Gannin

I've been looking for a good podcatcher, but I've been having trouble finding one that does what I want. All the podcatchers I've found either download all of the episodes available from a podcast all at once, or they just download the first show in the feed and permanently ignore the rest. I would like a podcatcher that downloads the first file available in every feed you're subscribed to, and then stops. And then when you click “download” or “update” again, it goes back and downloads the next show in the rss feed of every podcast you're subscribed to. So that way, you can get the archive of the older shows without having to download them all at once, without having to permanently skip them, and without having to download each older show manually. Any recommendations?

If you boot into another desktop, like Gnome or IceWM, and then try Xine, do you receive any different results?

Ideally what I would like to see, is for Mandriva to have Mandriva Community and Mandriva Business. Mandriva Community could have a new release every six months and a rolling upgrade process in between, while Mandriva Business could be updated once a year. I know this is almost exactly what Red Hat is doing, but I think it would greatly benefit Mandriva as well.

But as I understand it, only club members can contribute packages. The third-party package repos don't really fill in the gap either, as they tend to be missing a lot of software.

Using Gnome and then using a non-HIG application doesn't show that there's anything missing. It just means that someone created a program that you like, and they happened to decide not to follow the HIG. For instance, if someone made a game or a chat client that you really liked and wanted to use, and they decided not to follow the HIG, that wouldn't mean there was anything missing from Gnome. It would just mean that someone made a new program that you wanted to use that doesn't follow the HIG. Bloat can be a bit relative. For instance, on Mandriva, doing a regular install using Gnome instead of KDE takes up more space than using KDE instead of Gnome. However, on Fedora Core, if I remember correctly, doing a regular install with KDE instead of Gnome takes up more space than using Gnome instead of KDE. So Gnome is more bloated in Mandriva, but less bloated in Fedora Core.

When it comes to Mandriva's club model, I think the thing that I question most is only letting club members contribute. I think having a more open contribution system like Fedora is a lot more helpful to a distro.

I know there are some exceptions to this, but basically, the majority of Linux users are one of two types of people. Either they are tech people like us, where if they have a problem they either figure it out themselves, or ask about it on a message board, or find the answer on the Internet, or they're someone that knows a regular Linux user, and that regular Linux user convinced them to give Linux a try. In that case, if they have any questions, they'll just ask the person that convinced them to try Linux. Either way, offering paid support to home users for Linux is not really a viable solution. The only viable solution, as has already been mentioned, is to give paid support to businesses.

I think there is a valid point you're missing through. It's true that for an application to be directly integrated into the Gnome project, it has to follow Gnome's HIG (Human Interface Guidelines). I'm perfectly okay with that, because in my opinion, it makes applications a lot cleaner and easier to use. But, Gnome is based on GTK+. Anyone can build an application for Gnome and follow the HIG or not. A lot of people build applications that, while they're not actually included in the Gnome project itself, are made with Gnome in mind, and simply follow the HIG because they like the way it makes applications look too. But they don't have to. So basically, if an application is integrated into the Gnome project, it follows the HIG. But anyone can make an application intended for Gnome and not follow the HIG if they want to.

The KDE themes may be in the repository, as some are for Mandriva, but that still counts as installing a binary. It's true that in KDE, you can radically change the way the widgets themselves work by intstalling a theme (which must be compiled or installed as a binary), and in Gnome installing a theme simply changes the way the widgets look. But if all you want to do is change the way the widgets look, not how they work, then it's much easier to do that in Gnome.

Also keep in mind configuration. I don't mean the nuts and bolts, though that's easy enough to do in either desktop. I mean the theme. For instance, in KDE, if you want to install a new widget theme, you either have to go through the process of compiling the new theme yourself, which takes a lot of the KDE development packages, or you have to find a binary package that someone else has already made. With Gnome, you just unpack the theme and stick it in ~/.themes and you're done.

I'm referring to some of the driver-type packages out there. For instance, with a regular Mandriva install, if I tell it that I don't have a printer, it doesn't install any of the extra printer packages (hplip, cups, etc.) But with Mandriva One, it installs it all, whether I have a printer or not.

I'm not saying it's unique, I'm just saying it's a bit of a mess. For instance, if I'm installing the regular Mandriva product and I don't plan on using my Palm Pilot with my computer and I don't like evolution, I can deselect those packages before installation. With Mandriva One, absolutely everything on the CD gets installed, and then you have to go back and uninstall whatever you don't want later. And instead of only installing drivers for the hardware it detects on your system, again, it installs absolutely everything on the CD, so you end up with a bunch of useless software packages floating around taking up space.

Also keep in mind that while there will be some Gnome supporters here, when you're asking on a specific distro's board what everyone's favorite desktop is, you'll generally get more support for the default desktop of that distro. Here, most people probably prefer KDE. At Ubuntu's board, most people probably prefer Gnome.

I prefer Gnome. It seems more solid to me. I found a recent discussion at another forum discussing this very same issue. Perhaps it'll be of use to you. http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread....threadid=145424

Not to the same degree.

I may have joined this particular board in March, but I've been using Linux since the late 90's. I started with Red Hat, although my first true experience was with a distro called Dragon Linux that used a loopback filesystem to connect to a DOS partition, so you could actually launch the distro from within DOS and you wouldn't have to create a separate partition for it, but quickly moved on to Mandrake and have been using it ever since. I've seen my share of negative things said about Mandrake / Mandriva over the years, it's just that lately they've intensified quite a bit. I myself have become somewhat dissatisfied with the direction the company has started moving in, and with how much they've started lagging behind the other distros with their software, and I've been seeing this and similar sentiments being echoed more frequently in the Linux world. I say this not only to clarify my own personal position, but also to clarify the fact that I'm not just some newcomer jumping into the middle of things and making suppositions.

I've been noticing in various polls that Mandriva seems to be losing popularity. Even more than that, I've been hearing more and more people complain about being fed up with Mandriva or tired of Mandriva, about their current level of technology and how they handle things. While all this is going on, I'm hearing more and more positive talk about other distributions. This makes me wonder, are things slowly spiraling down for Mandriva?

It doesn't work very well. It installs a ton of software and drivers that aren't even relevant to your system.

I really don't think that Gnome has changed the way that these options are configured. I think they just changed the defaults. Either way, it was easy enough to do in gconf-editor. apps > panel > toplevels > panel_of_your_choice From there, just change the auto_hide_size value and the hide_delay and unhide_delay values.

I've been a KDE user for a very, very long time, but switched to Gnome after trying it for a week because of its speed and simplicity. KDE has always felt sluggish and cluttered to me. However, I'll certainly take another look once KDE 4 comes out. I knew you could adjust the size of the panel from its properties window, but I didn't know you could adjust how much of the panel is sticking up when it's hiding. I'll try to track the settings down in gconf.

Tonight I upgraded from Mandriva 2005 LE and Gnome 2.8 to Mandriva 2006 and Gnome 2.10. Before, in Gnome 2.8, when I had the bottom panel set to "Autohiding," and it was in its hiding mode, there would only be a very thin line at the bottom of the screen to indicate that the panel was still there at all. Then when I moved the mouse to the bottom of the screen, the panel would pop up very quickly. Now, in Gnome 2.10, when the panel is hiding, instead of just being a thin line, it's a much thicker line that shows the tops of all the icons on the panel, and the panel is much slower about unhiding when you move the mouse onto it. Is there any way to get the panel to hide like it did in 2.8 again? Thanks. [moved from Software by spinynorman]

I've noticed that in KDE, when a file has meta information associated with it, such as the ID3 tags in mp3 files, you can edit that information from the file's properties window. However, I've also noticed that in Gnome, even though you can view the information in the properties window, you can't modify it like you can in KDE. Is there any way in Gnome to easily modify this information? Thanks :).

Thank you very much. I appreciate it :).

I tried using the provides command, and it came back with nothing. However, the compat package is indeed the one that is needed. But when I did my various searches for libstdc++*, it never came up. Is there another way I can use yum to find it, just for future reference? Perhaps using two asterisks, such as *libstdc++*? I realize I could install apt and synaptic and go about it that way, but I'd still like to learn the distro's main tools. Thank you :).

I decided to try out Fedora Core 4 in a virtual vmware session. When it came time to install Firefox, I went to the browser's website and downloaded the latest version. When I tried to run it, it complained that it needed libstdc++.so.5. On Mandriva, that's no problem. Just a little urpmi libstdc++5 and you're good to go. Now perhaps I'm overlooking something, but I've been playing with yum for quite some time, and I simply can't find the package that will give me libstdc++.so.5. Any ideas would be appreciated.