Gowator

What is the underlying filesystem where k3b creates the temporary file? If its a FAT drive then this is probably causing the limit

Well, perhaps after this fix the security problems? then again these have been documented since June and it hasn't worked on them since then so.... I wouldn't hold my breath :D

Sorta but I think what I found is stuff like this sometimes isn't worth fixing or messing with... largely because by the time its sorted out its getitng close to time to upgrade? Indeed I seem to remember the same prob and just wait till it starts rebooting and hit the power switch... if it reboots instead of shutting down or if it just sits there hit the power buttom? The logic being you can mess about with the BIOS etc. and then find other distro's have probs (or win if you use it) and then find next upgrade it doesn't work until you put it back the way it was?

curiosity here: I have heard this a few times, but more geared at mdv kernel patches. Correct me if I am wrong, a distro is composed of many things: kernel patches, utilities, support type, community, packages etc. were you only speaking of the kernel and driver patches? are you saying in some cases some user would be well advised to try another kernel version / source? (assuming most hardware problems are with open source kernel modules) maybe for this shutdown issue trying a vanilla kernel would have been a solution? Man its a long story......and a combination of a lot of stuff.... Basically I would be using one release... that release would work great on one or more machines but not at all on others. One example was the PCMIA slot on my laptop.... mandriva would lock up every time (presumably a kernel module) then I'd install the new release and 1-2 of the machines would start doing stupid things like not powering down or the NIC not working or .... Like ianw this wasn't changing hardware or even bios... the same hardware and the same bios settings would just not work.... (just look how many people are having problems with X in 2007 right now) Now some of these could be fixed by changing the bios ... perhaps but the question is why? The HW is the same .... its just mandriva have switched over doing something... Bear in mind I started on Mandrake 7 so I had a lot of this... and lots of these issues wrre actually historical bugs that they fixed. Now this is just my perception but it seems like a screwy development model. From my POV I feel it should be once a product is supported and fixed it stays that way.... Sure I don't expect 100% and some products will just time out because they are no longer available to buy or test but Im talking about stuff like major chipsets which are current... The nforce2 chipset was like this... somewhere between 10.0 and 10.1 it stopped working ... it was fixable but the bummer was no NIC therefore no internet access.... I just remembered another, a belkin USB2 card which locked up mandriva in a hard lockup.... Like the PCMCIA on the laptop it worked in Debian from day 1....(not just Debian but Debian based distro's like Xandros, Linspire and Mepis) The weird thing is it worked in one version of mandriva once.... it was the upgrade that killed it and the machine. Most of this stuff is fixable.. and its somewhat fun at some point.... but at the point where I ditched Windows completely it stopped being fun and became critical. I started off just using debian on the laptop and took the USB card out.... and then eventually I just got tired of the "ooh new version of Mandriva, lets see if it works with my HW" experience. If I thought I could have got it working and it would work with the next release as well then that would have been motivation to persist but over time I just got tired of putting mandy on then upgrading and it nor working anymore. What I found with Debian is once it works it more or less keeps working through new releases and the releases are fewer anyway's..I update more on new patches but major versions take years .... Im sure its not the only distro like this, Gentoo seems to be the same and RH excepting 1-2 hickups.... The best way I can describe it is Mandriva seem to be all over the place adding new stuff but at the same time older stuff suddenly stops working whereas some other distro's seem to go in a straighter line albeit more slowly. The consequence is less time spent messing about just getting the fundamentals working .. I guess if all the machines were the same its less hassle its just the bits that stop working seem quasi random .. even over the differences between nforce2 and nforce4 ??? I guess in summary I got to the point where I would have to dedicate a weekend to installing a new version and having it working by monday morning wheras I can install Debian in 12 minutes and be pretty certain its all working at least on a fundamental hardware level..... Sure some stuff does break ... like Xorg in testing when they switched from XFree but this is froma dist-upgrade live, not a reinstall and 90%+ of the SW will work within minutes and most anything doesn't (my recent one was cups) I just switched it to sysV printing until I can be bothered to work it out. These are more minor inconveniences compared to the NIC not working or no access to my data on USB disks etc. I started off just

ianw... I haven't tried nor am I an expert with GRUB but logic tells me not since grub still needs to be chaned from the MBR and the MBR on the second disk won't have an MBR to chain load it? I know its different to lilo in that you don't need to rewite the MBR each time you change grub but it must still need some bootloader stub to initiate? I think you can pre-do this in grub and write the boot loader part while it is still hdb (unlike with lilo) but like I say Im no grub expert.

Helmut, Im not 100% sure but I think the MCC is always running as root. That's why you have to type the password when you start it... (either that or it requests root when it needs it) ...

You will have to change your entry in /etc/fstab on the new partition to correpond to your new root partition, /dev/hdb1, as well. True .... but on second thoughts perhaps easiest is install this a is and make partitions, then copy allthose partitions over while hdb1 ... Then swap the disks over so hdb becomes hda having already added the second option to the boot loader but at this point it won't work because its still hdb1 and will install onto the wrong MBR.... An easy and quick fix is boot up in rescue mode from the install CD with the disks in the final position (the one you want top be primary as primary) then just mount the hda1 parition and chroot and run lilo/grub

I'm pretty certain you can only run the wine-able version as this was a major problem with my GF for a long time :mellow: So non of the add-ins work and you can't upgrade the sims version which is pretty much locked to that specific one. Last time I checked cedega had absolutely no plans to extend this .... The real problem is actually the cheat protection in the sims... basically the program checks for what it thinks is a debugger running and assumes wine is one and your trying to cheat...so far as I know the only difference of the "linux" (read wine) version is that this part is disabled. I would be really careful about upgrading Wine/Cedega because it might only work with this one version? The Cedega forums are probably the best place to check but last time I checked there were hundreds of upset users who felt abandoned by Cedega.... (perhaps unfairly since this is not entirely in their control) edits: Incidentally The Sims is also about the only windows app refuses to run in VMWARE too? Same prob it thinks its being hacked?

Well this sort of inconsistency is what made me abandon mandriva at least as a primary distro. The same thing in terms of working/not working with any specific hardware seems to have been happening since back in 9.0. It gave me the feeling that everything was 3 steps forwards then 2 back... and though its fun for a while it gets old real fast. Its like your hardware is all working perfectly (indeed I buy all my HW to work with linux) then you get the next version and everything just goes to £$it... the support for a specific device just dissapears... If you watch these forums for any length of time its like 20% of users with a specific chipset are having problems and then when the next release comes out these users are happy and the another 20% have problems with a different chipset that was previously working fine? This is principally why I switched to Debian because although development is a lot slower its progressive. To me its more little step forwards and very few back...

It could be that it is cycling the power before the shutdown in a reset... and your bios is set to boot after a power cycle? Did you try a manual init 0 ? or shutdown -h now ?

You would want to change the filesystem first since NTFS support is a little shaky and certainly not optimal under linux. On top of this you would need to change the entries in GRUB or LILO ...(basically telling it that the root is /dev/hdb1) If I were going to do this move then I'd probably recreate the same partitions and copy everything first (you need to preserve permissions and symlinks in the copy) There are a couple of ways of doing this. You can make a direct disk copy bit by bit with dd or use partimage or you can use tar with a tar cfv - . | (cd /new/dir; tar xfv -) Once its working then ADD (not replace) the boot menus ... i.e. make it so you can boot from either and it should be exactly the same ... so if anything goes wrong you can boot back to your original setup ... Once your happy and satisfied you boot into /dev/hdb1 and wipe /dev/hda1 and replace the filesystem.

And can't you use OpenOffice or Microsoft Word under Crossover Office? Or even Windows running in a virtual machine? (sorry to go a little bit OT) officially they shouldn't ....since I beleive OASIS is now accepted (course this doesn't help .. if you gotta do it you gotta do it) Unfortunately even the formats if otherwise working (and occaisionally the formats are a bit screwed) still write OpenOffice into the document info part of the document... (something like created by=OpenOffice.org) .. so even if you can't tell by looking you can open it in a hex editor and see its not "genuine MS word" I know this sounds trivial (and frankly stupid) but the reason for this is largely the automatic doc management systems that extract this info to classify the document.... Im sure lots could be done (like modifying the doc management system) but ......???

Would seem to be why......

Just ssh in and restart the Xserver .... oops.. its Windows... ;)

Yes but the udev should create a /dev/hdb in startup anyway ...prior to it having a filesystem and give it a /dev entry otherwise fdisk wouldn't have a device to assign (what I mean is you'd type fdisk /dev/hdb but if hdb doesn't exist ???)

Well I'm presuming his user was screwed up and wouldn't log into X but its a bit academic really since useradd and userdel are the correct way to add/remove users... but also how would he do this? Log in as root or log in as the user he was trying to delete? However userdel shouldn't delete the home directory or mail spool entries without the -r option being specified .... However if it was then presumably it has left the spool dir ? or perhaps some zombie processes are syill running? This can happen with the -f option (which also deletes home and spool BUT will do so wether the user is logged in or not...) anyway. run a ps -ef and look for processes with a UID instead of a user name....(probably 500)

I don't have time to see the model but Im presuming you have internet acess via a wired connection? ................... That depends on the actual chipset and I don't have time to check .... If you use the ndiswrapper to use the windws driver the easiest is probably searching for a .inf file on google for that card and accompanying drivers. If you installed 32 bit mandriva then 32 bit.... this should give you the 3d :D

Yep, you can also overwrite it with lilo too, and as part of the distro install, it puts an entry in lilo/grub to boot Windows. and you can restore it fairly easily with a XP boot disk just with fdisk /mbr (just in case)

The first thing is do you weant to delete the home dir? (you don't have to and you can even just rename it and then copy stuff later...) /etc/passwd and /etc/group and /etc/shadow are the likely places Just remove that user name ... then recreate....

Yep its quite simple.... the FAT partitions don't honour file ownership so when they are mounted they are mounted as an owner. This is just a restriction on the actual filesystem.... So when the filesystem is mounted you can't change the permissions since /local/<xxx> is then logically part of the tree with a FAT... You need to unmount the FAT part's top change ownership From a CLI this is (or use a GUI tool to unmount) umount -a -t vfat Then you can change ownership.... HOWEVER.... When you do mount From man mount In other words add -o uid=500 gid=500 (these are I think the mandriva defaults for the first created account - you can check from a console by typing id) Also to make them user mountable -users (after the -o) this is not FAT specific, it just means a nornal user can mount/unmount the devices. Erm, don't make links as root.(really try and use even kdesu konqueror as something to do occaisionally, its very easy to delete a whole tree of stuff or change permissions etc.).. to get rid of it you can delete in when the fs is unmounted.... or from a console rm /root/Desktop/local.Desktop or delete it from an su'd konqueror (kommander has a su mode too... you start is as nornal user and can switch to su mode and back)

Now that's a whole big question! I first used Linux out of curiosity ... back in the distance past and I think it was Slackware 2.x My work involved using a lot of proprietry UNIX and Linux seemed a good thing to try... I tried it, didn't find anything interesting and went back to windows for home use....proably back in the mid 90's sometime. Roll forwards to about 1999 and my job was a bt more techy and involved a lot of Solaris 2.5 On one of the training courses the instructor mentioned linux and also the first Solaris x86... I tried the Solaris x86 but couldn't get anytihng but 640x480 and 16 cols on my graphics card under XSun and the answer seemed to be using XFree ... I hacked Xfree into Solaris and then figured I'd try the whole linux thing and installed RH5.1 This was lots of fun... and it did a whole lot more than slackware 2 and I started using it more than Windows.. in the end Windows was just on one PC... and I went through all RH6.x and then RH7 was a total mess. Still at this time I was mainly using it for nerdy stuff as opposed to leisure, word processing etc. and i still used Windows for a lot... but I switched to mandrake 7 as my primary distro.... Over time things like printers worked under linux, webcams worked without a weeks hacking etc. and I was doing less and less in windows. I also got a load of scrap machines from work which were P90's with 64MB RAM and couldn't really run 2000 effectively and ended up playing more and more with linux and the more I played the more it helped in work. Ultimately I was left with my laptop running windows and everything else running Linux... i simply found there was almost nothing I needed windows for.... and most importantly all my software was eventually legal and also without stupid and very restrictive EULA's ... Then eventually I just wiped XP off my laptop and since then ive used Linux exclusively (well *BSD and *NIX) ... Technically ... well its just far simpler than windows ... there is nothing you can't learn about and nothing that is hidden. As an example I can see every process on my computer but more importantly I can see what that process is doing and find information on it. For example root 1523 1 0 Oct11 ? 00:00:00 dhclient -e -pf /var/run/dhclient.eth0.pid -lf /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient.eth0.leases eth0 I can simply man dhclient or I can look at the readme's or the source. I can see the config files and edit them and learn....

The thing is that doesn't match my experiences.... I'm FAR from being a windows expert, mainly its just a old nightmare now but from time to time I get asked to help others. A couple of years ago I bought my father a PC with pre-installed XP ... I went online to download antivirus, spyware etal and got a virus while still downloading....perhaps 20 mins? Im frequently fixing others PC's... and frequently removing virus's, I usually like to count them and then tell the person so they know the importance of antivirus progs but on more than one occaision I have abandoned this when the count has been in 3 figures and just set it to auto.... This isn't a single person, its quite a few who admittedly have no or very little interest in IT... BUT I do not know a single person who has ever got a linux virus in the wild.... EVER... but frequently Windows users have several hundred.... Now on top of this I have converted several of them to Linux ... and this type of user it does more or less everything they want. Erm, most of my systems have uptimes in months and they are only ever shutdown for physical maintainance or very occaisionally for a kernel change or patch. My server was installed in June but its been running since then without a shutdown (ironically till yesterday when I physically had to move it) ... My GF's PC is running kanotix from a couple of years ago just dist-upgraded .... again its only been shutdown a couple of times .... mainly for putting in cards or physically moving it... and this is uptime, not install lifetime. The box Im using now is a Debian install from about 3 years ago.... Well this is the strange thing.... There are lots of real top end progs for linux and lots of small utilities ... For me serious programs are Oracle or high end CAD/cartographic or scientific apps and these are available abundantly ... most of them never ran on windows anyway and those that did like Oracle never ran properly. The utility apps are as you say... its the mid range apps (stuff that costs less than $10,000 a licence) that's mainly missing.. like photoshop or semi pro recording or video editing stuff. (pro stuff is available if you have wads of cash - pixar certainy seem to have "managed") The stuff that does existing linux tends to be inferior to the point that it can't be used as a replacement in a professional environment (for instance replacing photoshop) Other areas are coming in both open and closed source. For instance Skype works almost as well in linux... its certainly reliable its just a sound server hog. Arctic mentioned Scribus the other day.... This is a real pro-app.... its just still in development BUT its being built in a pro-way... so the foundations are good but the interface is still getting there....but so far as I can see it could be used for professional DTP right now... whereas GIMP can never be used for professional graphics work because its built on a amataur base (most significantly it can't handle 16 bit images - so the idea of adding pro colorspace tools isn't even an option...) I do my photo processing with bibblepro ... according to the devels Linux is the most stable and fastest platform for it. For photo processing it is the best I have used, including Nikons own SW and Photoshop doesn't even compare.. its not even in the same ballpark on processing RAW files. For actual editing lightzone looks promising...(currently FREE for linux http://www.lightcrafts.com/products/lightzone/ ) OpenOffice really does replace any (or alsmost) 'legitimate' MS Office function....When I say legitimate I mean that lots of Office is actually not only poor but actively very very bad. Without going to deep I mean things like html export from word or powerpoint... This goes beyond just BAD programming its actively ($EXPLITIVE) .. lucky dreamweaver has a dedicated tool to cleaning MS generated code... (again something very hard to replace on linux) Another "illegitimate" example is the support nightmare which is using VB code in Word or Excel.... Sure OO doesn't support this but thank $DIETY not to mention the whole OLE object embedding nightmare or finance spreadsheets with hundreds of dependant speadsheets that suddenly don't work on an upgrade. Or one classic was one user saving a spreadsheet in French.... which had links to spreadsheets with ODBC embedded data...which of course in the MS world is language specific so all the TYPE="ODBC database" got changed to TYPE="base des donnees ODBC" This sort of dependency with embedded stuff really is a support nightmare... So what Im saying is 90% of missing functionality (like ActiveX or the ability to run a virus in outlook without even opening it) are deliberatly missing.. sure people have having to explicity run that "screensaver" they got emailed ;-( sure kmail and evolution default to not opening html content from untrusted sources... but its for a very good reason. Then there is frontpage type stuff.... great this does browser dectection or flash detection ..(oh but if the OS isn't windows it just throws you out) This doesn't even start on the .asp and/or Access.... both of which are great prototyping tools that lead to a dead end... that is you prototype but then as soon as you want to scale your stuffed.

The problem is when each installed distro has 4-5 boot entries due to different kernels etc. The shared /boot soon gets messy ... it works .. its just messy and when you play about with adding a slightly different kernel its not always obvious... If all you want is 2-3 OS's installed with a single kernel each and just 2 entries its OK but as soon as you have several kernels and different options on each it becomes rather a nightmare to control. A seperate bootloader on the partition does clean things up a little IMHO... and when you for instance install a new kernel the easy way then the automatic stuff that goes on adding the boot images etc. is only messing with that one distro. To call it you just call it from the MBR boot mamager - the same way as grub or lilo call NTLOADER for windows..

It sounds mysterious unless as John says its a SATA issue? How does the BIOS see it when you boot? you could also try (just to see) from a root console cfdisk /dev/hdb also have a look in /var/log/messages and see if it says anything? post anything relevant looking Im also wondering if Vista install "really sees it" ... or not.. hard to say I guess without trying How about trying a liveCD (preferably not Mandriva based to eliminate the issue of the mandy kernel) and see what it can see.... I'd try kanotix (because I use it) but also it has qtparted built into the OS... You might have some luck by actually creating a filesystem on it and then trying mandy again?

You can even add a menu item with this ... just exactly as John said in the "command" part. Indeed even better you can customise a konqueror profile and save it and load konqueror with that profile.. kdesu konqueror --profile root-konq (or similar) In order to make this safer you can make it look different using --caption or kdesu konqueror --caption "root" --title "root-konq" --name name --style CDE settings:/ Choose your own style but make it different to remind you its a root konq.....