AussieJohn

I just went to where you suggested to change the Scanner desktop Icon title but it seems it is different in Mandrake9.2 as compared to Mandrake9.1. When I get to /dynamic, I get /scanner instead of /scanners then I get a choice 3 icons namely gnome.desktop, kde.desktop and xsane.desktop. When I click on either the 1st, 2nd or the 3rd one it opens up the XSANE program. Even right clicking on any of them and selecting open with Kwrite shows Name=XSane $device and not the title as shown on the desktop itself. It looks like more searching is needed. Cheers. John

Thanks XOOX. You started out with a problem and solved it yourself, but in addition you have educated many of us , myself especially. so now I can make a change or two. Great stuff. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

1. I don't know how or if you can change the icon names. Whenever I tried changing them in Mandrake 9.0 or 9.1 it usually screwed things up and it was necessary to do a "dummy" upgrade procedure to restore things to normalcy. In my Man9.2 the cd-rom icons now thankfully do not show the path although the XSANE icon still does (just ugly and for no good reason at all) 2. you could try opening Mandrake Control centre ( now "configure your desktop center") then go to Look & Feel then Behavior and check that it is not ticked (USA=checked) there. The only time I have encountered the "removable" thing was actually in /mnt and by going into root I was always able to delete it. So I do not know if this the same problem. I have just checked my /etc/fstab and I find that it too has a "removable" as sda1. It is also in /mnt but I do not have it on my desktop (mandrake9.2) . So it may be you just simply remove it from the desktop while in root. You could also try going to /home/<your-account-name>/Desktop/.directory and completely delete the entire part which involves and refers to the "removable" icon. I hope some of this helps you. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

Hey !!!! What do you mean Ancient ???? You are only 10yrs past me and I'm not ancient although some times I feel like it. Remember the expression is "you are only as old as you feel ............... Just make sure they are over 18 before you do " Here is some info for you (and others) which may come in handy to understand what RAID is and does. A RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Discs. By connecting them in mode 0 (that is a zero and not an ooohhh) you use 2 or more Hard drives of the same capacity and connect them so that they operate as one big one equal the total of them e.g. 2 HDDs at 40 Gbs each makes a total of 80Gbs (a 30Gbs and a 40Gbs will give 60Gbs and not 80Gbs as you would expect------------see explanation near bottom of this post). When a string of data is sent to the hard drives, the first "bit" goes to beginning of the first HDD, the second "bit" goes to the beginning of second HDD. the third "bit" goes to the first HDD, the fourth "bit" goes to the second HDD, the fifth "bit" goes to the first HDD and so on etc. This method is called striping and makes for speedier movement of data TO and FROM the HDDs. Only major problem is that if one of the HDDs fail then you lose ALL your data because the HDD that did not fail has only every second bit of the data. When you connect 2 HDDs as RAID1, you are connecting so as to record the exact same data to BOTH HDDs simultaneously. It is called mirroring (but it is a misnomer because the data on the second HDD is not reversed in any way such as in a mirror). This has the major advantage that if one of the HDDs fail then you still have an exact copy on the other one. In other words it is an automatic BackUp system. Raid-0 is described as a Performance mode and Raid-1 is described as a security mode Both can be combined using 4 or more HDDs. In doing this what you are doing is creating two pairs of striped sets that are each a copy of the other. this means that in the event of 1 HDD failure then your data is still safe and in the unlikely occurrence of 2 HDDs you still have 4 chances out of 6 possible combinations of your data still being safe. I had 4 of 8Gbs HDDs running as Raid0+1 for 3.5yrs and only had one HDD fail so I never ever lost any data. It is important to remember that ALL the HDDs in any Raid mode should be the same size because the system will set up to the size of the smallest HDD so the extra capacity of the others is wasted. It is also preferable that they be of the same type. Now hopefully some one else can help us all in telling us how to set this up in Mandrake because my experience has only been with Raid in Windows 98SE and Windows 2000 Pro. I am now FULLY entrenched in MANDRAKE (1.5 yrs) Cheers. John (69yrs young) Ancient !!!!!! The cheek .

Wow. Do you give up that easily? Are you trying to tell me that setting up Windows for hardware is easier than Mandrake? I am wondering if I am on a different planet and we are talking about something totally unrelated to this planet. Continue to try to understand Linux and the way it does things (faster, accurately and reliably) Linux just uses a different approach to doing things. Mandrake is not just for people to learn about Linux the OS, it is fundamentally to enable you to do all the work processes that you can do in Windows and more that Windows cannot without milking you of hundreds of dollars more at a time. You have an odd mixture of hardware but other people using Linux have the same hardware (often deliberately designed to work to Microsoft) have set their gear up AOK. That is why MandrakeUsersBoard exists, to help others have an easier path to solutions to problems such as yours. I think you would find if you did some research that out of the box, Mandrake has hundreds more drivers for hardware, both old and especially new, than you will ever find in any version of Windows. Feel free to cease trying to use Mandrake but remember your decision says more about you than it does about Mandrake or Linux. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

What I don't understand is what possessed you to move the CD-ROM from Primary slave to Secondary master when there is nothing to be gained except configuration problems. The new HDD would have worked perfectly as Secondary master and is preferable because it makes communication between Hard Drives faster since they are not both trying to use the same cable path at the same time i.e. simultaneously. The same thing applies when you have two CD-ROM devices e.g. a DVD-CDROM and a CD-R/RW. What did you expect to gain? Perhaps it would still be easier at this stage to fit the CD-ROM to its original position , put the new HDD in Secondary master and then take it all from there. If you did a complete fresh Mandrake install then that is another matter. If you didn't then it might be an idea to do a "dummy" upgrade and this often helps to give a resolution to a lot of configuration problems. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

Although it too late for this year, these two sites may be handy for next year and not just for Christmas either. 1. http://www.everythinglinux.com.au 2. http://www.linuxjewellery.com/ Both have very good reputations dealing with overseas orders and the jewellery is of unique design and Australian made. (By the way the spelling of jewellery is the correct ENGLISH spelling. Other spellings are USA versions. I only found this out when I did a spell check and it said it was wrong so I rechecked with an Oxford Dictionary.) Cheers John (69yrs young)

Hello. When using Kongi as a file browser, if you right click on the background you will NOT get COPY, you will only get COPY TO-> or MOVE TO->. When you right click on a folder itself within Kongi you should always get both CUT and COPY options. As far as I know you can't (unless you are a programmer who can do such things ...... I certainly couldn't ) change it to be right click available all the time. I could be wrong on this point. Hope this clarifys it for you. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

The differences are due to whether you are using Kongi as a "file browser" or a "web page browser" Yes, I know my description is not technically correct but I am sure you get the point. John. (69yrs young)

Hello mandrake_alf. Go to /etc/sane.d/epson.conf. For simplicity, open epson.conf in Kwrite and delete the entire text. Then type in the following as shown below:- usb /dev/usb/scanner0 usb 0x04b8 0x010b Then click on File and save. Reboot. Yes reboot !!!! I am prersuming that you got the 0x04b8 and 0x010b figures by doing the "Acquire vendor ID and Model ID routine" which looks about right for an Epson Scanner. Please note the spaces and also that they are ZEROS and not the letter o. Hope it helps. John (69yrs young)

Finding the Mozilla files and folders you may want to delete is easy if you first first select Start Applications -> Applications -> File Tools -> Find Files. This will open up KFind. In the part called NAMED, left click in it and simply type in mozilla ( lower case will do and make sure the star symbol is still there). In the part titled Look In, select file:/ Click on Find and after a while it will give you a list of all files mozilla. It is a simple job then of going to those file sites and deleting them. As said by another post, you will also need to use the "show hidden files" facility in View of Konqueror. You may also have to go root to be able to delete some of these files. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

Thank you PMPATRICK, COUNTERSPY and PZATCH. Good info in terms I can understand. I am learning immensely here. Will keep my promise to report on how I make out. Thanks and cheers. John (69yrs young)

Thank you IPHITUS. Another Aussie I believe. I am going to try your suggestion of using LILO. Up to now I have been using GRUB. When you install and use grub as the bootloader, it shows FLOPPY in the boot menu. I got a similar idea to yours and tried to foot the floppy from there but it did not work. Maybe it will work using LILO instead. COUNTERSPY, hello and thanks for your homeland info that you are from Canada. The 2.88mbs floppy setting in the bios does not seem to effect anything at all so I may change it back sometime later. However the history is informative and I appreciate that. More pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that is MANDRAKE Boot disk. We still haven't heard from anyone who maybe has been successful in booting Mand9.2 from a floppy so If there is anyone then please come forward because I am sure I am not the only one who would like to know. Cheers all. Will keep you posted. John (69yrs young)

Thanks GOWATER and LINUXKNIGHTand others for your insight into the fact that maybe the CDROMs, although official Mandrake ones, could be the real problem. I have only the usual dial up internet connection so downloading is not an option, and had noticed many threads regarding install problems from downloaded Mandrakes and always believed that buying the official ones made more reliability sense ( besides also financially supporting Mandrake). Thanks to your more reasoned posts I can now see that this is a possible reason for the problems. I have noticed that my supplier is clearing out present disk stocks for nearly half usual price and am starting to wonder if this an acknowledgement of a problem with that batch. After all 9.2 has not been out very long and it seems strange to be having a heavily discounted sale already. I shall be following up on this in detail and will keep everyone posted of what I find. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

Thanks PMPATRICK for your extra info. I have to admit that while the MAN9.1 on a boot disk formatted to 1.73mbs worked, I did not try the same routine with a 1.93mbs disk in MAN9.1. I am about to reinstall 9.1 on a spare set of partitions and I will try it out to see if it works. If it does them it will reinforce my belief that MAN9.2 is the problem and not the boot procedure. One thing I especially notice is that Boot disks in 9.1 show the name of the man that wrote the boot program then you have the two progress bars as it is loading. With the 9.2 disks this does not occur . There is a pause then it goes straight to the MBR, shows GRUB then on as usual. (or into Win2000 if the MBR has been cleared) I also note that in the BIOS of my A7N8X-Deluxe mainboard there is a setting for selecting 1.44mb or 2.88mb floppys and it is currently now set to the 2.88mb setting. The Windows 98 boot floppy still works AOK seemingly normally. And thanks COUNTERSPY for your moral support on another subject currently being discussed. So you are a young 66. Live long, healthy and happy like myself. By the way PMPATRICK and COUNTERSPY what parts of the Planet are you pleased to call home, obviously mine is Australia, state of Queensland, city of Cairns. Will let you know of my next tests. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

BVC you certainly come on strong with your criticism while acting as a "moderator". You obviously did not read my comment fully, if you had you would have seen that my comment referred to a possible debate about which version had more or less updates after release. It is still irrelevant to what I was saying in my first post. This comment did not reflect on anything else that was said by others. Funny isn't it that other moderators did not find it necessary to be so rude and pointed. Cheers. John.

Thank you Counterspy. In my equipment summary I neglected to include Matrox Millenium G400 Max Video card. I too hope and trust that Mandrake come out of the bankruptcy situation AOK in January. Cheers... John (69yrs young)

As I said in my post, I am using OFFICIAL GENUINE paid for DISKS made by Mandrake. I have only ever used Western Digital HDDs and NEVER had troubles with them in either Red Hat or Mandrake8.0/9.0 or 9.1. ALL my friends use WDs and also have never had troubles involving Linux from an HDD standpoint. I use Mandrake solely as a desktop computer and for such use 9.1 has been near perfect even before I installed recommended updates. Frankly I am not interested in the debate about which version had how many updates and bug fixes versus the other one. To me it is irrelevant. 9.1 worked flawlessly for what i used it for and 9.2 does not (before or after installing updates). Since you ask about my system, here it is: 2 of 80gbs Western Digital Hard Drives, 1 of 8.1gbs WD HDD and run from a Promise ULTRA66 card (used as an exchange partition between Mandrake and Windows2000Pro), ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe Main Board, Corsair 1Gbs (2 x 512mbs) 3200 DDR low latency Memory, AMD1600 Athlon XP CPU with Thermalright SLK-900U Cooler (plus 90mm fan), Pioneer 16 x DVD/cdrom, ASUS 48/16/48 CD-R/RW, Creative 5.1 Digital Live Audio, Enemax 400watt Power Supply, APC Back-Ups 500 UPS. Next we have a Mitsubishi Diamond view 21" Monitor, Epson Perfection 2450Photo Scanner and an Epson Stylus PhotoEX A3 Printer, and finally an Altec Lansing ACS56 4+1 Sound system. If you can blame any part of my system for all the troubles then you must be pretty clever. I would certainly like to be enlightened how it could work with 9.1 and be faulty under 9.2. I built this system myself and is my 5th version so I think I have a little bit of knowledge of what works and what doesn't work with Mandrake by now. Yet I always remain open to new advice and information because I do not claim to know all or many of the answers. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

Yes. Regardless of all the possible flames I will get , I have to say that reluctantly I have concluded that Mandrake9.2 is a real lemon. I will be going back to setting up 9.1 which I found to be reliable and easy to install and look after. Here are some of the problems (there are too many to list them all. And all despite over 10 to 12 installs and reinstalls on a number of partition arrangements and using 2 different hard drives -------hda and hdd........each 80gbs by WD Inability to make a working bootable BootUp disk. Even on reformatted floppys made to 1.93mbs. (Thanks to PMPATRICKs help) Scanner settings repeatedly dropping out after a reboot. Screensavers disappearing after a 2nd reboot after restoring the.directory in screensavers. Error15 :"file cannot be found" ---- during bootup after selecting a kernel other than the default. (2.4.22-21) And it gets even worse after installing ALL the errata updates and upgrades etc. I started using Mandrake 9.1 within 2 weeks of it being released and almost never had any problems installing or using it and have installed it on four other peoples (ladies) computers with no trouble at all. This has made them new devotees of Mandrake. With Mandrake 9.2, I have had nothing but trouble from the very first reboot so I have absolutely no intention of upgrading or installing it on their computers. To do so would potentially lose these new Linux users. No doubt there will many of the purists that say each of the problems can be overcome by doing this and that. I just don't happen to be a programmer or a Computer Technician. Why should I spend my time trying to fix things in 9.2 that worked excellently in 9.1. And by the way, I bought my Mandrake disks--the official and authentic Mandrake ones. The main visual advantage of the 2.4.22-21 kernel from the errata site over the 9.2's 2.4.22-10 was that the GL screensavers such as Euphoria and Fireworks ran normally smoothly whereas in 9.1 they ran at about a frame per second......a real pain. I tried installing 9.1 and only installing the new kernel but by the time uprmi had installed what had to go with it from the 9.2 CDROMS, it finished up as a pseudo 9.2 install............hardly any good for anything. I am still a totally dedicated Mandrake devotee and will stick with 9.1 as my main Linux OS until Mandrake 10 comes out and see if they make a better hash of it than they did with this one. In the meantime I will continue to play around with 9.2 and keep up to date on its forlorn progress. I just think it is such a shame that Mandrake keeps pretending that everything is AOK when it is painfully obvious that it isn't. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

Hello again PMPATRICK. Well I have succeeded in making quite a number of large value floppys now (1.9mbs as you mentioned) and have successfully and repeatedly made boot disks in every occassion I have installed 9.2 on my machine ( some 9 times so far and still counting) and it doesn't matter whether Grub is installed on hda or the MBR has been cleared, i STILL CANNOT BOOT FROM THE FLOPPY. Is MANDRAKES ERRATTA advice really a huge lie if it knows that even when you make a floppy disk capable of containing the boot up files, that you are unlikely to be able to boot from it anyways ???. Your experience seems to support this view. Or does someone else out there Know how to make the machine boot the floppy or should I E-Mail ASUS for info on how to do this ???. What has me mystified is that I Reinstalled Mandy9.1 on a different set of partitions and made 2 boot disks, one with standard 1.44 and one with a newly made 1.73 and I then tested booting from both floppys some 4 times each and had NO trouble from either one, certainly not the 1.73 formatted one which I repeatedly rechecked with mdir to be certain it stayed 1.73mbs and had not somehow reverted to 1.44mbs. From this it would seem that the bios can handle a larger than 1.44mbs floppy disk. I am starting to believe the problem really is Mandrake 9.2 not giving the floppys the correct information and this despite the fact that I have installed the latest bug fixes up to date 24/11/2003. I have just downloaded the draxtools 25/11/2003 and will be installing it in a short while so I will soon know if this fixes the problem or not. All I know is that I am going to stick with this. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

I have had Corsair Twinex 1Gb (2 x 512Mb) on my machine for 6months with Windows 2000Pro and Mandrake9.1 and also now 9.2 and have NEVER had problems with the full amount of memory being detected as shown in Control Centre -> Information -> Memory.'' To the man considering setting up XP . Do yourself a GIANT favour and forget XP, if you must do a Windows then go for WIN2000 Pro with SP3. It is much more stable than XP ever will be no matter how many service packs (rumour has it that Mic........ft only brought out XP because it found that Win2000 was TOO reliable and stable ) and does not require enabling (activation) procedure. Also by using it you are endorsing this hideous and freedom stealing enabling (activation ) routine. Cheers. John (69yrs young) :D :D :D

PMPATRICK. Hello again. Just to let you know that your procedure details worked PERFECTLY. I have made 8 reformatted floppys to the value you suggested and have used 2 of them already with instant success. Because of your detailed information rather than abbreviated info I was not only able to do what i originally asked but I have learn't more as well. When I looked at the /dev/fd0 then I saw the fd0u1722 referred to in your info and then realised that the floppy could be formatted to larger values by selecting one of the higher numbered fd0u.... . I realised that these contain the full instructions for formatting to that particular size and although I will not be delving into this kind of info it is nice to understand a little more how things work in the overall scheme of things. May I be so bold as to suggest you put your instructions into the FAQ section of this and other forums. Yours is the kind of answer format most of us really need. Thanks again and cheers. John(69yrs young) :D :lol:

Hello iomari. That is an excellent question and I too would like to know the answer. Does anyone out in the digital galaxy know ??? Cheers. John (69yrs young)

My Anti-Virus program for use in Windows (2000) is a freebie from a company called AVG ( it is based in Germany I think) It is free for personal use and chages only for business use. I have always had suspicions about McAffee and Norton and their sell campaigns. I am still not entirely convinced that they do not let out viruses or encourage virus makers. Funny how few if any virus makers are caught. I have more faith in someone like AVG because they are not trying to financially exploit the average home user. This is supported by the fact that their product has no advertising contained in the free version and download updates can be done every few days. I also use Zone Alarm which is generally acknowledged to be the best around (free or shareware types) and this from a man who was hated and denegrated by the rest of the "security industry" heavyweights. Many people seem to forget this point. I do all my Internet activity using Mandrake and Galeon and have done it this way for the past14 months. Galeon is excellent . I only connect to the internet from Windows from programmes I am updating or upgrading and I always do a full virus scan after each download. I have only ever had 3 virus in the past 4 years and NONE has ever got past my Anti-Virus protection so I have never had an infection. So in Windows, AVG and Zone Alarm plus some commonsense practices and you have some peace of mind. In LINUX you have almost total peace of mind. Windows safe and secure ???? . Not bloody likely. Cheers. John (69yrs young)

PMPATRICK you are a thorough gentleman. Thank you sincerely. This is precicely the type of help I was hoping for and expressed in the terms I can easily follow. To the other gentlemen, thanks also. However I am not really concerned with how it is not necessary to use a boot disk nor that one can use LILO for multiple Linux OSs. I prefer grub and it is very difficult to set up grub with 2 Linux OSs (at least it is for me) I will let you know PMPATRICK, what results I get. Cheers. John (69yrs young)