Ixthusdan

I am not sure that polling Linux distros means anything. Because the business model is different from MS, simply asking "Which one?" is not enough of a question to get a usable response, IMO. And, someone else already observed, there are dozens of "polls" that are not really secure and we all know that for unknown reasons, Ubuntu enthusiasts seem to enjoy skewing said polls. Ubuntu is nice, but it is not all that good, also my opinion. Skewing polls only clouds issues and does not promote Linux.

If the driver allows, then the 3-D effects stuff will not be grayed out. It is a simple case of placing a tic mark on the appropriate square. But are you certain that the driver is installed correctly?

I must agree with the above. I also have a 64 bit dual core system, but the rest of the software industry is not yet working toward that end. Many things will not work because the drivers have simply not been written. I say that meaning that you can still use 32bit stuff in some cases, but then that defeats the purpose of having a 64 bit system, yes? :P

Cool!

Please post problems in the help forums. Also, read my response in the thread that you already have started. ;)

acpi=off When you get the boot screen, hit esc, and type "linux acpi=off" Tell us what happens.

In Linux, k3b does everything that Nero can do. The only games that play native in Linux are from ID Software, RTCW, Doom3 and Quake. Others need an emulator or a virtual machine. I had the original Half Life running with Wine once, but it was not stable. Sometimes it would launch and sometimes it would not. I understand that commercial emulators will work just fine.

I have both sata and ide devices. 2008 got it all right the first time. My brother's computer has an ide drive and an sata drive, and I have to edit grub once for a proper id. It wants to locate the boot on the wrong drive but it installs fine and works fine after the edit.

As I posted, doing partition changes is always better prior to installing, and not during installation. When you reboot, and try start up again, what happens? Also, I would boot into windows just to check it out! ;)

I have never seen Mandriva do this in an install; Making a single / directory is fairly common. But, if there is no data being stored in hdb6, then creating an installation there is not a problem. I do not think that sharing any directories works the way you might think. /usr must exist for each installation, and this where most of the additional program files reside. /home is a possibility, but different versions of a desktop can have a problem. For example, if KDE 3.5 is being used in both installs, it works fine. But, if a different version is used in each, then the personal file, /home/username/.kde might not work for one or the other. Shared swap is not a problem at all. I would just make a whole install onto the available space. If you wish to try to use a common /home, then prior to installing, create a /home partition, transfer your data there (Hard drake will do all this automatically for you) and then identify that partition in the new install. Do not format your /home when the time comes. (The installer is smart and generally does not tic that partition for formatting.

Are you using the proprietary ATI drivers for the chipset?

Accordong to what I have found, the "mars" chip will work. but if you have an "amr" chip, you're done. The old Lucent technologies has only released the source for the mars series chip. Here is the information and data to download,

OT: FWIW, John, Western Digital themselves have acknowledged that some of their newer manufacturers have not produced a product up to par. Data recovery businesses know that part of the WD problem is that specific parts used to build a specific model number in their line are dependent upon where the drive was built and not the model number. That means from a business perspective, their quality control problem can be traced to poor tracking on their production vendors. I do not see why anyone would make up such a thing, particularly WD themselves. I am glad that you have not experienced any problems with WD. Unfortunately, many other people (including myself and WD) have seen a change in their product.

Welcome to MUB! 2 things: 1) Make sure you are root when working an installation. For example, while one may be able to "make' as a user, "make install" can only be performed by root. 2) You should install your kernel source. ("urpmi kernel-source" in a shell.) If make is not actually installed, this will install all the stuff needed for compiling.

I use either Maxtor or Seagate.

Best Buy sells Linux. It is generally found on a bottom shelf, rather dusty. American business has difficulty getting away from selling software, although many better IT businesses are now recognizing the value of simply selling services rather than software. Unfortunately, many programs that are extremely specialized are windowcentric. I have an accounting client whose software must use mssql. Very lame. (yes, I tried.)

Yes, it does do this. But, normally the database will also unlock when it is done, usually 1-2 minutes.

Get the Western Digital hard drive tool from their sight and test your drive with their software. It will tell you if there is an error in the drive and they will exchange it for a new one if it is under warranty. WD's have had an increase in defective drives over the last 2 years. And no, they will not recover your data. You'll have do to that your self. B)

You need to manually unlock the database. This is a good way to do it. If you follow these instructions explicitly, you'll do fine.

How 'bout a merger?? B)

Your Nvidia card will work with one file from the Nvidia sight. Just get that file; it will run a shell script on its own. You will need to have the kernel-source package installed. If you use urpmi, it will install all of that from the cd/dvd. As far as the modem, it's hard tellin'. B)

Please post your /etc/fstab and your /boot/grub/menu.lst files

Although Linux could use 3G just fine, I would recommend using the second drive. I experiment with various distros with 10G partitions. I think that 5G is about the smallest to use, but I would not recommend shrinking the Windows partition.

The unknown partitions are the linux formatted partitions. Windows cannot read anything but FAT or NTFS. There are more format schemes than I care to list in Linux, but I recommend using ext3 or xfs. Mandriva may have chosen to use ext3. I agree that you must force Windows to surrender more of the drive. Generally, Windows will attempt to take all of any drive unless you intercede during installation. So I agree that you should get rid of your Windows "D" drive. The resulting empty space will be good for Mandriva. I think I would do this from windows, formatting the new partition to FAT. It really doesn't matter since Mandriva will reformat it during the installation. But, you will then know to leave hda1 alone and tell Mandriva to use hda2, which should be the designation that you'll see. After telling Mandriva to use that space, allow it to auto-setup, and you should be fine. Remember to install the boot loader to hda1. You were posting while I was... Make a single Windows partition from all the space, but not your first partition. ("C") you will have to format it because Windows will make you format it into something. Then use that empty partition for Linux. The available space does not seem to add up to 80G, however. Do you have any unpartitioned space available?