AussieJohn

Okay thanks BVC for your prompt reply.

However if anyone out there knows how to solve this problem then I would still like to hear from you.

This is because I still want to use a boot disk as the means of starting up this particular install because I am experimenting with it and do not want to involve it in a bootloader setup.

I have my Mand9.1 and Win2000Pro as my working OSs and do not want them screwed up by my playing around in Mand9.2.

So if anyone can help, then thanks in anticipation.

Cheers. John

Hello all.

Am I missing something here ?.

Obviously many have installed Mandrake9.2 by now . Probably 100's of thousands.

I have installed same as an upgrade and also as a clean install many times and have never been able to make a boot disk (always getting an error message saying insufficient space) and checking up on things I find that this is known to Mandrake and they suggest a remedy in their ERRATA . I have tried to follow their damned vague suggestion of using the SUPERFORMAT process to turn a !.44mbs floppy into something like 1.7mbs. I have had no success no matter what variations I have tried. I eventually got a process started but it would error stop on each progressing CYLINDER format and eventually reached cylinder 80 (of the83 cylinders selected) and would not progress any further (This was a new floppy and first formatted to FAT). This took over 12hours and still finally would not make a boot floppy for me. java script:emoticon('')

I find seemingly nothing about this problem here in Mandrakeusers.org.

1. Is this because this is so easily fixed that no one feels the need to mention it (maybe I am dumb and missing something simple here) ???.

2. Or is it as I suspect, no one makes boot disks anymore ???.

If someone knows how to make a larger capacity floppy then could you please explain the method to me in a fully descriptive form not the usual abbreviated notes that are usually only understood by an experienced computer buff.

Hope someone can help. Cheers. John (69yrs young) http://www.mandrakeusers.org/style_images/1/icon14.gif

I don't know if it is any help but when I have had menu items disappear I usually just open Control Centre then into SYSTEM then into MENUDRAKE then Menu Configuration Centre click on SYSTEM MENU then click on FILE then click on RELOAD SYSTEM MENU and finally click on SAVE.

II usually have Mandrake Control Centre, Control Centre and Konsole on the PANEL rather than the Desktop as I find it not only more convenient but they also never seem to disappear off the Panel whereas they sometimes disappear off the desktop after an upgrade or a "pretend" upgrade (a simple repair trick for most cases).

Hope this helps someone.

Cheers. John (69yrs. young)

Thanks Pzatch. John

BVC, you dream.

Mystified and tyme, you have it right. Mandrake rocks and rules.

John.

Thats very odd BVC, but I do not seem to recall pointing to you or any particular person.

All I can say is "if the cap fits wear it" . My comment was a general comment and should be seen this way and I suspect most readers would see it that way.

Thanks for the smiley as you tried to give me a slapdown.

Cheers. John

Hi Roland. You seem to be the only one to have understood the meaning of my post.

I did not suggest anyone leave just because they were not actually using Mandrake. I appreciate your efforts to help Mandrake users but I am a little sick of constant promotion of debian and gentoo as being superior and that Mandrake is really only for the likes of us who are not smart enough and called newbies. Like Mandrake is for newbies but if you want to no longer be considered a newbie then you have to migrate to one these other OSs.

It is called elitism and if you can't see that then that is sad.

I would have expected Moderators to be the first to show against elitism by example.

As a dedicated Mandrake user I CAN handle criticism of Mandrake because Mandrake was my choice as was coming to this site.

John

From what I can understand to be the case, Mandrake and RPM packagers who package RPMs for Mandrake strictly adhere to what is now deemed to be the RPM Standards protocol. Even though the RPM concept originated from Red Hat, Red Hat is becoming more like Micr.....ft and not adhering to current Standards protocols especially RPMs .

If I am wrong about my assessment of the situation then I will stand to be corrected but this would seem to be supported by Steves post.

Cheers. John (69yrs young)

Hi PeterPanic.

Have you tried the "pretend" upgrade procedure ?? I find that this method cures most of a lot of problems I occassionaly have caused by my continuous experimenting with MANDRAKE. All my troubles are caused by me and NOT BY MANDRAKE.

Put in your CD #1 of your Mandrake install CDs. When it reaches the stage where it asks whether to install or upgrade, select upgrade and follow on from there. This also gives you the opportunity to change from LILO to GRUB for your bootloader and many other things as well. I find this sorts out all my problems 95% of the time.

Regarding your comments about governments using LINUX.

NO GOVERNMENT OR BUSINESS WOULD BE STUPID ENOUGH TO RUN A COMPUTER SYSTEM WITHOUT AN " Uninterrupted Power Supply ".

I bought one the SAME DAY that I bought my first computer and have never been without one since (3yrs). Problems caused by Power failures are YOUR problems and not the fault of Mandrake or any other OS (including Win......s)

Do yourself a favour and get one as soon as possible. If you can't afford one then really you can't afford a computer either. Do not confuse Surge Busters with UPSs however. UPSs have surge busting capabilities built in but their primary purpose is to maintain power long enough for you to do SAVE and then an orderly shutdown.

I repeat, I have NEVER had a problem of anykind as a result of a Power failure or accidently disconnecting the Mains lead.

Anyhow try the "upgrade" method and see how you go.

Best of luck and cheers. John (69yrs young)

Thank you Pzatch for that. I will give that a try tomorrow.

Is this kind of problem really related with the monitor itself or is it related to the video card primarily ???.

If it is really a crap video card I think I could convince her to replace it with a better one now. But if it is a crappy monitor then she is planning to change to an LCD monitor soon anyhow and this means she will still need a more modern video card which can handle LCD monitors.

Thanks for your time and also thanks in advance for your next response.

Cheers. John

Hello all.

Mandrake is dying ????. I suppose Hell is currently freezing over at the moment as well !!!!!!

java script:emoticon(':D')

Has anyone given any thought that maybe the reason so many upgrades seem necessary at the moment is perhaps because Mandrake is acting far more quickly and precisely than instead of doing it over months as used to be the case.

And all you Debian and Gentoo fans, I would like to ask why are you so prominent on this Mandrake website if you regard them (debian and gentoo) as so superior to Mandrake. Frankly I get sick of having to find my way through this kind of mush just to read the Mandrake stuff that I am interested in.

If there is no similar debian or gentoo discussion websites ( if there aren't any then that must tell you something ) then you could always use JustLinux where you can discuss all OSs.

What I am saying does not run counter to free speech as some of you might claim ( an argument cop-out ). This is a Mandrake Users interest website and some of the Moderators should know better and set a better example. And I do not denegrate the excellent contribution they (and others ) make to our better use and understanding of MANDRAKE.

Cheers. John (69yrs young)

Hello all.

I am trying to help out a young woman who is interested in trying out LINUX for the first time in the form of Mandrake 9.1.

Although I have some reasonable success with many Mandrake Installs on my own computer (this is my fourth hardware build version)(8.0, 8.1, 9.0 and 9.1), I have not been able to get her computer running properly. During the install routine summary when I click on TEST I get an error message saying cannot determine monitor (or is it Screen.......... I am not sure which) layout.

Yes, Plug-n-Play is disabled in the bios and everything works AOK in the WinXP OS on her first partition.

Her Monitor is a COMPAQ Presario 1510 CPQ130E ( horiz: 31 - 50, vert: 50 - 100 )

and the Video Card is a TRIDENT BLADE 3DMVP4.

I cannot find the Monitor in the COMPAQ list or the correct Video card in the Trident list..

Perhaps someone might know what the correct equivalents are in the two lists and also how to boot into the GUI using some generic formula.

I tried using the settings that were detected (????) and set by Mandrake but it would not boot into a GUI ( selected KDE ). It would boot up to a command line requiring ID and then Password but when I entered startx, it would give a quick error message and proceed to freeze.

Most combinations of drivers and settings I have tried produce the same results but I have finally got it to boot up to a GUI screen which is badly blurred, pixilated and seems like offset double imaged and therefore still totally unusable.

java script:emoticon('')

I have tried to reinstall and also to try the pretend upgrade routine but still get the same trouble. I am using the same GENUINE Mandrake 9.1 disk set (3) as I use for my own installs so the problem is not related to the installation software.

java script:emoticon('')

Hope someone can help me win another convert ( she is already basically a good convert and I don't want to disappoint her because she realises this is a hardware compatability problem and not a Mandrake prroblem. What a pity more macho males could not understand this basic point )

Cheers. John (69years young)java script:emoticon(':D')

Thank you for informing where in Gnome you can set up for single click. Actually this information further reinforces my feelings about Gnome NOT being as intuitive as KDE.

My thanks to you all still stand. Cheers. java script:emoticon(':)') John

Am I correct in believing that Gnome -Mouse-configuration still only gives you the choice (?????) of double clicking.??? in Mandy9.2 KDE gives you the real choice of double or single clicking and I definately prefer single clicking. This is where it all starts so to me THIS IS important. I also found the overall look of Gnome to be dull and old fashioned.

And the arguments that this is faster than that is nothing more than prententious hair splitting and in other than life and death issues is irrelevant except to those who are constantly being pretentious about "their knowledge".

Cheers. John (69yrs young)

Using a single swap space partition for more than one Linux OS WILL NOT HOSE DOWN ONE OR THE OTHER LINUX. THAT IS A FURPHY (a lie) A swap space is only used as a temporary substitute for memory. i.e. it is only used when there is insufficient memory available at a particular time. Many computers now have high amounts of memory so that the swap space is hardly if ever used. Some users with up to 1gb of memory are setting up Linux WITHOUT swap space.

Cheers. JOHN

Hi BVC. With your years of experience it may be easy but for most of the rest of us it is not always easy. I remember one occassion when I had downloaded 5 rpms that were interdependant and for 5 hours I tried to install the first 2 of them and each one rejected because it needed the other first. When I finally worked out how to direct urpmi to the directory in which I held the uninstalled rpms, they were all installed and I had the desired programme up and running in less than 3 minutes. So sorry, no nah.

Cheers. John

Maybe we are better served here in Australia than France and elsewhere (would not surprise me). We can buy the official Mandrake products and have them delivered within usually at the very most 72 hours for the most distant places in the nation and betwween 24 and 48 hours for most populous areas of Australia from a Melbourne business called Everything Linux Australia.

Everything Linux carry stock of just about every Linux OS in existance plus books and all kind of extras. They have been going for years so they are not a flybynight outfit and they export all over the world.

If anything is faulty it is replaced quickly. Australian law is extremely tough in this area I can assure you.

Maybe all you disaffecteds could do better for yourselves by buying the official products from them rather than from Mandrake directly.

Their Website is :- http://www.everythinglinux.com.au

Cheers. John

The major advantage of urpmi apart from its ability to download necessary rpms is that it will install those rpms in the correct order necessary to satisfy the various dependencies needs. To try to do this manually can sometimes be near impossible.

Cheers. John

It shoul d be a . (dot) and not a , (comma) between go.png in

Icon=go.png

cheers. John

A note for great helper, ANNA and others.

Open up Konqueror and click on VIEW then click on SHOW HIDDEN FOLDERS.

Go to /usr/share/applnk-mdk/.hidden/screensavers.

in there you will see a .directory, open it with Kwrite and you will most likely see a text something along the lines of

[Desktop Entry]

Name=ScreenSavers

Icon=applications_sections.png

Type=Directory

Name [eng_Gb] = ScreenSavers

This entry is wrong and needs to be edited to read PRECISELY as follows:-

[Desktop Entry]

Icon=go,png

Type=Directory

X-KDE-BaseGroup=screensavers

Name [en]=ScreenSavers

Upper and lower case must be correct as shown.

Save the changes and reboot. All yor screensavers should now reappear in KDE.

Cheers and hope this helps everyone.

PS this only applies to Screensavers that have got lost and not to screensavers that have not already been installed.

The simple answer is that you don't have to delete anything.

Just disable the onboard sound in the bios AND set the audio jumpers on the mainboard to disabled as the previous posters have advised. Booting up will no longer look for the onboard sound. Forget the way Windows does thing.

Cheers. John

I have noted in all Linux forums that nearly all the rants and raves about not being able to successfully upgrade rather than do updated reinstalls, come from people who download the OSs from the internet . I have bought all my Mandrakes 8.0, 8.1, 9.0, and 9.1 CDs from Mandrake outlets AND I HAVE NEVER HAD A PROBLEM DOING EACH AS AN UPGRADE OF ONE OVER ANOTHER. I notice that most of the complainers practically never do a data checksum test of their downloaded CDs and this is where the problem is usually found. When they find this to be the case they download again and often the problem is resolved, but you don't hear any apologies from them to the OS assemblers such as MANDRAKE. And this on top of the fact that the biggest complainers don't contribute a single cent to Mandrake or even contribute any code to the Linux world.

Those who do contribute code, write programs and such do not make these kind of rants.

To the contributors I say god bless you .

To the ranters and ravers I say god help you because nobody else will.

95% of all Mandrake install problems and user problems stem from the user and not from the OS. I am no computer geek and only started in computers about 3.5yrs ago and I am only using the command line to install occassional TarBalls during this past year. I am 69years young.

I tried the various versions of RedHat and forever had troubles installing but with the same hardware and usage I HAVE NEVER HAD INSTALL PROBLEMS WITH MANDRAKE. I WONDER WHY THAT IS ???

I admire and respect the patience and effort people put into the Linux world and to Mandrake in particular

I may have built my own computer, this is my third, but I don't imagine for one minute that I am a computer expert........ ((ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. 1Gb Corsair 400 DDR Memory, Matrox G400 Video, AMD Athlon1600 XP CPU (soon to be Athlon 3200 XP), 2 of WD 80gb (8mb cache) Hard Drives, Pioneer DVD-ROM, ASUS 48/16/48 CD-R/RW, Mitsubishi 21inch Monitor, EPSON Stylus PHOTO EX Printer (A3 size), EPSON Perfection 2450 Photo Scanner, Logitech Dual beam laser USB Mouse, Logitech USB Internet Keyboard (latest) and finally a NETCOMM Roadster 11 Serial Modem ))

Sorry Moderators but my rant has been building up for a long time after seeing what you and other helpers have to put up with and still smile and while Mandrake continues to hang in so tenaciously for all of our benefit.

This time round I will be BUYING the full 9.2 Power package to do my little bit to help the battler, Mandrake "keep on keeping on".

Cheers to all good folk and folk of goodwill. John

Come on everyone. Don't tell me that most of you couldn't pick up that the article was a hoax as are all the other articles on the website? They are very clever articles to be sure. Or is it only us Aussies that can pick good hoaxes? Cheers. John :P :lol: :P :P :D

Hi. I am willing to bet that NOT having DISABLED Plug n Play is the cause of the problem. This is emphasised by the removing of the PCI-USB card removing the problem.

The first and MOST Important rule BEFORE installing any LINUX OS is :-

DISABLE plug n play IN THE BIOS.

It is the one rule most ignored by newbies who then complain that LINUX is too difficult.

Cheers. JOHN