banjo

One of the weaknesses of Unix/Linux is that most of the documentation addresses the details only, and it is very difficult to find an overview. Man pages are excellent once you know how the system works if you need to go find the details of some command or other, but if you are a novice, they suck. I installed Mandy 9.1 about three years ago, and all I ever found on the package management system was man pages and web pages that described the rpm switches and the urpmi switches and examples of what magic will occur after typing this stuff into the command line. In the process of stumbling through the commands I mostly ended up in Dependency Hell with no way out. In some cases I ended up with programs incorrectly installed in /usr/share (how about /user/share/firefox/firefox..... don't ask :o ). I also ended up with a hermaphroditic GTK when I tried to upgrade to a newer version in support of newer browsers etc. Version 2 claimed that it was installed, but it was not accessible..... etc etc. etc. Now to the good bits. I just recently installed Mandy 2006 after reading aRTee's excellent writeup. The explanation of the package management system did make the light go on, and I set it up by the book. I was able to download programs not included in the distro (e.g., inkscape) and also was able to upgrade important apps (e.g. OOo2) with very little effort. It just worked. I almost even started to trust it! Anyway, many thanks to aRTee for filling that overview void. Linux would be percieved as a lot more friendly if there were more writeups like that one. Banjo (_)=='=~

I have used Knoppix to fix my lilo. I would think that any live CD would be able to do that job.... or maybe I just misunderstood the question. Banjo (_)=='=~

Wow! Kewl. That is exactly what I was looking for! Banjo (_)=='=~

Anybody know where I could find out just exactly what these different security levels do? It seems a bit too fnWindow-esque to provide nothing but boiled-down pablum don't-worry-your-pretty-little-head-just-trust-the-wizard stuff in a Linux distro. One of the reasons that I moved to Linux is so that I can have control of my OS and not have to just trust this kind of crap. Oh, yeah, and one more rant. They call them "Folders" now. I almost choked the first time I popped up a right-click menu and saw an entry for "Create Folder". Aaaahhhhh!! Those are directories not folders! Ahhhhh! Old Unixers and new terminology tricks don't mix. :P Other than that, I love my Mandy. Banjo (_)=='=~

OK OK .... I got it now. This is something new with Mandy 2006. During the installation, the default Security Level has been boosted up to High. I guess it used to be Standard. So, just taking a guess, I went into the MCC and changed it back down to Standard, and that seems to have fixed it. How to change Security Level: Open the MCC. Options=>Expert Mode to see the utility that sets the Security Level. Click on the item that says "Set the system security level and the periodic security audit". That popped up a dialog box that allowed me to set the security level back down to Standard. Once I had done that, I could set the permissions on the /home directories and they appear to stick. I even rebooted once to make sure that I still have access. I guess the High security level runs a daemon that watches those directories and protects them. I don't know because I have not yet found a document that describes the details of those security levels. Thanks to all for the help. This one really had me puzzled for a while. Banjo (_)=='=~

Oops! Nope. I spoke too soon. It went away again. I closed down the terminal windows and then browsed for a few minutes. When I went back, my permissions were once again set to drwx--x--x for my home directory. Something is locking that directory. I cannot even enable group permissions on it, so it will not help to have other users in the same group...... I think. Very strange. I'm confused. Banjo (_)=='=~

OK, I did that on a couple of users, then I did a chmod ug+r on my home directory. Then I rebooted to see what would happen and the new permissions stuck. But the directory still appears locked. I get permission denied on the directory when logged in as the other user. Does "users" have to be the primary group as scarecrow said? Thanks again Banjo (_)=='=~

OK. I kinda understand your suggestion, but my Linux (Unix) admin skills are stale. Can you give me a pointer to a man page or two? Thanks Banjo (_)=='=~

I am on a home system running Mandy 2006. There are four users, and we often share files such as digital photos. However, we are locked out of the other user's home areas because of file permissions on the home directories that are set to drwx--x--x. Yesterday, in order to allow file sharing among us, I changed all of them to drwxr-xr-x. That worked just fine. But today, the file permissions on the home directories are back to drwx--x--x and we are locked out. I am all in favor of secure systems, but I think that I (as the sysadmin) should be allowed to set them up as I wish. Is it me, or is this really part of the Mandriva plan? This is all too fnWindows-esque for me. How can I make my new file permissions stick? Thanks in advance Banjo (_)=='=~

Well, I did it. I have finally upgraded my Mandrake 9.1 system to the new Mandriva 2006 after three happy years of computing on the old system. I did not have a problem with my old Mandy 9.1 except that the applications were out of date, and the newer apps require resources that are not on my 9.1. Now that I have gone through the update exercise, I thought that I would post the details of what I did in case anyone else is planning to do the same thing and wants to see how I did it. This posting is long because I wanted to include the details as well as an overview of it. If you are not interested in reading a long, boring discussion of upgrade details, hit your back button now! Because I have three years of files belonging to four users stored on the old system, and I cannot afford to lose those, and I have never done a Linux upgrade before, I decided to do it on a new disk. I partitioned and formatted a new disk the same way as the old one and then I copied pertinent information from the old one to the new one. After doing that, I simply installed Mandy 2006 on the new disk with no possible danger to the information on the old one. The old disk remains mounted in the computer but disconnected. Once I am convinced that we are good to go on the new Mandy, that old disk will be reformatted into an external backup. It is a little bit expensive to do it this way, but I will sleep better at night knowing that our files are safe. Before I go any further with the details, here is my review of the new Mandriva 2006 installation. Yay That said, here is how I did it, step by step. I bought a new hard disk. I got a Seagate 160 Gig drive even though the orginal disk is only 120 Gig. They just keep getting bigger. But then, so do the files that we must store. 87 bucks OEM from Newegg. 'Nuff said. I bought the Mandriva 2006 Power Pack from the Mandriva Store. It cost me about $90. Sounds expensive for a free OS, but I do not mind paying for an excellent product that works as well as Mandriva. Call me a chump. I ordered it online, and in about three days it showed up at my door. Good service. *************************************** Install The New Disk *************************************** I installed new drive as the master drive on IDE0 in order to partition it. I disconnected the original disk completely to make absolutely sure that I would not partition the old disk and wipe out all of the information (I can be fairly stupid at times). I really really do not want to lose those files. I booted the computer to Setup and confirmed that the BIOS had seen the new disk. Then, I set the boot priority to boot from the ATAPI drive so that I could boot Knoppix. I booted to Knoppix to do this job. It is a wonderful tool for system maintenance when the maintenance involves messing with the disk drives. If you don't have a copy, download it or order a CD. It will save your butt. Knoppix showed /dev/hda unmounted and unpartitioned and unformatted. So the first step was to partition the new disk. *************************************** Partition The New Disk *************************************** The old partition setup was part1 / 6 Gig part2 extended part5 swap 0.5 Gig part6 /home 88.5 Gig part7 /usr 25 Gig I partioned the new disk in a similar fashion, but with slightly larger partition sizes. part1 / 6 Gig part2 extended part5 swap 0.5 Gig part6 /home 125 Gig part7 /usr 28.5 Gig I used cfdisk to partition /dev/hda. Cfdisk is a curses based version of fdisk. It works great. I ran cfdisk against the new, virgin disk and got: > cfdisk /dev/hda No partition table or unknown signature on partition table Do you wish to start with a zero table [y/N] ? I answered "yes" and I was presented with an empty partition table and a menu at the bottom of the screen. Here is an example of one of the menus. [Bootable] [ Delete ] [ Help ] [Maximize] [ Print ] [ Quit ] [ Type ] [ Units ] [ Write ] Use the arrow keys to highlight the desired function and type the Enter key to perform the function. You will be prompted for the appropriate types and sizes. Make sure to toggle the Boot flag ON for the primary partition, hda1. I created one [Primary] partition and three [Logical] partitions. Cfdisk named the partitions for me. I did not have to create the extended partion, hda2, which contains the three logical partitions; cfdisk did that for me. I had to create the partitions in the proper order to get them numbered with the appropriate numbers. I wanted the numbers to match the original numbers to minimize any differences with the existing /etc/fstab. I was not sure if the installer would read that file or not. I believe that it did not, but I don't know that for sure. I created the partions in the following order: / swap /home /usr Here is the result of my efforts as displayed by cfdisk cfdisk 2.12q Disk Drive: /dev/hda Size: 160041885696 bytes, 160.0 GB Heads: 255 Sectors per Track: 63 Cylinders: 19457 Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- hda1 Boot Primary Linux ext3 5996.23 hda5 Logical Linux swap 501.75 hda6 Logical Linux ext3 [/home] 24999.59 hda7 Logical Linux ext3 [usr] 28541.73 I then selected [Write] from the menu and answered "yes" when asked if I really wanted to write the partition table. After the partition table was written to the disk the new partitions showed up in /dev. /dev>ls hda* hda hda1 hda2 hda5 hda6 hda7 Notice hda2, which is the extended partition created to hold the logical partitions, 5, 6, and 7. *************************************** Make File Systems On The New Disk *************************************** The next step was to make file systems on the new disk partitions. Use mke2fs on each partition Options -j creates the ext3 journal -c checks for bad blocks -L <name> labels the file system /dev/hda* is the target partition > mke2fs -j -c -L / /dev/hda1 > mke2fs -j -L /home /dev/hda6 > mke2fs -j -L /usr /dev/hda7 If you use the -c flag, this will take a long long time. That flag causes mke2fs to check the disk for bad blocks. I did it on the smallest partition, /, and it took 34 minutes to complete the task. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and figured out that /usr would take about 167 minutes and /home would take 708 minutes! That is over 14 and 1/2 hours! That would be way too long for me to wait, so I bailed out on the -c for the other partitions. Without using the -c flag making the file systems took 2 minutes 45 seconds for /usr and 11 minutes for /home. I can live with that. *************************************** Copy Files From Old Disk To New Disk *************************************** Once the new file systems were in place, I copied all of the files from the original disk onto the new one. I only copied the contents of / and /home. I did not copy /usr because that would all get replaced by the installation anyway. I did not want any of that detritus lying around on the new disk. I did not know if the installer would use any of the files on / or not, but it was small so I copied it anyway. I copied /home over because all of our files are on /home. To do the copy, I shut down the computer and re-attached the old drive as the master on the IDE so that it would show up as /dev/hda, and I demoted the new drive to the slave drive so that it would show up as /dev/hdb. I did the file copy using Knoppix so that the old disk will be mounted read-only. This should minimize any accidents causing files being written to the old disk by mistake as I am copying them over (I can be really stupid at times). I then made the mountpoints for new and old root directories: > mkdir /mnt/newroot > mkdir /mnt/oldroot These mount points exist only in the RAM disk of Knoppix, so they must be recreated each time you boot Knoppix. I mounted the root partiions > mount -w /dev/hdb1 /mnt/newroot > mount -r /dev/hda1 /mnt/oldroot Then, I copied the contents of the old root directory over to the new root directory. > cp -pax /mnt/oldroot/ /mnt/newroot Options: p means preserve the ownership, timestamps etc a means archive, same as dpR d means do not dereference links R means recursive copy x means stay on this one file system Once the root directories have been created and copied, the mount points for /home exists on the new disk. So I mounted and copied the other partition. > mount -r /dev/hda6 /mnt/oldroot/home Mount the new file system and copy. > mount - w /dev/hdb6 /mnt/newroot/home > cp -pax /mnt/oldroot/home /mnt/newroot I left the "home" name off the destination path because if I put it there, cp would create a new directory by that name in the existing directory, and I would end up with /mnt/newroot/home/home. I found this out the hard way once. The above commands took quite a while to complete. In fact the copy of root to root took about four minutes, and it was only about 286 Meg of files. The copy of /home to /home took three hours and 44 minutes! That seems really slow to me, but it did get done. I would like to find out if there is a faster way to do this copy. I did not use dd because the two partitions are different sizes and I did not know what dd would do to the new file system. ************** IMPORTANT ********************** Unmount all of the disks to flush out the files. ************************************************ > umount /mnt/oldroot > umount /mnt/newroot/home > umount /mnt/newroot Shutdown Knoppix and turn off the power. *************************************** Swap The Disks *************************************** At this point, the new disk was ready for the installation. It had a copy of / and a copy of /home. So I shutdown and opened the computer to disconnect the old drive once again. I reconnected only the new drive as the master. Unplug the IDE cable and power plugs from both disks. Jumper the new disk to be IDE master. Plug the IDE cable and power plug into only the new disk. I then rebooted using the Mandriva installation CD for the install. I chose a clean install instead of the upgrade option. I will not go through the details of the installation since it looked very much like aRTee's excellent writeup, which you can see here http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/installmdv2006.html I did tell it to show me all of the packages so that I could select the ones that I wanted. One thing I wanted to do was disable installation of kat. I do not want a search engine eating up my CPU to maintain itself. I also added in some packages that were not included by default. One thing that had me worried at the start, was how I would get my old users back with the proper user and group ID numbers. Well, I needn't have worried because, when I got to the part where you create the users, it stepped through each one of them and recreated them just fine. I had to supply the Real Name and Password for each one, but other than that it just found them. Each time I clicked on "Accept User" it presented the next user until it was done, and then it presented me with a blank form to create any new users that I wanted to. The user and group ID's were preserved. One word of caution: I had a bogus directory in /home (called "apps") where I had intended to store applications, and the installer created a "user" for it. I ended up with an inadvertent user called "apps". Evidently, it is looking at directories in /home and assumes that each one is a user. This screwed up the ID numbers on the very last legitimate user, so I had to correct that after the installation. I fixed it using the suggestion from arctic, basically using chown like this: chown -R username:username /home/username I will get rid of the bogus user later. Just make certain that there are only legitimate user directories in /home and you should be OK. I have two printers connected to the system, one Lexmark E312L and an Epson-C84. I turned them both on prior to doing the installation and they were both recognized and set up flawlessly. At the end of the installation, it asks you if you want to get the updates. I held my breath and clicked "Yes" thinking that I had just got my self into a loooong download. In fact, it took only about 20 seconds. I have no idea what it did. The whole installation took about one and one half hours (not counting making the new disk), mostly because I looked at every package and made a decision. Most of that time was spent staring at the screen. It would go a lot faster if you just accepted the defaults. Finally it was done, and I booted the computer. It came up with a "First Time" wizard that was supposed to create an access account out on Mandriva. Once again, I held my breath and clicked on "Yes". It hung up completely. It just sat there........ no busy cursor... no nothin'. Finally, just as I was about to give up on it and push the power button it timed out with an error "Mandriva Services Not Reachable". So I clicked on "Skip It" and moved forward. So much for Mandriva Services. When I finally got it booted, a bunch of the applications were missing. I expected this because I had downloaded them and installed them myself, so they were not on the distro. One of the missing was Firefox, which I had mistakenly installed down in /usr/share on the old system. The new installation put it (properly enough) in /usr/bin and called it "mozilla-firefox". All of my desktop links pointed to /usr/share/firefox/firefox (don't ask), so I had to update those and then it worked OK. The applications that I had downloaded and installed myself were not there. These included Audacity and Inkscape, etc. I poked around on the mirror sites and found them on contrib. I went ahead and set up my urpmi to point at the main and contrib sites. I had not been able to figure all of that out when I installed the Mandy 9.1, but thanks to aRTee's excellent writeup of that feature I did it this time. Look here for the explanation of urpmi: http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/review2006.html#lrepo I followed the instructions on that site and soon after that I found and installed my other applications. I even went out and found OpenOffice2.0 and installed it. The distro DVD only had OOo1.1.5 on it. I was somewhat spooked by the size of the OpenOffice2.0 downloads (about 150 Meg), but in the end it only took about 20 minutes to do the whole installation. Urpmi worked flawlessly. Thank goodness for broadband. One problem did arise with the graphics. When I shut down, the screen went bonkers with nothing but noise. I found the answer to that problem here on the board as well. I just had to add a line to my xorg.conf file to give it some information about my Nvidia graphics card. I found the answer in the Hardware forum, here: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=31273 So far I am happy with my new Mandriva. The apps have been nicely upgraded and it does everything that I need. The graphics are a bit slow for some apps, like the new Firefox, but that could be the generic Nvidia driver that was installed. I will have to address that issue later. That is about it. I am still fine-tuning the applications and getting used to the changes in them, but all-in-all it only took a few days to get it all back. I think that I can recommend an upgrade if you have an older system. The applications are better, and lots of bugs that I had been living with for a while have now been fixed. So, here is my review of Mandriva 2006 again. Yay *************************************** Questions: *************************************** I wonder why it takes so long to do the surface check using the -c option on mke2fs. Anybody know? I also wonder why the copies took so long. It seems really slow to wait for three and one half hours to copy 18 Gig across a dedicated IDE. What did I do wrong? Is there a faster way? I hope this writeup is not too long. I wanted to include all of the details so that it can provide some answers for those who have not yet been through this. I learned a lot about what is on my disk and how to maintain it by doing the upgrade. The beauty of Linux is that all of this is possible, unlike some other well-known but inferior operating systems. Happy computing to all. Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~

Ok. I just noticed this, and it is kinda freaky. Go out to the theregister...... here http://www.theregister.co.uk/ ... and look at the logo at the top of the screen. Now, go look at the new Mandriva 2006 Penguin.........here is one http://wwwnew.mandriva.com/en/individuals/...s/2006powerpack and look at the lighter part on his tummy. See the buzzard? Is this a co-incidence, or is it a subliminal message that the British are taking over Mandriva? ....or have I been drinking too much coffee....? Banjo (_)=='=~

I just did this myself last Sunday. I had my old users on the /home partition when I did the install. When the installer got to the Create Users part, it found those user directories on /home and grabbed the information, proposing user names which were the same as the old ones. I simply added some information such as Real Name and password and clicked Accept. The users were created in /etc/passwd with the same user and group ID's as they had before. Each time I clicked Accept, the installer posted another one of the existing users until they were all created and then it posted a blank slate for creating new users. When I finally booted the new system the same old users were there, and the permissions were fine. Be warned that it is looking for directory names as "users". I had a bogus directory in /home and it created a "user" for it.... D'oh. So, just make sure before the installation that you have only user directories right under /home and it should just work. Banjo (_)=='=~

Ok. Kewl. Maybe I will go out to Whois later and look 'em up. For now, the ufl site was very quick for me. Once you get used to urpmi, it works pretty well. Thanks again to all. Banjo (_)=='=~

How in the heck do you tell where they are from those cryptic url's? I was just guessing the the ".ufl.edu" is Univ. of FL or something. Is there a list of them somewhere that says where they are locates? Banjo (_)=='=~

Ping actually has quite a history behind it. It is one of those programs that you assume has always been there. But it was, in fact, invented by somebody and caused quite a stir when it showed up. Look here for all of your ping answers http://www.ping127001.com/pingpage.htm Banjo (_)=='=~

Well, I did it. There were a few false starts, for example, I tried the Rutgers mirror and it said that it had no such information. That was a URL that I got from easyurpmi a few days ago. When I went back to easyurpmi it was no longer in the list of choices. Strange. Then, I tried the mirror in Texas. I could not even ping it. I finally landed on ftp://ftp.cise.ufl.edu, which looks like it might be in FL. Third try is a charm! Since I am in the Boston MA area, that is not the closest mirror to me, but it seemed pretty fast. I installed Inkscape and Kdiff3 in a snap. Then I went for the big one.... OpenOffice2.0, which reports that it is about a 400 Meg download. I was surprised that it only took about 20 minutes total. Hooray for broadband. I don't think that this would have been possible on a dialup. Urpmi seems to have worked flawlessly except that I have not found the icons for the programs yet. I am sure that I will figure that out soon. Thanks to all for your help. One of the biggest helps was the Mandriva 2006 review on www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr. I did not understand how urpmi was supposed to work until I read that overview. It all makes sense to me now. Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the help. I am more worried about picking a "popular" mirror which is overloaded than I am about the geographical distance. I am looking at some pretty large downloads (e.g. 150 Meg for OOo 2.0) and I would like to avoid taking hours and hours to do it. I do have broadband, but that won't help if the server is clogged. I will try the ping idea. Thanks Banjo (_)=='=~

I have just installed Mandriva 2006 and I am about to set up my package manager sources. When I go out to easyurpmi I must choose from dozens of mirror sites. Other than tossing a coin, I have no logical way to make the choice, so I thought that I would ask the forum if there are any preferences for mirrors. I am in the Boston area in the U.S.A., so I suspect that a stateside mirror would be faster, but which? All ideas, opinions, and suggestions are welcome. Thanks in Advance. Banjo (_)=='=~

I moved over toa clean (no fnWindows) install of Mandrake three years ago and I have not looked back. Congratulations. Banjo (_)=='=~

aRTee, I just found your review and installation writeup. You did a terrific job. I have been sooo confused by the whole package manager thing that I could not make it do anything. After reading your articles I understand it much better now. Thanks a ton for spending all of that time and effort to do the writeup. Mandriva should put a pointer to it in huge letters right on their web site. That information is just way too hard to find for a newbie. I have been running Mandy 9.1 now since 2003 with very few problems. I have 2006 on order as I type this. I am looking forward to using the upgraded system. Banjo (_)=='=~

John, Thanks for the pointers. I do have my /home on a separate partition. But my apps are so stale at this point that I don't even know if the new ones will be able to make sense of the old config files. This will be the first time that I have ever attempted to upgrade my Linux, so I will be extra cautious. Maybe next time I will just go for it. I am trapped by my own success with Linux. I now have my family members relying on this OS (because it is so solid), and I dasn't lose their stuff. When you deal with fnWindoze, you just get used to the idea that at any time on any day all of your stuff is going to just go up in smoke. But with Linux, you start to believe that computing can be done in a stable environment, so people start saving things that they really want to keep...... and assume that it will be there tomorrow. It makes the sys-admin job a bit tougher LOL. And always remember that old Unix aphorism......... "As ye fool around, so shall ye learn." Banjo (_)=='=~

AussieJohn, Thanks for the welcome back. I was gone because of a very strange problem I was having with the web site. Whenever I tried to go to any of the forums my DSL modem/router would crash and reboot itself. The web site took down my entire home network. It did not matter if I went to the site from my Linux computer or any of the Windows boxen we have. After I tried to visit a forum I would have to reboot the entire home network. A few days ago, on a whim, I decided to try again, and the problem was gone. I don't know what happened, but I am back. Arctic, thanks for the tip on reassigning ownership. I had not thought of that trick. Thanks to all for the information on upgrading. My Mandy 9.1 is such a rock in the midst of all these Windows boxen that I hate to risk it even to do an upgrade. But the time has come, the Walrus said. As I do this I will log any issues I run into just in case anyone is interested in the stumbling blocks I run into. Linux rocks! Banjo (_)=='=~

Thanks for the info. I guess what I am most confused about is how to get the old users back without doing a bunch of manual work. I understand that if I just create them again I might not get back the original UIDs and GIDs. I don't remember the exact order that I created them in. I suppose that I could write them down and then boot my Knoppix and fix up the numbers after they are created. I currently back up my important data on an external disk and occasionally burn it into CD's as well. I will certainly do a backup before attempting any upgrade. Banjo (_)=='=~

Greetings, I am seriously considering upgrading by beat up ol Mandy 9.1 to a later version. My apps are seriously out of date, and upgrading the apps requires upgrading the whole system at this point. My Mandy Linux has been a rock! Nearly three years of virus-free, adware-free, crash-free computing. :D But I have three years of history on this Linux computer which I cannot afford to lose. Starting over on things like bookmarks and mail folders etc. would be a major pain. So here is my plan: 1) Get a new disk and partition it the way the current one is partitioned. 2) Copy my entire /home partition onto the new disk 3) Get a copy of Mandy 2006 and install it on the new disk using my old /home directories 4) If all goes well, make my old disk into a backup external. Will this procedure allow me to install the new OS and preserve my current files and settings? Is the Mandy installer smart enough to make use of my current user information? Is this the right order to do this in, or should I install first and then copy over the files? Is Mandy 2006 a stable release that I can rely on as I have relied on Mandy 9.1 all these years? Any advice in how to do this task would be more than welcome. Thanks in advance Banjo (_)=='=~

Be careful when replacing a mother board in a Dell. There was a time in the recent past when Dell was using special mother boards from Intel that had the power plugs wired specially for them. The power plug is physically the same as a standard board, but some of the wires have been changed so that they are no longer compatible with regular mother boards. The power supplies were also rewired to be non-standard. If you replace a Dell mother board with a standard one, and you do not also replace the power suupply, you run the risk of destroying your new mother board instantly. Be careful. I do not know if they still do this, or what models have the issue. This information came out a couple of years ago. Do some research. Call Dell before you risk a new mother board in your Dell. Banjo (_)=='=~ Edit: Here is a link. I know nothing about this company, but it has information about the problem. http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/dellconverter.html Edit again: Here is another link describing the problem http://www.quepublishing.com/articles/arti...p?p=339053&rl=1 Be careful!