your drive.

Perhaps, this could be because ATI's own linux driver doesn't support PCI-E cards yet?

Although as far as I know x700Pro is basically 9700Pro in a PCI-E slot. I am surprised that it doesn't work.

It is usually started by udev.

How about the services harddrake, haldaemon, and hotplug? Are they running?

Open a console and type this command as root

tail -f /var/log/messages

And see if there are any changes when the camera is plugged in and out.

Hmm.. I see that usb-storage is missing from the list. If that is the case, no wonder it doesn't create /dev/sda

Is udev service running?

I did that, but all repositories only shows the 32 bit version of Mplayer. No 64 bit mplayer, just the plugins.

And I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Xine. Still won't work. It just hangs on the splash screen. While I can move it around, I still cannot do anything.

Like I said, maybe the 32 bit version of FC4 is good, but the 64 bit version is quite lacking. KDE crashes left and right whenever I changed something (like using plastik instead of bluecurve, changing the clock scheme in kicker to digital look, etc). The big plus for me in FC is the wvdial based dialer in FC. Not to mention that 64 bit makes it a lot easier to dialup using my cell phone (no disconnection compared to a couple of times in 32 bit, and a lot of times in Windows).

I second the suggestion of changing to another distro. I find that PCLinuxOS or Mepis is very good Linux beginner distro.

Anyway, maybe you can change the sound driver from Alsa to OSS. In a console, type

draksound

as root.

Then select i810_audio. Maybe it works.

Also, isn't version 5332 of the NVidia driver is well.. old? The version I have while playing around with FC4 x86_64 is 7174. It installs well.. as long as you have matching kernel-source.

Note that you need the full kernel-source rpm (not the stripped version) to compile NVidia driver. I made the mistake yesterday of installing the stripped version and NVidia driver just plain won't compile.

Actually, I tried FC4 x86_64 for about a week before giving up. It's snappy, but definitely too gnome based. And multilibs add to the bloat, whether in space (hard disk) or bandwidth (downloading updates). And I still cannot find a good video player for it. 2005 LE 32 bit edition on the hand, is smooth sailing, so I went back there.

If all you need is to read PDF, why are you using Adobe Reader 7? I rarely use Adobe Acrobat Reader in Linux, preferring either XPDF or KGhostView.