Glennzo

I've installed a lot of Linux distros in the last 4 or 5 years, including Mandrake/Mandriva. Mandriva 2007 Free has to have been one of the easiest I've installed. But alas, that's on MY hardware. Your mileage may vary. What else can I tell you?

I notice that it says '0MB HIGHMEM available' at the beginning of your dmesg, right below the 10 or so lines that start out with BIOS. Mine says 128 MB HIGHMEM available. I wonder if that is an issue with your memory.

And it does report 'yes'.

After I posted those results I booted FC6 and ran glxgears. I got about half the performance there that I got in Mandriva. Makes me wonder what the difference is. Maybe the fact that I use KDE for Mandriva and Gnome for Fedora. Anyhow, just what is considered the better/best tool for testing video performance?

Mandriva Free 2007 has been one of the easier distros to install and configure. A huge surprise is the 3D desktop effects. I fought for a week to get desktop effects working in Fedora Core 6. I won, but it's not 100%. On the flip side, a few (6-7) mouse clicks in Mandriva control panel and away we go! 3D effects works flawlessly and it's really neat! I have an NVidia GeForce FX5200. Any comments or thoughts on the following output from glxgears as run from a terminal with XMMS and SuperKaramba running? [glenn@dhcppc2 ~]$ glxgears 6988 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1397.030 FPS 10500 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2087.487 FPS 10500 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2086.238 FPS 10574 frames in 5.1 seconds = 2092.082 FPS 10360 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2066.915 FPS 10500 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2093.961 FPS 10387 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2069.833 FPS 10360 frames in 5.1 seconds = 2049.590 FPS 10500 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2082.992 FPS 10387 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2071.198 FPS 9380 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1860.729 FPS 10500 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2093.071 FPS 10527 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2090.727 FPS 10080 frames in 5.1 seconds = 1986.646 FPS [glenn@dhcppc2 ~]$

Ok then, I'll leave things as they are. Thank you.

Hi all. When I installed Mandriva I took advantage of the option to copy the cd's to the hard disk. Where are the files? Now, I'm playing around with package / system updates. I re-did easy urpmi with no trouble. How do I get the cd's included in the urpmi sources? Thanks for your time.

Hi all. I was just sitting here playing Patience solitare a few minutes ago and was thinking that the card animations are too slow for my taste. Since linux is open source I thought I would try to find the program and look at the code to see if I could find a section that controls the animation speed. Where do I look? If I make a change is there any need to re-compile the program? [moved from Software by spinynorman]

Disregard my previous reply. It doesn't answer your question. I need to pay closer attention.

Did you install xmms-mp3? Also, use the menu editor to remove the word 'soundwrapper' from the menu item for xmms so that it reads 'xmms' only.

Hi folks, got a question. I'm playing with the free version of Mandriva 2006. I installed SuperKaramba as SuperUser. Ran it as regular user 'glenn'. While playing around with it I noticed a button that offered more applets. I downloaded and tried to install one of them and was greeted with an error message stating that I didn't have permissions to write to a subfolder of my home directory. Wondering if it is because I installed SuperKaramba as SuperUser and not as user 'glenn'? Glennzo

Try running the game from the command line in a terminal and see what kind of error output you get. That might be a good way to see where the problems are. I use the Pysol game that John mentioned and have used it for years. It has worked under all flavors of linux with no trouble, except for Fedora 4 with the very newest python. However, I wouldn't have known why Pysol suddenly won't run unless I tried to run it from a terminal. That's where I saw errors concerning python libraries. Any time I tried it from the menu system absolutely nothing happened. Glennzo gjohnz@comcast.net Powered by Mandriva 10, Fedora Core 4 or the distro of the day.

First you need to know what the horizontal and vertical sync ranges are for your monitor. Then, run xfconfig. When you get to the part where it asks vertical sync the bottom choice is to enter your own settings. Choose that and enter the settings for your monitor. The same for horizontal sync. The bottom choice is to enter your own horizontal settings. Again, choose that and enter the horizontal settings for your monitor. Complete the xfconfig program. I'm sure that this will get you going. Also, take a close look at the default mouse settings in xfconfig. I believe that that particular setting has screwed me a few times. The error message you get when you type 'startx', if the server dowsn't start, should tell you if it's the mouse or the video that's holding you back. Examine the output closely. Even though it's barely comprehensible the answer to your problem is in there. Hope this helps. Glennzo

It's not that big of a deal. In lilo.conf acpi=off should do the trick. If not then change acpi=off or acpi=ht to noacpi. Then try acpi=ht. One of them will work. I've had this minor annoyance several times and that's what fixed it. You don't need to install any freakin' software or get the newest kernel. Try it. Your 'puter won't blow up. Glennzo

Hello all. I wonder if anyone could tell me how I would know if I've been hacked or compromised. I have no reason to believe that this has happened, but I know very little about computer security, therefore I wouldn't know if anything is going on 'behind the scenes'. Are there tools available that will tell me if there is a problem? What steps should I take to prevent such an occurance? I am running Mandrake 10 on a small home network. My linux box connects to the internet through a Netgear RP114 router. I don't think that there is any software firewall running. The ip address from Comcast is dynamic, but I can't say how often it actually changes. Also, what log files do I need to be reading? Are they easy to interpet? Thanks in advance. Glenn

Probably because your monitor's horizontal and vertical refresh rates are incorrect. You may want to try using xf86config to set up the refresh rates and screen resolution. Find out what you monitor's maximum hsync and vsync are and use that info as a guide. You will also need to choose a video card from the list, so it will help if you know what card you have. Take your time. After you use xf86config and save the configuration, type startx and see if it works. If not, try xf86config again. Don't give up. Sometimes you need to play with the settings to get x to work. xf86config is located in /usr/X11R6/bin Glennzo