scoonma

According to the big computer news site www.heise.de Mandriva has found a safe haven (report in german):

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Investoren-retten-Mandriva-1028100.html

Some words should be said on RAID: It is not always wise to use it, as it *may* - but not necesserily must - cause more trouble for the home user than it is worth it. Think of the situation you always have in mind, i.e. the most common reason, why most people want RAID: it is the mirroring to defend data when one harddrive goes down. But when you are not sure which of your two HDs is broken, you can lose your data by picking the wrong one for replacement. It may sound trivial, but is often not, when you use two identical drives for mirroring.

Another point goes to checking the drive status: How do you know when one of your drives is broken? Would you do regular checking from time to time or in everyday use? You would not want to go the first drive down and lose the second shortly after, because of perfect mirroring you did not even see there was an error!

These hints are not my personal opinion, but were mentioned in an article from a german computer magazine, which is quite popular in the technical oriented scene. I found them quite considerable when my brother-in-law asked me to build up a NAS. So I'm not argueing against RAID in general, but there are moments to be observed.

Good luck!

 

Here's my current disk - is it possible to double the size of swap? If I understand correctly, I cannot resize /home partition from the beginning - or is it possible?

 

It is possible to resize /home and /swap, you should be careful however and make sure your /home partition has enough free space. Good advice is to make a backup of important data in such cases. I've made most fortunate experience with the GPartEd system. Thus you can create your own boot CD or pen drive, boot off this medium and safely change your system. You can find it here:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Use the .iso file for creating CDs and the .zip file for an USB drive. Unless you know what you're doing you should stick to the stable version. Then boot gparted from your new medium and make changes. It's quite easy!

HTH,

scoonma

Hi ianericovich,

welcome to MUB! If you're really into setting up your own dns, you should have some experience. Do you know what a nameserver does? What do you want to achieve with your own one? If you already installed bind, you can find substantial info with "man named" and "man named.conf". You can start the server as every other with "service named start" and integrate it into startup with "chkconfig --add named", both as root, or by using graphical interface. You may edit "/etc/named.conf" to suit your needs. But beware - changing dns behaviour is no easy task and very rarely necessary if you want to stay compatible to the rest of internet. You should use additional or virtual hardware - not your standard workhorse.

scoonma, since you are the one who told me about this (and I thank you again) it seems pretty churlish of me to go correcting you, so I apologise in advance. But I tried your command and it didn't work, a little bit of digging and I found the answer.

In fact I have to admit that I don't use fish myself, but found a linke to some useful docs. Another version is here:

Fish user docs

I supposed you needed the export of your path variable:

"Exporting variables

Variables in fish can be exported. This means the variable will be inherited by any commands started by fish. It is convention that exported variables are in uppercase and unexported variables are in lowercase."

so whilst in the other distros, we just typed "su", it was actually doing "su -" we just never knew about it. Mandriva used to be like this until recently it seems.

This is quite interesting! Arch Linux, which I'm using here recently, doesn't have it (obviously). I'll check Ubuntu and SuSE, too.

Thanks, now i just need to figure out how to fix gconf.

Seebor, you shouldn't run gnome apps out of root context if you don't have to (could be mcc, it's modules or similar). If the error occurs for *normal* apps from user context, there's something wrong elsewhere, not with gconf.

it is generally advisable to always use 'su -', using 'su' without the minus can have strange effects as you will be root but still be using your own environment settings (sometime you want that, but if in doubt 'su -' is the better choice)

Hm. Didn't have the need to use "su -" in more than eight years of Linux. Strange...

Thanks, that stopped any errors from coming up, but what does it do differently?

The command "su" without parameter executes the "set user" command with defaul user "root", i.e. as result you get a shell prompt with root privileges.

For the second error, if you are trying to load something from terminal as root then try using:

su -

For execution of single commands as root you normally use "sudo" from terminal. The dash in the example above makes the resulting shell a login shell - which is rarely necessary.

What other command line "drak" items are available? This would be useful to know. I didn't even know that drakboot existed.

You can look around after installing bash-completion, then relogin and try drak+<TAB>.

EDIT:

With 2009.0, you can use this feature with urpmi by default, too.

Have fun,

scoonma

The Gnome setup here doesn't include arrows neither. It's called "arrow" in the default setup, but the look depends on your theme. Yours is possibly broken - I do not suspect a gnome bug. So I suggest changing your gnome theme.

I know that I did not configure it to do this.

Okay, I don't know the reason for this behaviour, but maybe at least you can change it the way described above.

When the gnome taskbar is visible, right click on it to change properties as needed.

HTH,

scoonma

Yeah, using "set" for (environment) variables is quite common in shells other than bash.

Guess it should be this way:

set -x PATH $PATH:/opt

Hi viking,

which servers do you refer to? I'm looking for a package named "kernel-source-2.6.29.x", which is nowhere visible for me. Tried distrib-coffee and others but no luck...

I'm looking for the -source- packages, not just devel (needed to recompile the kernel). Still wondering why they are there for some flavours but not for standard 2.6.29.x ...

Title says it all - are they missing or am I doing something really stupid?

I'm looking eagerly forward to the release - guess 2009.1 will be quite solid as cooker is running here fine yet :-))

I've always hated Win*, no matter which version. You can live with it when you have to (at work), but you can never embrace it. I'm slowly but steadily getting my friends also switching distros to Linux. Mandriva was suggested to me around version 8.0 by someone with lot's of Linux experience, so I tried it and began to learn. My gf and my to-be brother-in-law switched to Mandriva and they're happy now - after some learning at the start. You can never expect to fully feel at home with *any* new OS right from the start. One of my friends - very far from being a computer addict - is using KDE/SuSE now for years, and there's no complains. Another one who is more technically interested is working himself through Ubuntu, and he's happy, too. In two cases are run highly advanced / rare windows apps, and they do fine in wine. :-)

I wouldn't want to switch distro but hope Mandriva will find someone who does as good as Adam did - I can feel him missing. When it would come to the point, I'd try out Arch and Fedora. Mandriva is a good start anyhow.

HTH,

scoonma

Hi all,

the title does it shortly. After having managed to do graphical login as default, I'm sure it's not fully okay. System is 2009.0 32bit.

Here's from /var/log/messages:

Feb 10 20:11:02 localhost gdmgreeter[3775]: WARNING: Theme broken: must have pam-message label!

Feb 10 20:11:08 localhost gnome-keyring-daemon[4282]: Couldn't unlock login keyring with provided pass

word

Feb 10 20:11:08 localhost gnome-keyring-daemon[4282]: Failed to unlock login on startup

Feb 10 20:11:10 localhost pulseaudio[4468]: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_NICE, (31, 31)) failed: Die Opera

tion ist nicht erlaubt

Feb 10 20:11:10 localhost pulseaudio[4468]: main.c: setrlimit(RLIMIT_RTPRIO, (9, 9)) failed: Die Opera

tion ist nicht erlaubt

Feb 10 20:11:22 localhost gnome-session[4284]: WARNING: Application 'gnome-wm.desktop' failed to regis

ter before timeout

Feb 10 20:11:22 localhost net_applet[4535]: ### Program is starting ###

Feb 10 20:11:22 localhost pulseaudio[4468]: module-x11-xsmp.c: X11 session manager not running.

Feb 10 20:11:22 localhost pulseaudio[4468]: module.c: Failed to load module "module-x11-xsmp" (argume

nt: ""): initialization failed.

Any ideas?

[edited topic title - arctic]

Any reason why there's no updated 3.0.6 package for 2009.0 yet? Is this no important update?

Hi there,

recently I've purchased this small device for a reasonable price and I'm still trying to get it working using MDV. The hardware is okay, I've checked using Windumb (BDA drivers). However, I'm still not sure how it can be done with Mandriva. There seems no possibility using those drivers the way it can be done as with ndiswrapper for wlan. I've also tried using this package, as the device seems to use a af9015 chip. This is from dmesg:

[...]

dvb-usb: found a 'TerraTec Cinergy T USB XE' in warm state.

dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer.

DVB: registering new adapter (TerraTec Cinergy T USB XE)

input: Power Button (FF) as /class/input/input3

ACPI: Power Button (FF) [PWRF]

input: Power Button (CM) as /class/input/input4

ACPI: Power Button (CM) [PWRB]

forcedeth: Reverse Engineered nForce ethernet driver. Version 0.61.

forcedeth 0000:00:05.0: setting latency timer to 64

nv_probe: set workaround bit for reversed mac addr

af9013: firmware version:4.65.0

DVB: registering adapter 0 frontend 0 (Afatech AF9013 DVB-T)...

af9015: Freescale MC44S803 tuner found but no driver for thattuner. Look at the Linuxtv.org for tuner driver

status.

dvb-usb: TerraTec Cinergy T USB XE successfully initialized and connected.

usbcore: registered new interface driver dvb_usb_af9015

[...]

The modules seem to install all right (kernel modules built and installed from the package here:

http://linuxtv.org/hg/~anttip/af9015/

I'm able to scan frequencies, but nothing is found. Any ideas?

Hi atchoum,

to me the problem has come from your system restauration. I've never worked with Acronis, but it's presumably much simpler to reinstall than get the old image working on your new drive. You did well assigning /home to a seperate partition. This is where all your user data resides. When reinstalling, I'd do partitioning manually and mount /home right at the process.

Other than that you could try to boot an install CD/DVD into rescue mode and try to boot from harddisk from there, then re-install boot loader - this may be possible directly from rescue mode, too. If that fails, reinstalling well maybe isn't smart, but fast and reliable.

HTH,

scoonma

I've changed the stick as warranty case at the vendor. Was CnM before, now Intenso. So this is solved ... sort of.