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Counterspy

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  1. Both sites are working now and it is past the deadline in the first post. Confusing! The new site also took a long time to load. Counterspy
  2. I had written a piece on linuxiso called "Phony reviews in Linux publications" because so many were after-install single use on one machine and all were positive to keep those freebies coming. Yours is the first review I have read anywhere that tackles installation on a number of different systems and I congratulate you for both completeness and objectivity. I also appreciated your footnote on contributing to Linux through other means than buying commercial packages or joining the Club. There are many ways to contribute to the Linux community and to include that in your review was a pleasant addition. On the review side, I would say that it is time to bury urpmi and switch to apt-get as Texstar has done with PCLinuxOS. As to positives, this is the first Mandrake version that I have installed without issues going away back before their money troubles. I said that here with the Community Edition and it holds true for the Official Edition as well. It is easy to see the hands on the wheel of the new CEO. It took him some time but he has not only restored the company to profitability but also to quality-driven effort on the part of his empoyees. With this release, Mandrake has climbed back to first over Fedora in the one month summary at Distrowatch, testimony to the improvements that have been made. Counterspy
  3. It never ceases to amaze me how far the minions of democracy will go to protect their turf without so much as a nod in the direction of elected representatives. To that end, I am proposing that ministerial responsibility (read protection of civil service incompetence) be ended and the true perpetrators of government screwups be sacked without notice or severance. I would like to see the looks on the faces of the incompetent jerks who run our governments when they are suddenly called to account in the dock of public opinion. Counterspy
  4. You don't say whether you are installing the Pro or Personal edition. Off the top, I don't think you have enough memory to run a full graphic install of Suse Pro. I have never used the Personal version so i cannot say with any certainty that it is the same problem. The best way to proceed is to reinstall s+Suse and and at the summary screen, choose change and then partitions. You could also use the Mandrake 1st install cd to get to Diskdrake and use it or another partitioner from Mandrake since you can load Mandrake. Cfdisk would be my choice. Reinstall Suse from the start and limit your choice of KDE components and do not install Gnome if it is an option. Use similar discretion with the rest of the selection of software to what you need. Others will no doubt have additional suggestions. Counterspy
  5. Suze is better in every way than Mandrake. They have not had to recover from a very bad history brought on by financial circumstances and now have the marketing and engineering expertise of Novell. Mandrakesoft's recent progress has been impressive but there are still holdovers from the dark days of the past from my reading of the cooker mailing list. Maybe by 11.2 they will be fully back in the game. Counterspy
  6. It fooled me too and I've got 13 years on you. Just once though. So I guess the is hope for us old folks. Counterspy
  7. As a persisent and vociferous critic of things Mandrakesoft, I have made the trip over here from my two posting homes now, linuxforum.com and linuxiso.org, to say that I successfully downloaded and installed Mandrake 10.1 CE. For the first time since I don't know when, a Mandrake release has worked right from the install. I have not yet put it through the paces I usually do, but the fact that it bettered Suse 9.1 made me feel that I should say here that this is real progress. There may yet be a few niggles to work out and there is still the silly descriptions like very nice etc. when you do individual package selection. For the first time since the dark days of the bankruptcy, I can see the hand of the new ceo taking charge. If this course is steadied, then there can be nothing but success in the Mandakesoft future and those who have been its dedicated supporters through thick and thin. If the final lives up to the test, it will occupy an equal place with Suse as my preferred distributions. Counterspy
  8. The offer has ended. I got mine and they are all full editions and not crippled. The only restriction is that you can't transfer them. I have also heard that you can't use them in a production environment. Counterspy
  9. There are some things you can do that may help: 1) Turn plug and play and antivirus in the bios both off. 2) Disconnect any exotic peripherals like cameras, zip disks, memory keys etc. 3) Try burning the iso's to cdrw's. They seem to be more fault tolerant as well as being easier on your wallet. Counterspy
  10. There is a new Partitioning How-To at http://www.tldp.org . It settles a lot of discussion about swap file sizes and other minutae of partitioning. The installation manuals of Debian and Gentoo also have good recommendations depending on the use you intend for your machine. It makes you think more carefully about how you are going to use Linux. Counterspy
  11. I want to make a few points here. First, the Maxblast utility will quickly establish whether the drive is gone. So let's get on with the issue and get that fixed. I do not see how an mbr error trashed a hard drive to the point of making it unusable. I can appreciate the level of anger at the thought that this was caused by Mandrake. Next, Partition Magic 8 can be used to pre-partition the disk with ext 3. I use it all the time for that purpose, but it still is the case that LBA (Linear Block Addressing) should be enabled in the bios to ensure proper drive performance with !0.0. Next there was a comment back on the first page that Maxtor drives are no good for system files. I use twin 30 Gb. Maxtor drives in my second machine for two years without a problem. The machine still has Mandrake 9.2 installed without problems and I regard that version as an abortion compared to 10.0 CE. Counterspy
  12. There was a comment somewhere that said that German sites were more reliable so I used one of those. The issue of two errant signatures crashing the whole update is not addressed by having updated keys. Doing the update in pieces established that out of all of the programs two had bad keys and both were Mandrakesoft programs. I have run into this key problem numerous times in updating my collection of distros. I run fairly tight security on each and have not had any adverse consequences. The point is well taken though, that programs with bad signatures should not be downloaded. The problem is that many sites do not have the method of updating as clear as what was posted above. This is an elaborate explanation and it applied to Mandrakesoft itself. Are these instructions on the site? Are they on other sites commonly used and are they updated in similar fashion? The update method is hardly one that is easy for new users to understand. There is a fundamental security issue left unaddressed in this discussion and that is that the sites, like Texstar for example, should have it displayed prominently that 1. You should use the keys and 2. This is how. Counterspy
  13. You must use the Debian documentation to stay on track with any flavour of Debian. AFAIK, bvc is correct about dist-upgrade but I would take it one step further and state that it has been deprecated and should not be used at all. There is an apt-get how-to and several man pages which I doubt are included in the Knoppix install. It is also correct that you will hose your setup by changing to stable or testing. I always suggest that the Debian Reference Manual be downloaded as a PDF and kept for a ready reference. Counterspy
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