sitor

I don't really see the need for partition magic. I've always used the partioning tool that you find in the MDK installer, and it always worked great for me. I even use it when installing anoher version of Linux that does not have such a good partitioning tool. Then I pop in the MDK install CD, go up to the partitioning part. Do the partitioning that I require, and then quit the MDK install, and use the other linux distro installer to install it form then on. Of course partitioning is always a little tricky, and you need to have a minimum of understanding what you are doing. E.g. always make sure that you have defragmented the existing FAT partitions before resizing it,... Partition Magic has a very good name, but I don't really see the need to acquire it when the MKD partitioning tool is already so good. Ciao, Sitor

When I received the mail with the announcement, I immediately forwarded to all my friends and family. You can never know that someone wants to buy a new (perhaps second) PC. 300 €! Prices can get low without Windows tax! Great for people wanting to install a server at home as well. Ciao, Sitor

Do you need to compile all of this stuff? Can't you just install it from PLF?

Hello, Just to give some feedback: I have done some testing in the mean time in VMWare. The purpose is for me to give this user at least the same experience as he is used to. That means that he should be able to use a good office suite. I only know OpenOffice well, so that is what I used as a benchmark. So I did a test with the different DEs / WMs that you can install Mandrake of from the CDs. The test was simply to measure the time it took to launch OpenOffice and wait til it was ready to accept input in a fluent way: KDE: 6min30sec GNOME: 6min10sec IceWM: 1min40sec WindowMaker: 1min08sec Enlightenment: 2min30sec Blackbox: 1min50sec So the result is that you cannot really use KDE with only 64MB RAM (once OOo was loaded, typing the text went quite OK with any of them though). So in the mean time I let the user know he has two options: either a rudimentary desktop (IceWM) without any costs, either upgrade the RAM and be able to use KDE (which he has seen in Knoppix and liked quite good). Hey, the 128 MB RAM doesn't cost more the a virus scanner these days! And it is virii that started this in the first plase. Just for completeness I changed the RAM settings for the VMWare machine to 128MB RAM and ran the test again: KDE: 55sec GNOME: 1min06sec IceWM: 35sec WindowMaker: 27sec Enlightenment: 35sec Blackbox: 25sec This shows that 128MB RAM is surely sufficient. Of course these figures only give a general idea, since they will depend largely on software installed, speed of processor, HD, amount of SWAP (I did have 500MB). Moreover there is the loss in performance just from using VMWare. Ciao, Sitor

I've tried once to follow the guidelines on Funix, but got horribly stuck. But hey, I'm a GUI man not a CLI man. Never done much make install stuff, let alone solving dependencies. Maybe you are better at this. Or it might just work on your machine. Good luck and let me know. If it works for you, I"m gonna give it another try. Ciao, Sitor

I have been looking into that myself. If it is just for copying home made DVDs (I do that for my home movies), just copy the disk plain and simple with K3b. If it is to backup commercial movies you own (here in Belgium that is legal), then Linux is not really ready for that in my opinion. If you have been able to rip it to HD, you could try buring it with K3b. K3b is able to burn a DVD movie if you provide it with the correct DVD structure, but it cannot do encoding itself. A lot of commercial DVD are dual layer, so they don't fit on a single layer DVD-R, so most of the time, that does not help you that much yet. There are some scripts that exist, but as I'm more of a GUI man (OK, I'm just lazy), I never tried. To be honest, I just use DVDShrink on Windows. One of the single reasons to boot in Windows for me (lphoto now offers me a workable red eye removal solution now). The only other reason is CD-games for the kids. Those seem not to work with Wine, or Crossover office either. Did not try Winex/Cedega yet, as it is paying, and I have very little hopes that that will work as well. Ciao, Sitor

I've tried it as well, and generally I did like it. I agree that the installer seems way old, not really finished. I gave up for the moment because OpenOffice did not even work, and I could not get it installed with Synaptic. Thought I spent enough time on it. I think this distro has potential, but for the moment it is not near to where Mandrake is. It clearly uses less resources then Mandrake does though, even in KDE. Just my bat. Ciao, Sitor

OK, I got it. Instead of using Mandrake Update, I needed to add the local folder as a medium (in the Media Manager) and use the Install Software. There you can select to filter "All packages by update availibility". This gives you the packages that are updates and by selecting them you can perform the update. Ciao, Sitor

Hello, I'm about to install MDK 10 on a PC with a slow Internet connection. I want to install the updates for security. Therefore I have downloaded the whole updates tree from a PC with a fast connection. However, I can't get it to install the updates from the CD (or from a folder on the HD). I'm trying using the MCC (I'm not really a CLI hero). It always wants to go online to find an online update source. There is a way to force it to use a specific source by adding an update source in the Media Manager, but that seems not to accept a local folder (it still wants to go on the net). Probably I need to put the path towards that local folder in a specific notation (did not work with file://...). Anyone that knows how I can do this. This is for a user that is fed up with the insecurity of Windows, so I certainly want to give him a secure system. However he would not appreciate a whole nights download either (here in Belgium that is quite expensive). Any help would be dearly appreciated. Kind Regards, Sitor

Got it done in the mean time. I used the dvdiso script. At first it only create an image of 280MB or so. Looking at the CLI feedback, I saw that from a certain point he complained about not having space left in /tmp. I still had the mdk10 dir from the earlier attempt in /etc taking up 1,9 GB, and the / partition was 98% full. When I removed /etc/mdk10 and reran the script it worked. Simply burned the ISO with K3B and done. Thanks for the tips in any case. This will help testing 10.1 (did already try the alpha, but certain packages did not install, so I could not even boot into KDE, have already issued a bug report on that). Needed this to work first, because being still a newb, I prefer installation from CD (or DVD), and I was not going to burn CD-R's at each new version (images are too big for CD-RW), but if I can do it on DVD+RW, I can reuse the same disk over and over. Thanks for the help, sitor

Hello, I was going to try the new Alpha version of MDK 10.1 (in VMWare, where I ruined my previous version due to some testing). So I downloaded all of the 10.1 alpha ISOs and tried to follow your guidelines. Copying all of the data from the ISOs into /etc/mdk10 works fine, however the Makecd does not: [root@localhost etc]# mdk10/misc/MakeCD --discsize 4700000000 -t /etc -i /etc -a /etc/mdk10 Can't locate attributes.pm in @INC (@INC contains: mdk10//Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/:mdk10//Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi/:mdk10//Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/i386-linux/:mdk10//misc:mdk10//misc/perl5/5.8.5:mdk10//misc/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5:mdk10//misc/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi/:/mdk10//misc/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux/ mdk10//Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5//i386-linux-thread-multi mdk10//Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/ mdk10//Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi/ mdk10//misc mdk10//misc/perl5/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi mdk10//misc/perl5/5.8.5 mdk10//misc/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi mdk10//misc/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5 mdk10//misc/perl5/vendor_perl/i386-linux-thread-multi/ mdk10//misc/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi/ mdk10//Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl//5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi mdk10//Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl//5.8.5 mdk10//Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl//5.8.4/i386-linux-thread-multi mdk10//Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl//5.8.4 mdk10//Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/ /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.5 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.3/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.3 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.2/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.2 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.1/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.1 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.0 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl . /home/warly/files/cvs/mdk/soft/mkcd/pm/) at mdk10//misc/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/Mkcd/Group.pm line 811. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at mdk10//misc/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/Mkcd/Group.pm line 811. Compilation failed in require at mdk10//misc/mkcd line 30. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at mdk10//misc/mkcd line 30. Anyone a clue what I'm doing wrong? Thanks, Sitor

I have been testing Libranet in the mean time as well. They claim as well that it runs with 32MB RAM minimum, 64MB recommended, just as Vector Linux. However I couldn't get Openoffice installed. I tried it in VMware, and limiting the RAM there to 64MB led to reasonable results with IceWM, but running quite slow on KDE. What strikes me with these low RAM distros (Vector Linux and Libranet) is that they run IceWM by default, where other distro's run KDE or GNOME by default. So I suppose that does make quite a difference. I'll try to install Mandrake, with IceWM and KDE. If KDE runs too slow (probably), then it might still work with IceWM. We can of course try to get more RAM installed, but then I will need to find out what type it is and whether it can still be found. Thanks for the replies anyway. Ciao, Sitor

Arctic, Thanks for the hint. However the computer is not that old. It has a 700MHz processor and a 25 GB HD. Just the memory is quite low. Mandrakemove and PCLinuxOS did not run due to that. Knoppix did but obviously very slow. Thats why I checked out the system requirements of Mandrake. So that is going a bit too far I think in this case. I would like to know if someone did run Mandy on a PC with 64 MB and if it was doable. And if using e.g. IceWM i.o. KDE would help. Ciao, Sitor

Hello, I will install Linux on a PC with only 64 MB of RAM. It's for a friend of mine that got his Windows machine all crippled by a virus. As he has no experience whatsover with Linux (but he is very open to it), I will install it for him. The system requirements mentioned on the Mandrakelinux site mention that 64 MB is the minimum, but they advice 128 MB. Anyone experience with such low amounts of RAM? Yeah, I know, RAM doesn't cost much, but this user does not want to do anything fancy (just some office stuff and websurfing). I know that next to KDE and GNOME, you can use other DEs as well, like IceWM for instance. Would that be more appropriate in this case? Do these use less memory? Thanks for some advice. Ciao, Sitor

I've read a bit on there site and forum. Seems to be the full thing nothing crippled. It's just already 9 months old and 3.0 underway to be released within a month. Ciao, sitor

Well, I don't think that it matters that some of the components are not the latest. It's about time there is a decent Linux distro that comes with all the shit that people use included. With all respect for the distros that prefer to ban anything that is not free, it is a real nag that you need to install all kinds of stuff (flash, Windows Media codecs, JAVA, etc.) all seperate. The nice thing of distros is that they bundle OS with all the software you need, but if these always are missing, part of that benefit is wasted. I think this is a great development. Mandrake should bring out such a thing as a cash cow as well.

Hi, I use flphoto for getting the pictures from the camera. Works great, but is quite litited further. I use then gthumb to rotate the ones that need rotation, and rename the files (has got quite a good renaming functionality, I rename always a whole bunch at once with a name that includes the date and a description of the content). Still did not find SW that can take good care of red eyes in photo's. That is one of the two sole think that makes me boot in Windows from time to time. So if someone knows a good tool in Linux that can do that, please let me know! Ciao, Sitor

OK, I looked at the GPL again and it is now more clear to me. I was stuck with the notion that if you distribute a SW that uses another GPLed SW, your SW should be GPLed as well. It is the definition of USING another piece of SW that is the thing here. I thought that any SW running on the Linux Kernel is using the kernel and as the kernel is GPL, the SW running on the kernel should be GPL as well. And so on for SW running on that one. And again, and again,... In the GPL FAQ there are some topics on that: and It is all very subtle in differences, and as I'm not a programmer myself it is sometimes difficult to grasp the differences. But it is somewhat clearer now. Important for the roadmap of our own products. From the few comments I have seen from Xandros users, it seems that it should be good. I guess that the best way to find out will be to test it, huh? Ciao, Sitor

Hello, As I'm trying to get also my kids using Linux more and more, I have created an account for them where they can do what they want. I installed them some games so they can play with them. However I read about Childsplay which would be a good packages of games for the kids. I already installed GCompris, whioh is OK, but not that attractive. Childsplay is supposed to be better in that respect. However when I install the Mandrake rpm, it installs alright, but it just does not run. When I try to launch the program, I get an item on the panel that says Starting Childsplay and a sand thing to show it is busy. However it then just disappears without doing anything. I tried to install an older package that was build for 9.2 (on my 10.0 OE box), it installs as well, and launching give the image of a cow and then all of a sudden nothing anymore. I think this might really help win my kids for the Linux camp (or at least give them the feeling that I'm not so crazy wanting to use Linux), so I really would like to get this working. Anyone an idea how to get this running? Thanks in advance, Sitor [moved from Software by spinynorman]

Anyone who has used it? Is it safe or has it the same kind of security problems as e.g. Lindash (everything done with root account)? BTW, there is something that I do not understand. I thought that the GPL says that if you distribute GPL stuff, that you should GPL anything else that you distribute with it. In that case Xandros should be completely GPL. Then why hasn't there been free copies of Xandros been available on FTP servers since ages? Or did I interpret the GPL in a wrong way? Can anyone clarify? Ciao, Sitor

Can you describe how? It might work for me aas well. PS: Swiftddeath, could you change the title of this topic. By using the terms vulnerable and unreliable, a lot of newbies on the forum might get scared of thinking Mandrake is not safe and crashes a lot, which is clearly not the case, on the contrary. Thanks. Ciao, Sitor

When I tried to run ./nvu, I get this error: nsNativeComponentLoader: GetFactory(libwidget_gtk2.so) Load FAILED with error: /home/sitor/downloads/nvu-0.20/libgtkxtbin.so: undefined symbol: gdk_threads_lock But I'm happy that it works for you. Ciao, Sitor

Correct Michel, I was just simplifying. For most people in the world it must already be incomprehensible enough. Such a small country but so damn complex! Did not mean to offend the German speaking Belgians though. Ciao, Wim

I prefer the GUI way by far. Only if I'm already working in console and I know the name of what to install, I use CLI URPMI. Yes you should. You need to update regularly to make sure your PC is staying secure. Also on Linux most updates are for security reasons. On Winbloze you have them and can have them installed automatically, without any explaining about what is installed (might be more Trojans and there is probably some reason why you often can't remove them anymore). With Linux also you need to install them if you don't want to be vulnerable to crackers. If I were you, I would install 2.6 (faster then 2.4). If it doesn't work (heard as well it is still more selective on HW), you can still install 2.4. What can you loose? 30 minutes? Not a lot of choice there. You will then need dual boot or try WINE, or if you want to spend some money to make your life easier Win4lin, Crossover Office or VMware (the latter is the most sure to work, but costs most as well). I still use the dual boot. NVU (www.nvu.org) has been cited to be an alternative for that. Haven't been able to install it yet. Packages for MDL 10 are in the making. And there is the Mozilla Composer of course. There are Open Source alternatives, I'm sure. Pretty sure that MythTV does the job and much more. You will probably even be able to reuse your remote with LIRC. But it might not be very easy to set up though! Good luck in any case, Sitor

How, how, hold your horses. Belgian courts have nothing to do with this. It's not because half of Belgium also speaks dutch that we are from the Netherlands! I was gonna add some joke to that but I don't know if the political / religious ban would allow that. In any case, the dutch people live in a country called The Netherlands (also called Holland) and speak dutch. In Belgium there are two peoples: the Flemish that speak dutch and the Walloons that speak french. So two dutch speaking peoples but in two very distinct countries. For the rest I agree totally with you Gowater. The thief is clainming ownership and the judges grant it to him. Ciao, Sitor