sarah31

there's always sudo.

this has nothing to do with the userfriendliness of a distro and everything to do with the fact that the files you require for EE are a product of gnome 1.4. further the reason you often don't find <somepackage>-devel in some distros is that they do not split off the headers and other files that are used for "development". PS-this latter comment is not a stab at distros like mandrake or RH, just an observation.

if i am not mistaken it may be all in the commands that you used to create your user. if you use this: useradd -m -s /bin/bash <usernamehere> i believe this should fix the "problem"

cybrjackle, i will pm you with my experience with tal and jon and some things that i have observed since my departure. my view of libranet has changed drastically but i do consider it a good intro to debian....if you cannot get through the debian install. (but i have my opinion on that as well.)

the for-profit does not bother me it is the blatant act to hide it and the potential playing down of users and developers work. if this guy's claims are correct the two head cheeses at gentoo are egotistical parasites.....i hate parasites that masquerade as dogooders. they took a good chunk out of me at libranet.

while i admit it is an easy "distro" the developers are evil and those "reviews" are mostly from longtime, and therefore biased, users. i would suggest try the ancient but free 2.0 version before deciding to blow all that money for an installer and admin tool.

while this guy is a bit high on himself. his argument is a sound one and reasons forking are logical. the gentoo main developers sound like tyrants. yet another reason to dislike gentoo. if this fella had been working for arch it would na happened.

hugerobot, i don't think you are an elitist. far from it i think you're ***** not an eliteist. see the problem isn't that linux is hard it is that fact that it is not known very well it does things differently from the lazy OSes like Windows and OS X (i love OS X but they hade to hide alot of the unix in it to spare their users alot of "grief"). people expect to turn on their computers and start working right away. what idiots it take tim to learn and the more you use the more you learn and the easier it gets. people are lazy and you have to get them past that. ultimately though if they don't want to make the effort then it is pointless to try. can the "boohoo linux is hard and has to change so i can get more lazy idiots using it" i bet if you plunked a child in front of linux they would eventually get the hang of it with very little effort and when they get older they would be all the better for as linux would be to them what windows is for others.

yoper is from new zealand :P

i would have to see a bit more of the rror but my guess is that there is some mistakes in the source code or you are missing a needed file in one of you libraries or headers.

oh sorry for the delay in the response. well buy GUI based i assume you mean configuration tools and wizards? if that is what you are asking it is definitely "do it yourself".

arch linux and i like it for many resons. 1. logical file hierarchy 2. good inits 3. devfs 4. package manger 5. arch build system 6. no default de/wm 7. i686 optimized 8. very nice crowd and great user community- not saying that others are bad but arch makes it very easy for the user to contribute in many ways. it can mean alot to a user to see their contributions in numerous ways make it to the final product. while other distros don't discourage user contributions they are/can only on a very limited basis (bug reports, helping on forums like this that are completely ignored by the official mandrake community, etc) it is not for everyone but fits me to a tee.

bah it's because you don't have to package perl apps, etc for a distro. i have come across so much sloppy perl coding that it made me completely dis interested in learning it. i'd sooner sleep with a badger that use it.

not only is not like C++ but QT is pure POS. don't like it. stay away from perl it may be nice to use and easy to work with but it is a horrible, lazy language. write once read never. i suggest C or even C++ (even though i find C++ a cumbersome language to deal with compiling wise)

well restart is an option in the menu so i would take a look at the menu file for the command. more important though is that you should not have cursor lock like that...even occasionally. i would do a little investigation such as trying some other wm and if it occurs even with those or a DE i would say it is a small symtom of what could eventually be a larger problem. (hardware likely)

well still alot of talk but not much action :P before you get too far into final product find out if you can do that. package manager---make your own it does not have to be complex and if built right your users can easily change a configuration file and make packages to their optimizations or with something like makeworld rebuild their entire system that way. as well having a "simple" packaging system and the availablity of the build files and templates alliows users to contribute packages to the project (this is how arch works). using rpm and apt is just lame imho because you would have to recompile all their packages which are i386 or i586. i don't like autopackage's blaise attitiude to not evoking security or actively looking into it. signed packages are important in many many ways and i know that it is one of the major things arch is working on right now. ultimately far more research is need to be done before you decide on final form. as well you really have to ask yourself does the linux community neeed another distro? choice is great but too much is a detraction and makes it hard to assist those with troubles.

chown -R group.user /foodirectory

sorry but i must disagree a bit with this. while it is not uncommon to have some problems it is not a given that you will have problems. you do have to install a app called modutils or something like that that accounts for change to module management in the new kernel. btw the most current 2.5 kernel is 2.5.72 i believe.

if these are the steps you did this would be your problem. you should have (and feel free to correct me if i interpretted your post incorrectly) cd /usr/src mv linux linux-old mv whereeveryournewkernelsoureceis /usr/src tar -zxvf (or jxvf) linux-x.x.xx ln -s linux-x.x.xx linux cd linux make menuconfig

uh search the gentoo forum for the link to all the fun and silly optimizations you can do. personally i would drop the -O3 in place of the far more generic -O2. why? because some apps simply will not be able to use it or it will introduce instabilities into your binaries. i realize alot of people like doing ridiculous optimizations like you quoted but most are pointless: -march=xxxxxx -O2 -pipe is pretty well al you need. many of those other CFLAGS will pretty well will show up anyway if they can be done.

to be perfectly honest...if mandrake works for you then why change distros? maybe just take a look "under the hood". i learned alot with debian because i was occasionally force to look under the hood when their configuration tools were not working. the only reason to change is if you think you are not getting the best/most out of your distro and no matter how you try, your distro does not allow it. there is also no reason you cannot double boot. maybe you can learn something with one distro that you can try to apply to mandrake. often other distros with show you just how much mandrake does for you and what you can do to make things work "better" for you. i know a few people that have done alot of testing of other distros and always went back to the "easier" ones because they just worked better for them. some people just aren't interested in doing more "work" and this is not a bad thing. on the other hand you may enjoy it....al i can sayi s that this tread will give you some ideas as to some distros tha may interest you. gentoo is involved at the beginning but once you have the initial install done and have x and a DE or WDM installed it can be very easy. arch is a fair amount of work to and it can be frustrating but once you get some thing down and shake of uncertainty is is nice too. libranet is an esy debian install but can be a bit difficult to upgrade certain things on due to the their tendency to mix various repositories and expiremental trees. I cannot coment o RH as i have never used it. Sorcerer, lunar and root linux will be alot of work too since they are source based as well especially root. lfs will give you alot of linux experince and frustration i am sure too. if you are really interested in testing other distros make a new partition for one and then distrowatch and from there visit the home pages of the distros. there are alot to choose from and all will be some sort of learning experience. you may choose a big/top ten distro or you may find a smal gem of a distro (which arch was/is for me). only you can really decide what is right for you and the only way you can find out what you want is by exploring the other linux offerings. if one distro fils to please you at least you have your mandrake to boot back into.

if you installed the library as described in the README or INSTALL file and the library cannot be found or called issuing the command ldconfig (as root) should do the trick.

the ftp servers may carry some of the patches other will/can be found via searches.

you can use my channel #lhf if you like for your conversing it ain't that busy its on freenode (yuk)

um gtk is baggage on alot of other apps i can tell you right now that if you want to run some of the stuff mentioned you need gtk or gtk2.