AussieJohn

Well Arthur I gave your suggestion a try and here is the results from Konsole:- [root@localhost root]# !/bin/bash bash: !/bin/bash: event not found [root@localhost root]# modem_run -m -f /zzz/alcaudsl.sys [root@localhost root]# pppd call adsl [root@localhost root]# sleep 4 [root@localhost root]# ifconfig lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:338 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:338 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:23804 (23.2 Kb) TX bytes:23804 (23.2 Kb) [root@localhost root]# iptables -A INPUT -i ppp0 -p tcp --syn -j DROP [root@localhost root]# The first event was the killer , where it said "event not found". Should there have been a space between the exclamation mark ! and the / or just as I had it??? I checked that every programme you recommended was actually installed, and it was. I should point out that that I was (am) using the default 2.6.3- (I think it is 4)kernel that comes with Mandrake 10 CE. By the way does anyone know what the kernel version number is?? Is it 5 ?? Would it possibly make a difference here??? I'll keep trying all your suggestions till this problem is licked. Thanks EVERYONE. John 4.10 PM here.

Thank you ARTHUR. I will be trying this out in the next 24hrs and will continue to track your help details. I might start to make some headway at last. Well I hope so and hope reigns supreme. Cheers. John.

I am not certain but I think almost every ISP in Australia can handle Linux. I am certain Telstra Bigpond, the biggest, with probably 70% of the market (not certain of the correct %) and Austar which has the biggest % of the remainder certainly can. Am not sure about the remainder but I haven't heard of any that cannot. This doesn't mean there aren't any of course. It would seem however that we in Australia are much better served than a lot of other countries. Kmack. Didn't take you long to settle in back home. ( you were back home at this point weren't you???) He He He :D

So it would seem that my conclusion about this being a Mandrake stuff up is proving correct. Earlier the problem was being blamed on the 2.6 kernel but other posters like myself have tried the 2.4 kernels and it still won't work. I can hardly wait to get my hands on the new Official Mandrake 10 set on the 10 th of this month to see if Mandrake has fixed the problem but I am not holding my breath, especially since there is no word about it from anyone at Mandrake. I haven't tried it with Mandrake 9.2 yet but I think I will reinstall it on my playaround partition group where I currently have a 2nd Mandrake 10CE installed because it seems that many have got SpeedTouch to work there. To put it mildly, I am always bloody on edge working the internet with Windows 2000 even though I am using Mozilla and am constantly (every 2 or 3 days) updating my Anti-Virus and Anti-SpyWare. However I will keep on trying ALL and EVERYTHING that anyone suggests so as that well used expression says "keep those suggestions coming in folks" . At this point I must make a public expression of thanks and gratitude to STEVIEAG in the UK for his generousity and work in compiling a mass of packages and helpful hints he sent to me here in Australia in the hope that one, some or all might help. Unfortunately it didn't help but that does not take off any of the shine on his Star. Thank you sincerely, Stevieag. You are a champion. Cheers. John

While I realise all this could be a learning experience I ask the question here, What is your preferred interest ??? 1. to solve this problem 2. to have a working system as soon as practicable If it is 1. then ignore this post. If is 2 . then there are two options and each only take from 30 to 45minutes Stick in your No 1 CD of the install set and let it start its routine. Carefully watch for a window where it asks you whether you want to UPGRADE........ or do a NEW Install. Now if you get to the part where it starts to ask you to setup partitions etc without having earlier asked the previous then it means that your Linux install is so screwed up that the install process has not been able to detect the presence of a viable working system so matter what you do stuffing around trying to fix a socalled boot problem you are not going to get anywhere so you might as well go ahead and do a fresh install at that point. If on the otherhand you did get the Upgrade offer then it means your OS has been detected as a viable working system and you are in luck. All you have to do is select upgrade and let it run its course. When you get near the end of this "upgrade" you can make the appropiate selections for booting such as Grub or Lilo, whatever is your preference. PLEASE MAKE SURE you check all the other stuff as well such as printer, internet, display etc., When you reboot you should find a clean boot up run this time. I have found time and again that this procedure has cleaned up most problems and I do not spend most of my time trying to fix things, I spend most of my time enjoying using my Mandrakes. I enjoy my time here at MUB, learning from others and trying in turn to also help others. A lot of the problems I see being posted I feel could have been eliminated by using this approach but I am loath to be involved because I often get the feeling that many want to do it the hard way. Any way the choice is yours. My POSSIBLE ( I certainly can't guarantee anything any more than anyone else can) easy way or the long way round. Cheers. John

So far as having read capability of all the Windows partitions is concerned, I have always played it safe by creating the kind of seperate Fat32 type of Partition you first enquired about and called it Exchange. In windows it is detected and I name it Exchange there also and as a symbolic middle finger raised to Microsoft I change the ICON to a TUX penguin. Back in Mandrake I ALWAYS go into MCC (Mandrake Control Centre) then into Mount Partitions and deliberately UNMOUNT ALL the Windows partitions other than the newly created EXCHANGE. After having done that I go to /mnt and right click on each of the win shown and right click on each one in turn and select Properties to make sure it is only about 4 or 5kbs and then delete them (this has to be done as Root) This check is essential or you could accidently delete windows data residing on those partitions. The reason for all this is I had a bad experience with Red Hat a number of years ago where with my playing around with Red Hat to learn things and experiment, that I screwed up Red Hat so bad that it was unusable. I found to my horror that it had screwed up my Windows OS as well ( No it was not an MBR problem -- I had already learnt how to solve that problem) . I realised that if the partitions are of the two OS are actively connected then Screw up Linux and you can screw up any other connected OS (windows or Linux) even if they are supposedly Read Only and should not be effected. Cheers. John

Hello NATE. Am I correct in concluding that you are in Australia and using BIGPOND ADSL??? Question :- Have you asked Bigpond to send you a replacement CDROM?? I suppose they do not have spare copies because the CDROM is normally supplied with the modem kit package. If they won't or can't then I'll do a clone copy for you from my CDROM ( hope Bigpond has no objection to this, I couldn't imagine they would since it is only of use to anyone they supply the 530 modem to and who are already their customers) and send it to you. Contact me via PM first so we can communicate directly then I can get your Mail address to Post it to you Express Post On Tuesday Morning if that is OKAY for you. Cheers. John.

I am sorry to say it ALA but Mandrake did not screw up anything. You did. This should not be taken as a criticism of you. You are a newbie to Linux and therefore do not have experience. I suspect that you have a fair amount of experience with Windows and have tried to use it in setting up Mandrake. Mandrake IS NOT Windows so you cannot use your Windows ideas in Mandrake. I seriously suggest you go to the following website to view the complete Mandrake Howto that a MUB member by the name of ARTEE has generously put together for everyones use. http:/www.mandrake. tips.4.free.fr/install100.html Follow his advice and you WILL quickly have a properly working Mandrake installation. Apart from that you will have to clear the MBR to be able to get to your Windows OS. Your Windows OS would not have been affected only the ability to get into it. Or are you already working from your Windows OS to be able to communicate here. One other thing. The aggressive damning of Mandrake in your post may have been the reason you have not had a response from others yet. Keep it cool and you will soon get heaps of help as you need it. Finally. A very big WELCOME to the world of Linux and to MANDRAKE in particular. :D

It doesn't. that is why I said I used CDEX to convert the MP3s to wav. then when that is done you select create Music CD in XCDROAST and it converts the wav to the proper Audio disk format. I can't off hand remember what it is called. Hang on, I just checked and is called cda. The point is that Nero, K3B or Xcdroast must have its input in wav form first before they can create the Audio Cd. I do not think any of them can convert from MP3 or OGG back to wav except by using plugins of some sort and I have never used any. I should also point out that ripping, although fairly effective, it is not a lossless exchange and when you convert back again then you are going to lose even more quality. Since a lot of commercial disk playing devices can play MP3 and ordinary CDs (some can also additionally play OGG), and you can play just about any music format type on a computer there would not seem to be a real need or advantage to converting back to cda But if you mean "burning mp3 to a cd in the MP3 format" itself then that is a different story altogether. All you do is burn a DATA cd because MP3 and OGG are a DATA (i.e. digital) form of music which wav and cda are NOT. Just because MP3 and OGG are music does not imply that you use the "create audio cd" modes in the burners. YOU MUST USE THE "create Data cd".

He He HE. Do I detect BVC having a little lend of some of you???? I have no troubles using XCDroast or K3B (the very latest version of XCDROAST is in Mand10 and I have the latest tar from K3Bs website) for ANY burning. I like the CLONE capability of K3B and use it when making copies of music or data CDs. So far as music goes, if I want to convert wav files to MP3 or OGG, I use CDEX in win2000 then burn them to disk from within Mandrake10. Again I prefer CDEX to convert MP3 or OGG back to wav for then burning an Audio CD in Mandrake. If I just want to rip a Cd then I find GRIP to be excellent. (CDEX when in Windows) I never seem to have any slow functioning that some you talk about. Sure I have 1Gb of memory and a 1Gb Swap partition now, but before I had that I still never had any such problems of slowness. I think you may be headed for the old "if it isn't difficult to use in Linux then it can't be any good " syndrome. Cheers. John.

Calling it poppycock doesn't mean you are correct Iphitus. I have many times been asked by people to help them with problems such as trying to install new OSs on their machines or install upgrade components and the only ones that have ever been bas+++ds to work on were the likes of Dell and Hewlett Packard. It is common knowledge that when you think you have a normal SoundBlaster card it is in fact TOTALLY unusable under Linux. I wonder why that is ????. and who are among the biggest users of Winmodems. Totally impractical to do this today??? with profit margins for hardware constantly shrinking. Dream on. JB

That business of not stressing your computer by turning it off and on was based on fact as was also the original idea of using screensavers. With the earlier phospher coatings on monitor screens, you could get a semi permanent and sometimes permanent ghosting on your screen by burn-in if parts of the screen were subjected to very long durations of non moving but bright images. Screen savers helped to prevent this problem by starting a moving image if the screen was inactive of movement for any length of time. With the improvements in Phospher technology this is no longer a real issue anymore and screensavers now serve a different purpose, namey saving boredom from an inactive screen imagery and also for entertainment. The Power on/off thing originated from the fact that when a computer was running then naturally everything heated up, and this included components and their solder connections. The components and the solders had different thermal expansion characteristics, that is they expanded at different rates and therefore also cooled at different rates. As a result, the solder connection would eventually stress and over time become what is called a "dry" joint, meaning it acted as if it wasn't soldered but mechanicaly still held the component in place. Majority of the times it would be a Resistor connection because they tend to get vey hot relative to their size. If a solder connection was not done correctly in the first place ( in early days all solder connections were manually done) then this could also happen at this point. Nowadays the technology of solder and robotic soldering has all but wiped out this phenomena. Today the main issue is about saving electrical energy. Assuming we use our computer just 8hrs in a day but running it full time. we are WASTING almost half of its energy consumption even if we use standy techniques etc or 2 thirds of its energy consumption if we do not use any saving routines. One final point. It is not necessary to reboot any LINUX, let alone Mandrake, daily or at any other regular interval. You gain nothing from it. Only Windows seems to benefit from this idea but really only if it is actively used a great deal. Anyway if you decide to become energy saving conscious and turn your computer off when you are not actually using it then you are going to be regularly rebooting anyhow. Cheers. John.

The advice is right. You CAN build your own.. In October 98 I bought my first computer from an OEM (Other Equipment Manufacturer) and not a big name brand one. Even though I checked as carefully as possible, with my totally zero knowledge of computers, I found after gaining a bit of knowledge over 12 mths that I had basically been conned. They used parts that were big name parts but I found that they had used the very cheapest versions of each part. The computers they submitted to magazines for comparison testing used the same named parts but only the best versions as it turned out later. I started replacing one part after another with better ones and eventually had rebuilt it entirely by March 2000. I then decided to build a totally new machine from scratch and using only the best practical components ( not a gaming machine............not interested and never will be) . I bought a MacCase Full Tower case and went from there. Its internals have been rebuilt twice since and I have even modded it with side window, extra cooling fans, cold cathode lighting, leds and so on.. I now have a Mitsubishi 21inch Monitor, Epson Photo EX Printer (A3 size paper), an Epson Perfection2450 Photo Scanner, and an Altec Lansing4.1 Sound System. And even if I say so myself, it is a pretty hot machine and system. Well even my much younger friends say it is so I guess it must be right. I have now also built 2 complete and new systems for friends, naturally with Mandrake included. I ordered the appropiate parts and components, they paid for the parts etc and I assembled and set them up. They have been running for almost a year now without any real problems apart from one which had a HDD failure and is being replaced under warranty. The point I am trying to really make is that if someone of my age then, 65yrs old, with no experience can do that, then ANYONE CAN DO IT. That is why I feel so comfortable in joining with the other posters in saying...... BUILD IT YOURSELF. You will have a superior machine than most and it will have cost a hell of a lot less into the bargain.. You will never regret it. What many do not realise is that Dell, HP etc have custom BIOS chips on their Motherboards designed to make it extremely difficult to use other supplier components and use specially modified internal modem and audio cards that will work ONLY with their own proprietry drivers. That shows up in the number of posts of newbies trying to install Linux on these machines. Cheers. John.

Huerzo. Yes you did. Well done and very sophisticated to be sure. Cheers. John.

There goes that same damned problem again..........trying installing Linux on first partitions and then trying to install XP (or any Windows) on subsequent partitions. It just will not work this way. Bloody Windows thinks it is the only OS in the world and has first rights to first partitions. Linux will work on any partition no matter where it is placed, it doesn't care where it is placed so long as it can bed down for the duration. " even though Windows demands the inside rail position, Once the race starts Linux just bounds away into the lead effortlessly getting further ahead all the time " That is the reason you finally had success, you finally did it the correct way. Congratulations and success now enjoy. I never cease to be amazed at how hard all these guys work at trying to help resolve problems for people (yes, including myself) and all by remote contact. Great stuff. One of the problems with XP in particular, is that it spreads its files all over its partition (not to be confused with fragmentation, which spreads a file all over the partition) and if its partition was originally the entire disk then unless you use something like Partition Magic to carefully move these files back closer, i.e. consolidate them, to the beginning of the partition, before resizing the WINDOWS Partition, then I am afraid you are going to either lose (note spelling,,,,it is not loose as I constantly see being used.......not even in America) or corrupt your XP Os to the point that it has to be totally reinstalled if you want it to be at least somewhat stable in the future. Another note :- YOU SHOULD ALWAYS DEFRAG ANY WINDOWS os before doing any resizing of its partitions. But with XP this does not necessarily result in ALL files being consonsolidated back to the beginning of the partition. It does help help though. Mandrakes' Partition Wizard is extremely good at partitioning, but its abilities to accurately moves files during this procedure is still not (yet) as good as Partition Magic. (getting very close) Cheers. JOHN.

I support BVC on this one. When you click on an RPM package to select it to be removed, the package handler will pop up a list of any other dependencys that would be removed as well. If it shows the potential removal of a package dependency you do NOT want removed then obviously you DON'T remove the one you would have liked to removed. I think cannonfodders suggestion is OK if you have more experience knowing what you want or don't want even though a reinstall doesn't take very long with Mandrake. Even having a Separate /home partition you still have to do a bit of fiddling around again to get things back to the way you liked them. Cheers. John

I know, but it "usually" does and when it does not then I have usually found I had some screwy problems some where, that is why I said I was a little concerned ("disconcerting") and NOT that it was definately a problem. He-He-He. I've learnt to choose my words much more carefully since starting to post here at the MUB. I never knew there were so many bush lawyers in existance. Cheers. JOHN Bush lawyers............................THAT DOES NOT INCLUDE YOU aRTee, I am pleased to say. Hi ciinien, are you having any luck yet????? John

Don't unpack them. It is not necessary. Just start up DESKTOP Control Centre, select Look & Feel, select Icons. Near the bottom of the window you will see "install new Icons" just click on it and use the drop down menu to take you to where ever you have placed the tar package of icons, and when you find it clickon it and follow through the procedure. It is as simple as that. You will now see the package in the list if other icon sets and if you want it to be the new default then highlight it and click Apply. Done. Now if it does not install then it means that the icon packager has not included the appropiate bits and pieces ( so you are out of luck this time) or that you had unpacked the package first or that you don't have access rights. (you may need to do it from ROOT and if so be very careful and then get back out as quickly as possible before you accidently make some kind of mistake and damage anything. If you gather a collection of icon sets then keep them all in one direcrory of their own for the install purpose and if you want, you can do as I do and that is create an additional directory where you can have them all located in their unpacked form which you can then use if you want to change individual icons. The unpacking requires nothing more than LEFT clicking on the package and it will then appear in Folder form, RIGHT clicking on the folder and then COPY (DO NOT USE CUT) . Go to your new directory made for the purpose and RIGHT click in it and select PASTE. Again done. Cheers. John Hi Ixthusdan and lovely lady wife.

In my days as a Medical Electronics Engineer I found that almost every salesman was a certifiable full time liar. I spent far too much of my various employer companys time trying to clean up the customer relations messes left behind by these salesmen who had already moved to higher paid positions in other companies based on the great sales records that they had made in the previous 12 months. Despite my hard earned qualifications, I made about two thirds of what most of them got paid (I won't say they earned because that would be a lie) despite that during my last 12 years in this field I had 7 jobs and had not applied for any of them. In the last year of a 7yr term with one company (in Australia) I was offered by the companys USA headquartered INTERNATIONAL SERVICES Manager my choice of one of two of the companys USA regions as Service Manager. So I think with my background and recognition I can speak with some authority on the subject of sales people. Even today I got a phone call from some outfit who introduced themselves and before the person could say anything more, I said "OK what are you trying to sell me??" I got the answer "A$8,500 worth of goods and services for A$97.50". I said "no thanks". The caller clicked off faster than I did. Was I rude??? I do not think so, in fact I know so. This call centre person is a sales person, just another spiv. I find that most people with a sense of ethics and wrong and right do not last long in the sales world. You only have to look at real estate people. the greatest nonjailed collection of liars and cheats in existance as is also the case with lawyers. Of course there are some honourable people amongst them but they seem to plug on just to prove you don't have to be a liar and a cheat to make a living, but do they make the really big bucks?, no way.. End of rave, rant or whatever you might feel like calling it. Cheers. John.

Hello Ciinien. I think your problem is in /etc/fstab Both lines for cdroms have dev=/dev/hdd and dev=/dev/hdc respectively. I think you should change the /hdd part to /cdrom and the /hdc part to /cdrom2 Do not alter anything else, then click to save the changes. You will need to reboot. If that does not work first off then change the cdrom to cdrom2 and the cdrom2 to just cdrom, of the bits you changed earlier. Do not alter anything else. Again SAVE and reboot. I find the cdrom listed as a higher number hd, namely hdd, and the cdrom2 listed as a lower hd, namely hdc, a little disconcerting. So you might need to do this 2nd alternative I give you here for it to work cheers. John.

Hi BVC and ANON. I have been using Mandrake10 CE for about 3 weeks now. A lot of the packages including kernels appear to have EXACTLY the same version numbers as in the CE. I was of the impression that many of these would have had bug fixes. Wouldn't that usually mean at least a .1 increase in the version number, or doesn't it work that way???. This is not an implied criticism of anything, only an attempt to find out and understand how the system works. Actually I am waiting for the availability of the cdrom disk set of Mandrake10 OE in a week or two so I really do not intend to download any of these updates at this time. So my interest is just that, interest. Thanks in advance.

Hi WilliamS. I use the same as you do. The only time I have come a little unstuck is when I have not downloaded other than what I think I needed and then when using urpmi to install the programs it tells me one has a dependency need. You guessed it one of the ones I didn't download. But that is no big deal, I just went back online and downloaded the extras needed. One other trick I used to do is find the folder that the rpms were being downloaded to and while the last one or two were being downloaded, I would CUT and paste them into another folder and when the last one was completed downloading, urpmi would stop the install process because the other rpms were not there as it expected them to be so at that time I would COPY that last one or two rpms to the folder I had set up for the other rpms and then COPY ALL of them back to their original download place. I then reactivated the install process which would run to completion but I now had safely stored copies of all of the rpms which I then burnt onto a CDROM creating my own ERRATA disk. Tedious??? Not at all especially when ever I did reinstalls I had all the ERRATA and any other stuff ready to reinstall also without having to download it all over again. When you consider ERRATA has rpms for a whole load of other stuff you don't need or use then this method also picked up all the dependencys of the stuff you selected. Using the first method meant an occasional further downloading sometimes.

Hello to you Ciinien. Nice to meet you. Heres hoping this idea grows for all of us. Cheers. John

Just a side note. Hello Ixthusdan, nice to meet another MUO user face to face. Cheers to you and your lovely lady/wife. Looks like we might start something new here and gradually move away from the "anonymous" visual contact with oneanother even though we may wish to keep our names that way. Cheers to you both and to ALL. John

Sorry ARTEE, but from everything I have read on the subject, it is NOT recommended to put both optical drives in the same IDE channel, especially if you consider any burning "on the fly". In that situation, both drives will be competing for the same in/out channels simultaneously. I also notice in your /etc/fstab that you have ,sync, in both lines for the cdroms. I think you should try deleting it for starters. I only ever once had cdrom problems a long time ago and removing ,sync, fixed the problem and at no time since have I ever seen it in any of my 30 to 40 installs of mandrake. For /mnt/cdrom i would also change to fs=auto as well. And for cdrom2, I would change to read dev=/dev/cdrom2. Basically both cdroms' lines should be similar. Hope this helps.