pindakoe

Suggest you get a live CD (Mandriva One or any other Linux Live CD) and boot from that. Mount the root partition on the 160Gb onto this (say on /mnt/160gb for clarity) and edit /mnt/160gb/etc/fstab to bring it in line with your partitioning scheme and/or labels. If you need more detail pls post back and we'll take it from there.

I haven't read the article (not enough energy to work through the French which is a language I can only understand parts of), but you may want to look at Bubba. Don't know whether it has enouygh horse power, but it can operate below 15W...

Mandriva 2009.0 uses UUID instead of hard-coded partition names. Unfortunately the UUID does change when re-partitioning (even if just shrinking/expanding) -- at least that is my experience. My guess from the frist pass of yr message is that Mandriva is looking for a partition with UUID which no longer exists. Suggest you boot with a live CD and run following (as root):

 fdisk -l /dev/sda 
blkid /dev/sda1

Command 1 is to identify what partitions exist on sda (first hard disk) -- change as needed. Make a note of the partitions containing linux file systems. Assume for sake of argument this is 'sda1'. To find out the UUID for /dev/sda1 you issue command 2. Lastly edit /etc/fstab on your hard disc (not on the livecd) to correct/reflect trhe UUID(s) as you learned them.

Thanks for the feedback. I should have phrased my question a bit more clearly as my question wasn't too much about the mechanics of switching off (I know my way around run levels), but more what would break (primarily on the PC running it). Ian's comment suggest not an awful lot, so I have also switched it off (permanently).

I have a small home network where my Linux box is used as primary workstation and Samba/CUPS server for 2-3 windows PCs. As I do not like to have more software than what I actually use I have over the years pruned my install to the bare minimum; one piece I am not using is Avahi (as far as I know -- it is started by default in run level 5, but I am not aware that I required it on the Linux box itself or from the Windows PCs (which see printer and shares perfectly with Samba & Cups alone).

Removing it is however not possible as it takes half of Gnome (by the looks of it) with it when I select it for removal in rpmdrake. I know everything can be removed by rpm -e --nodeps, but prior to doing so would like to get an idea what stops working.

Anybody out there who can tell me why I would need it? The description on the avahi website only re-enforces my idea that this is something I do not care for.

Thanks for yr expert advise.

@Kyalami: this doesn't ring any bells. Can you be a bit more specific or attach a screencapture to demonstrate what you mean. Another hint to get closer to the cause (and hence the solution): open the movie with mplayer from a terminal window and see what output it gives you -- could be that this AVI-file (remember: AVI is just a container format; many possible ways to encode movies inside AVI (Wikipedia; you may not have the codec to decode the compression scheme that has been used. One package you almost certainly need to have installed is win32-codecs, but you may need others.

Hi Greg2 -- same as angst, i.e. thanks for packaging grip, but I have now been able to get the desired effect (ID3V2 tags) with grip so I am happy. Thanks for the support.

The way I would summarise it is as follows:

• The grip in main does by default only generate ID3v1 tags (Lame's behaviour is to only generate ID3v2 tags when needed). Nothing on the menu's suggest that you can force ID3v2 tags as the checkbox for ID3v2 will not appear in this build. You have to know the lame option for --add-id3v2. I do not know whether this creates .4 or .3 ID3v2 tags.
  
• Greg's build exposes that you can have id3v2 tags just as well, albeit apparently only id3v2.3 and not the full id3v2.4. I am no expert on this, but the differences seem to be minor (a browse at wikipedia suggests that v4 allows the use of '/' whereas v3 does not).
  
• And for those who like simplicity there is Soundjuicer. That is simplicity, unless you want to create MP3's. The gstreamer framework may be well designed, but is somewhat at variance with Gnome's 'just works' philosophy. Furthermore, libgstlame (which defines the encoding step) only exposes part of the LAME options and does not include ways to set the -V n options (which is rather ironic as this is much simpler than manually selecting vbr-type, quality, stereo-mode etc).
  

You choose your poison...

Gerg2 -- tested your Grip package and found it to install and work well. Thanks!

Most likely the same issue -- the partitions defined by these last UUID's do not actually exist. Kdiskfree does see the entries, but as they do not exist, nothing gets mounted, meanign size zero and no max size available. Your /etc/fstab is out of line with hardware. Suggest you again look at the output of fdisk -l /dev/sda to see which partitions exist (screenshot suggests sda1 and sda6) and then blkid to see what UUID's match to these partitions. Use that to update fstab.

Repositories are servers around the internet which distribute software for mandriva (called packages or RPM's for short). The control center software program displays all software that is in the repositories you have enabled (which can mean zero). Suggest you follow the Easy URPMI link on this site's home page (link) and go with the defaults. Accept the files that are downloaded to your PC (you will need to enter your root (Administrator/system manager) password to get these repositories added. Then go back to software mgmt and see what's there.

Greg2: I am also interested to give it a spin.

Call me interested as well -- just spend the better part of a Sunday wrestling with Soundjuicer and gstreamer-0.10/libgstlame.so to realise that (1) tweaking the mp3-encoding options still is rather painfull, (2) grip is ~11% faster on same hardware and (30 that I couldn't get the equivalent of "lame -V2". Thus defaulted back to GRIP, but hadn't realised that it was only generating ID3v1 tags..

Some questions to (hopefully) narrow things down:

* Is there anything in your logs (/var/log/syslog) indicating what happens just before the crash

* What happens if you boot into single user mode or in level 3

Thanks for the hint -- urxvt indeed does the job (whilst staying small and nimble like rxvt)

When displaying manual page of something inside an (rxvt) terminal window I frequently (probably allways) do not get the hyphens and single quotes displayed. Instead rxvt displays inverted question marks, dashed squares or other non-standard characters (see attachments for examples). Similar problem happens when using the console (Ctrl-alt-F2 etc etc), though the 'strange' characters are different. This does not happen when using vte (the MCC terminal emulator). Any suggestions what to investigate?

Attachments:

medo3819 may have the real cause -- I have found in several of last Mandriva's that anacron did not run or was simply absent. A lot of maintenance (log rotation, but also locate's database, the security checks will never get run as a consequence). I believe the other culprit was something in the script /usr/sbin/on_ac_power which for reasons I cannot recall always failed (or passed) and thus meant /etc/init.d/anacron always exited before anacron was started. Believe this was fixed before 2008.1 (may be a lot longer ago).

Google for mandriva+Cups should help or look for linux how-to on CUPS. Here is what I recall from having gone through this process recently (new laptop in the house):

The Mandriva Control Center should be able to help you through. Fire it up, go to hardware, configure printing and get your printer installed. Steps are (usually) pretty self explanatory. Make sure that you share this printer with others on the network. This will install your printer using CUPS (Common Unix Printing System). Then fire up your web browser and point it to http://127.0.0.1:631. This webpage (which your own PC shows you) shows you stuff you can set (you will need your root password to make changes). Click on 'printers' to see the installed printer(s). take note of the printer name CUPS has given to your printer -- usually an abbreviated form of the real name (my HP Laserjet 1010 is called HPLasJet1010). Test it from your (linux) PC to see whether it works. If so, proceed to step 2: Making this accessible to other PC's -- your (default) firewall on linux will block access to the printer.

Stay in MCC, go to security and fire up the personal firewall applet. Ensure that you allow 'the internet' to access your printer via CUPS. Whilst on the linux box, run the command ifconfig as root. Note down the IP address (listed as 'inet addr' usually for eth0 if you only have 1 network card). typically this address is of the form 192.168.x.x for home networks.

Thirdly, go to the XP-box, fire up control panel/printers, add a printer. Select network on the next page, then connect to printer on the internet (exact text may be different as I have a non-english XP; mine is teh last of 3 options). Type in the following as the location/name of the printer http://ipadress:631/printers/HPLasJet1010 in which ipadress is the ipadress you noted down in step 2 and HPLasJet1010 the name of the printer as CUPS showed it to you on your linux box. The standard Windows XP list of printer drivers comes up. Select your printer or use the 'browse' button to select drivers from install CD or file. Test the printer after install.

Scenario: I start MCC, type in root password, wait for this to fire up and so some admin stuff (installing updates, removing software whatever). When I look in the task bar (Xfce in my case) I see a few dozen icons there (see attachment) which I believe go back to pam_timestamp_check. Running 'ps ux' shows several dozen instances of this running. After starting MCC a few times in one session (with ample time in between) I now have 201 instances of this running.

To me this seems a bug, but I am not even sure what app is causing this, let alone how to file this in bugzilla.

Example (you will have to aim carefully as the height of the picture is so small):

Thanks a bunch -- this seems very worthwhile to explore over Christmas.

I use Popfile:

http://getpopfile.org/

Yves,

this sounds interesting. Can you expand a bit on function of the different parts? To me your setup seems an alternative to fetchmail --> procmail --> local maildir/mbox/MH (dependant on client), which I have never been able to get working satisfactorily. Also is your setup is popfile using a common set of rules to separate spam/ham or is this per-user?

This may be related to your default security settings which you can set in draksec. For level 4 and 5 (higher & paranoid), users will not have access to cron & at, unless you grant access via at.allow (or override the default for enable_at_crontab for that level in /usr/share/msec/level.4 or level.5.

If that doesn't explain it then I am out of options..

Does a file /etc/at.allow exist and have your name in it? the at.allow and at.deny files can be used to lock down access to at

Add following line to /etc/sysctl.conf

net.ipv4.conf.all.log_martians=1

Have you installed mplayerplugin? This is needed for firefox, epiphany (and probably more) to figure out which external program (mplayer) to call certain content.