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viking777

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Everything posted by viking777

  1. This problem that I am about to report has been present since the very first version of Mandriva I ever used (2007 I think). If you use MandrivaUpdate to update your installation it is absolutely impossible to prevent it from trying to update all the packages it finds, even if it cannot do so. Let me explain. In cooker today I have 8 updates showing, 7 of them are genuine working updates and one of them is impossible to install by any means including the command line. If you use MandrivaUpdate the entire update will fail - exactly the same happens if you use urpmi --auto-update. The sensible course of action in this case is to uncheck the faulty update from the list in MandrivaUpdate, but it makes no difference, as soon as you click on the 'Update' button it is added back again and thus the update fails (again). I took it a stage further and unchecked all the updates in the MandrivaUpdate list - as soon as you hit the 'Update' button, all 8 are added back again and yet again the entire update will fail. So you are going to say, that means the the other updates are dependant on the one update that is uninstallable. Wrong. To prove this I used urpmi to seperately install each of the other 7 updates and all installed successfully. This behaviour has been going on for years now and it really would be nice if it was sorted out. In the list of updates that MandrivaUpdate presents there are check boxes which can be unticked, but since it makes no difference if you untick them or not then what is the point of having the check boxes there in the first place? I am absolutely positive that I cannot be the first person to have noticed this, so why has it never been fixed?
  2. No, I wasn't aware of how to do that, but I am pleased to tell you that it has solved the problem completely, so thank you very much!
  3. How I hope that quote is true tux99!! I switched to xfce for the same reason. On the FF question then it must be me. Can't help wondering why though.
  4. I prefer Opera as a first choice browser, but it tends to have difficulty with Flash on some occasions, so I always keep FF around as well. I just had a look at 3.0.6 on cooker today and I couldn't believe how bad it is. Is this just me or is anyone else having these difficulties? Here is a list of things that don't work that I have found so far (I doubt I have found everything yet!) Speeddial doesn't work. It gives a warning every time I start up and displays not diallers at all. Foxmarks doesn't work. It says it is syncing, but it never does it just carries on forever. Bookmarks don't work. Not in any way. If I import them from an html file it says it has finished but no bookmarks ever appear. If I click on 'Bookmark this page' the bookmarks are still empty. History doesn't work. It is always empty no matter how many sites I have visited. Flash doesn't work. Not in any form. My Opera install on cooker is working OK with flash at the moment but not FF, I can't get a peep out of it. I have done the usual uninstall/reinstall, but it was all exactly the same. It is not a big issue for me since I don't use Cooker that much or FF for that matter, but it would make me think twice about putting 3.0.6 onto any other installation.
  5. Thanks for that scarecrow, but unfortunately enabling the radeonhd driver resulted in no graphics at all and a trip to XFdrake to reinstate the ati driver so no joy there.(I have an Nvidia card on my machine and all this makes me realise how lucky I am). Regarding your comments on compositing window managers in xfce, I would love to believe that is true since nobody hates compiz as much as I do. Unfortunately if I disable compiz then the option to select compositing from xfce goes away with it, and if I re-enable compiz it comes back again, so I am sorry to say that doesn't work either. As for AWN well you are right in that not all the plugins work, but enough of them do work to keep me happy with using it (although I must admit I am not sure how much of gnome I have installed along with the plugins - but it isn't as much as you suggest). Also my wife was impressed with AWN as well which is why she asked me to install it on her machine, and anything that helps to convert windows users to the cause is worth the hassle of a few superfluous files as far as I am concerned. EDIT: A slight correction here, on Cooker you are completely correct, I do not need to run compiz to get awn to work, but on 2009.0 I definitely do need to, perhaps that is something to do with the xfce versions?? On 2009 it is 4.4.2 on cooker 4.5.99.1.
  6. I put Mandriva 2009 xfce edition onto my wife's computer the other day, a process which was a lot more difficult than it should have been. However, I managed to solve all the problems bar one and that is that on every cold boot the screen and all the menus, fonts, icons etc take on a pixelated form as if they are being shown through some distortion filter. All I have to do to get rid of it is to restart the x server and it all returns to normal, including through any number of logouts and reboots. If you shut the machine down however it starts up again with the same problem. Weird eh? She has a Radeon mobility x1600 graphics card and is running with Compiz enabled from MCC and compositing enabled from the xfce 'widow tweaks' menu. Both of these are necessary since she wants to run the AWN dock. The graphics card and driver are obviously able to run this set up as they do normally as soon as you restart X, they just won't start off like it. Switching off compiz is not an option as the AWN dock relies on it. Any ideas?
  7. Thank you once again for replying tyme. Your suggestion was interesting and gave me the following results. Unfortunately I can't actually decode what they mean, perhaps you can. /usr/bin/gksu terminal GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are th at you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks d ue to a system crash. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Failed to get connection to session: Did not receive a reply. Pos sible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message b us security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)
  8. Before I could answer that I would have to know where the shortcut file lived - and I don't (the shortcut is a launcher that lives in an xfce4-panel, but thinking about it that probably doesn't make much difference because if I use Alt/F2 followed by 'gksu terminal' that fails as well - unless I am using a bash shell) I hadn't before, but I have now and it makes no difference. Thanks for trying anyway tyme.
  9. That is a very valid point tyme. The other thing about security is the numbers game. If there were as many people trying to attack Linux systems as were trying to attack windows ones then Adam's analysis would be completely correct, but there just aren't that many who are trying because if you only have a target 'audience' of 0.9% it isn't really worth the effort. Add to that iphitus's point about the huge variety of Linux desktops which would tend to make it even more difficult and I think we are definitely more secure than our Windows using friends. There is also the wider point that there is no such thing as totally secure computing in just the same way as there is no such thing as totally secure life. Howard Hughes tried to attain the latter objective and he still died.
  10. Quick reply! Thanks Ian, I thought there had to be more to it than I could see.
  11. OK, I will be the first to admit that if you want advice about computer security then I am probably the last person on earth that you should ask, because I know next to nothing about it. However I was a bit surprised when just the other day I came across the following entry in the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config. I would particularly draw you attention to the line that is not commented out. # Authentication: #LoginGraceTime 2m PermitRootLogin without-password #StrictModes yes #MaxAuthTries 6 #MaxSessions 10 I have 5 versions of Mandriva running, 2x2008.0, 2x2009.0 and 1x2009.1. All three of the later versions have that line included by default as does Linux Mint. Open suse and 2008.0 do not have the file written in the same manner. Now it is perfectly possible that there is some reason that this is not insecure and that I just don't know about it, but you have to admit it doesn't exactly look secure does it? I never allow the ssh daemon to run, so it doesn't bother me that much, but if I did use ssh, I think it would bother me. Why is the file written like this?
  12. I did a cooker update today that has totally crippled xfce4-panel. Every time you launch a program - any program - panel crashes. You can launch it again via Alt/F2, but the next program you launch makes it crash again. I don't know what is causing it, the update did contain a new version of xfce4-volstatus-icon, but I have already removed that and it makes no difference. EDIT. Hmm, it seems that xfce4-panel was not the only thing affected. Now every time I run drakboot that crashes as well. The bug reporting tool caught that and filled in all the details for me so I posted it as bug #47331.
  13. I have never been a keen command line enthusiast, although I do use it now and then, and I thought I might try 'Fish' to see if it was any better than 'Bash'. I installed it on Linux Mint first and I did find it to be slightly better so I then tried it on Mandriva but came unstuck. It is my normal practice to have shortcuts to programs I use often in a sidebar, particularly root instances of shells and file managers. The shortcuts contain commands such as 'gksu terminal' for example. Trouble is that as soon as I installed 'Fish' this functionality died. Every time I click the shortcut I get the warning 'failed to communicate with gksu-run-helper'. The strange thing is that if I open a user mode terminal and type the same command it loads the root instance normally. The user mode instance runs correctly as well it is only the root mode that wont work as I want it to. If I return the shell to bash, the shortcut works again. It also works normally in Mint. This behaviour is beyond me perhaps someone here can understand it.
  14. Now that part of your post I fully agree with!
  15. I doubt it ffi, because doing so would involve admitting they got it wrong in the first place, and human nature being what it is, I regard that as extremely unlikely. You already know that my solution is XFCE, and although it took a lot of work to get used to it I am now 100% happy with it and I miss KDE not one jot! Gnome has never been an answer and I doubt that it ever will be.
  16. I just read a magazine article today that quoted information from a company that collect statistics on type of operating system used on various computers that access their sites. They reckon that they have about 160,000,000 visits per month to these sites so it is not a particularly small sample that they use for data. Their figures for 2008 show that, in round figures, 90% of their site visitors are using Windows. Obviously no surprise there. 9% were using Macs, but what surprised me was that only 0.9% of their visitors were using Linux! Now I would have thought it would be a bit larger than that. Apparently that figure has almost doubled in the past 12 months largely due to the rise in the number of 'Netbook' users, a lot of which use Linux. Of course I am aware of the old adage about 'lies, damned lies, and statistics' but even taking that into account I was surprised that the figure was so low, it certainly deserves to be higher.
  17. Following on from my experiments with xfce4 on top of KDE and Gnome, I can now present my findings based on an XFCE only install - I'll only mention the differences this time, so don't worry it won't be as long as the last post! Previously I added task-xfce onto an existing installation. This time I downloaded the Mandriva 2009 xfce edition and burnt it to disk with xfburn then installed that. I haven't used xfburn before, but it worked well so no immediately obvious problems with that particular program. I then attempted to set up xfce with exactly the same programs that I had running on my other installations. As these extra programs would not have the benefit of the gnome or kde libraries that the previous installs did have, I was expecting to have to add a few extras. This is what I needed to do. First the obvious differences. Clipman was installed by default, I only had to add it to the taskbar. On my previous install I had to download it first. Exaile was installed by default, it is not installed if you use the task-xfce package. As ffi said in an answer to my last post it is a very good music player and has definitely become my default choice. The volstatus icon was not only installed by default but set to autostart as well. Good news this, previously I had to discover and install it myself. Pinot, a search tool, is included by default. Again I haven't used this before, but once it has built its index it works very well. There is no calculator tool installed by default, a surprising omission to my mind. It is not something I use regularly but it is always useful to have. I installed xcalc to make up for this deficiency, about the lightest example I could find. And now the things that wouldn't work without extra help. Xfe will not work in root mode unless it has a terminal of some sort present. Unfortunately telling it to use Xfterm4 for that purpose will not work, it just doesn't seem to recognise it. I had to install xterm as well. Checkgmail requires two extra libraries to run - perl-crypt-SSLeay and perl-gtk2-trayicon. They are available through the repos. Maybe I am missing something here, but the default install does not seem to have any program for launching a root instance of a program. I had to install gksu to cover this surprising oversight. I never seem to have much luck with Totem as a movie player, it just doesn't work. Obviously a codec problem but I am not sure which one is missing. It is not much of a bother to me as I prefer to use vlc and that always works (although it does require the 'a52' plugin as well. The biggest problem this time around came with the screenshooter program. If you remember from last time I said that you have to have version 1.4.9 or later if you want to get a 'region' capture mode. Last time I successfully installed it from source, this time I drowned in my usual dependency hell(gcc and make are not installed for starters, but it runs much deeper than that). I was just about to give up on this one when I decided to take a look on rpmfind.net, and what should I find but a Mandriva compiled binary of 1.4.9 which required about two clicks to have installed and running. I can't help but wonder why, when distro specific binaries of a completely stable and superior version already exist, that the repos are still using the older version? Still never mind at least I know how to deal with it. And that was all that was needed to have a fully working xfce only system. I did install other programs that I like to use all of them are available through rpmdrake (although you plf need the plf repos for some of them). All of them work perfectly (with the exception of gnome-do where not all the plugins work, but gnome-do plugins don't work on any other version of Mandriva either).Here is the list: Opera, gparted, googleearth, keepassx, gtkdiff, unison, thunderbird, gnome-do, adobe flash player, vlc, and of course my old favourite kmymoney. They were mostly fairly light in the amount of libraries they required with the exception of the latter which pulled in around 80Mb. The xfce only version of Mandriva boots about 10 seconds faster than the gnome version and 35 seconds faster than the kde version (although my kde version was a bit screwed up in fairness), the biggest surprise however is that it is not any smaller than the gnome/xfce version. They both weigh in at 3.4Gb, not a lot I admit but very surprising when you consider that one has two desktop environments and the other only one. But all in all I am perfectly happy with my xfce only version of 2009 and I have used it to replace my kde version as my default Mandriva boot. I hope somebody finds this useful. EDIT. I found the reason for the size anomaly. On xfce the Pinot search database is 1Gb. It isn't running on gnome, so if I installed it on gnome/xfce then it would be about 1Gb larger than now.
  18. WONDERFUL! that works! I have been wrestling for weeks with that, I have lost count how many times I have reinstalled the Nvidia drivers, and such a simple solution as well. Thanks a million ffi.
  19. I don't think I can help you with that, but if it is any consolation Cooker is unstable for me as well, in particular I cant get my Nvidia graphics to work. I am just waiting for a CD iso to be produced and I will replace the lot and start again. The DVD edition is much too big to download.
  20. QUOTE (scarecrow @ Jan 14 2009, 06:29 PM) XFCE4 does have taskbar addons/plugins for both clipboard management and screenshots. Personally, I use none of them. I prefer parcellite as clipboard manager (IMO much better, and lighter than glipper) and gscrot as screenshot utility. I don't even use the system sound volume manager of XFCE4, I much prefer a little app written by an Archlinux user. It's named volwheel ( http://oliwer.net/b/volwheel.html ) and it works with most software mixers. It can be very easily compiled for usage in any other Linux distro. BTW the sound mixer in XFCE 4.4X is rather poorly laid out- the one in the new XFCE 4.6 (due to be released Feb. 6th) uses a better backend (gstreamer) and works much better. And... if you liked XFCE 4.4X, you will be hooked with XFCE 4.6. It has all the good functionality of Gnome and almost none of its bad points (...err... excluding gtk, of course...), while remaining clean, stable, easily customizable and totally articulate. Factly, I've been using XFCE 4.6 svn snapshots since the end of last October, and even the early ones were ages more stable than any of the recent KDE 4.1X "stable" releases... I look forward to seeing that scarecrow. QUOTE (dexter11 @ Jan 14 2009, 10:40 PM) I didn't read all the first post, I gave up about at the third, and I don't wanna play the forum admin here but we have a blog section. IMHO this would better fit there. There was a massive clue in the title there dexter. QUOTE (ffi @ Jan 15 2009, 08:42 AM) I never managed to get the xfce-screenshooter plugin to bind to the prt scrn key I haven't actually tried this before, but just for you I just have tried it now and it works. This is how I did it. 1) Right click your xfce desktop, select Settings/Keyboard/Application Shortcuts/Add. 2) A box pops up asking for the shortcut command which is 'xfce4-screenshooter' 3) Enter this and another box pops up asking for the required shortcut - simply press the 'Print Screen' Button and the shortcut is registered and on my system it works faultlessly. Hope that helps. QUOTE Exaile and Banshee are good gtk alternatives for amarok; Exaile' s aim actually is to be one day gtk' s amarok As I said there are a lot of options in this field although I haven't tried either of those. (btw I got vlc to work today, I just needed the vlc-plugin-a52 which is available from the repos) QUOTE Same here as you know but 4.2rc1 is bringing some of that love back and xfce won' t even run currently in cooker I have xfce running on cooker, not sure why it won't work for you.
  21. How (and why) I learned to live with Xfce. I will deal with the why first because that is easy to explain. In my Linux life I was 'weaned' on KDE and loved it. That love stopped abruptly with KDE4. I won't go into the reasons for that here, I have said enough on that subject, just suffice to say that for now and I far as I can see into the future I do not want it on my computer in any way, shape or form, not even it's libraries if I can avoid them. That decision left me with a problem because I don't like Gnome either. Granted it is a lot better than KDE4 but still not to my tastes and why anyone considers it to be 'easy' to use is beyond me. I could have stuck with KDE3 of course as it is still far and away the best option, but that is changing rapidly, more on that later. So that meant I had to look very seriously at Xfce. Initially I could not really come to terms with it either, the biggest problem I faced being file management utilities. I have never been happy with any of the default file management utils on any of the main desktop environments (ironically I find the best of a bad bunch to be Dolphin the KDE4 file manager! - every cloud has a silver lining so the saying goes - but even if I were willing to use the rest of KDE4 I still wouldn't use Dolphin by default). My solution to this for a long time now has been Krusader, it is (or was) simply superb. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. In their headlong rush to make Krusader compatible with KDE4 they have ruined it on KDE3. If I install the latest version of Krusader on a KDE3 based system it rather inconveniently erases the contents of every file that I open in root mode (and root mode is one of the best reasons for using Krusader). Thunar is no worse nor better than Nautilus and Konqueror, in my opinion none of them are good enough. So for a while there I was completely stuck. My interim solution was to install Xfce on top of a KDE4 install, which then allowed me to use Krusader without erasing all my files every time I opened them, but that meant I had to suffer all the largely superfluous KDE4 libraries with their massive amounts of updates, 'polluting' my system and I didn't want that. But I found a solution to that particular problem and several others, and that leads me on to the main point of this post, the 'How' part in the title. 1) File Management. As I said above this was one of the biggest problems for me. It was solved very simply and easily when someone introduced me to Xfe. Two things to say about Xfe, the first is that it is not the same as 'Xfce' and (as far as I know) has very little to do with it. The second is that Xfe is not as good as Krusader, but it has about 80%-85% of Krusader's functionality, and it doesn't erase your files when you open them so that is a distinct advantage. It takes a little bit of getting used to but it is not that difficult, and it is platform independent. 1a) Kdiff3 Really part of file management this. Krusader has a function in it's menus that provide a direct link to kdiff3 (or any other compatible differences utility) that enables you to compare the contents of two files simply by selecting them and clicking on 'compare by content'. This is very useful and is not duplicated in Xfe. In order to get a similar functionality I would recommend a program such as tkdiff. It wont integrate into the file manager and will need to be launched separately. However is extremely light weight and fully functional. 2) Removeable Media. I cannot understand why everyone else is not as concerned about this as I am. When I plug in a removeable drive I want to be told that it is present - I do not EVER want it to be automounted (because that drastically increases the probability that I will forget to unmount it again later). When I manually mount that drive I want to be told that it is mounted and I want that indication to remain visible for as long as the drive remains mounted (and no matter whatever else I am doing, so desktop icons are worthless, they will be covered by application windows).I also want the opportunity to unmount it again preferably from the same indicator that performs the other functions. KDE3's Removable Media applet did this perfectly and should be the benchmark that all other DE's follow. OK so you are going to ask me "Why is this so essential?" Well, I have already destroyed 2 removeable media devices in my life and I don't want to destroy any more. Let me define 'destroy'. Destroy does not mean 'lose data'(although that certainly happens), destroy means - render totally inoperative, so inoperative that not even low level formatting tools like 'fdisk' are capable of writing a file system to the device - in other words you bin it. Now you might tell me that this is impossible, but I will beg to differ, because I have done it not once but twice, and I don't want to do it again (and after I discovered KDE3's removeable media applet I never did it again). So how to overcome this problem in Xfce? It is a twofold process. First you need the 'Places' plugin. This shows devices that have been plugged in but not mounted in an partly 'greyed out' font, and devices that are plugged in and mounted in a normal font. However it does not visually distinguish when devices are mounted or unmounted without clicking on it first (and this is why KDE4's 'recently plugged devices' is such a worthless waste of space). In order to have that VITAL visual inidication that a device is mounted you also need the 'volstatus' plugin. This does absolutely nothing until a plugged device is mounted, then it presents an icon in the system tray to warn you that you have something plugged and mounted. It also gives you the opportunity to unmount it safely, so all you have to do is to remember to glance at the systray before you unplug devices or shutdown. My only criticism of it is visibility. It is a greyish icon on a greyish background. KDE3 Removeable Media applet is far superior in that respect, so about 90% functionality compared to KDE3, but acceptable. 3)Quicklaunch Toolbar. As I said above, 90% of the time, desktop shortcuts are totally worthless because they are covered by application windows. This is why a quicklaunch toolbar or something similar is, for me, an absolutely essential part of a desktop environment.Yes you can use program shortcuts in your taskbar, but in my opinion they take up too much space. When I was testing KDE4 I spent literally ages trying to get the quicklaunch toolbar to work. It never worked properly and it was one of the many reasons I gave up on '4'. Having said that, the quicklaunch toolbar in Xfce does work, but is obviously so much of an afterthought that it is not much better. Luckily there is an alternative. Xfce (and Gnome as well if you like) provide the opportunity to have more than one panel on a desktop, and also enable you to choose where to put them. I utilised this functionality to replace the quicklaunch toolbar. My solution was to have a second panel on the left hand side of the screen which, by default, was auto hidden. It thus did not occupy any screen space, but was accessible simply by moving the mouse to the left (which is no different to moving it over a quicklaunch toolbar). It is then possible to place as many shortcut buttons as you like (xfce calls them launchers) in this panel, without occupying any real estate on your main taskbar and system tray and they are no more difficult to use than a quicklaunch toolbar. Functionality 100% 4)Kshowmail. There are endless Mail clients in Linux, if you use Opera you even get a pretty useful one built into your browser, but none that I could find, with the exception of Kshowmail were capable of reading and deleting mail whilst it was still on the server. In my Windows days I used to use Poptray which has a similar functionality and it is the simplest method of making sure that your machine remains free of email borne viruses whilst ensuring that you miss nothing that a spam filter might wrongly categorise. The method I used to overcome this was to open a googlemail account and then to use the excellent checkgmail utility to access it. You don't actually have to use googlemail much at all if you don't want to, you can simply set up a mail forwarding rule to forward a copy of the mail on all your ordinary mail accounts into googlemail, this has another advantage in that you automtically save your email in two separate places and thus are very unlikely to ever lose it. You will also find the that googlemail is quite an impressive service. Functionality 100% 5)Ksnapshot Ksnapshot will run on xfce/gnome although it does not behave exactly the same as it does on KDE (specifically when you want to take a screenshot you do not press enter as the popup window suggests you should, if you do the whole thing will freeze, you have to double click with the left mouse button instead). This is how I was operating for a while. The reason I couldn't use the default xfce-screenshooter? It didn't have a 'region' shot mode, which is the only mode I ever use. However I found out later on that the reason it didn't have a 'region' mode was because the version of screenshooter in all the repos was an older version and in fact the later version (must be 1.4.9 or above) does have this function. Of course there is always a downside. v1.4.9 is only available in a tarball. Now my success rate with installing things from source is no better than anybody elses - about 10% I would think, so I didn't hold out much hope of getting this going either, but in fact it installed quite easily. The only thing to remember is that you must uninstall any previous version of screenshooter first, other wise it won't run. The required file can be downloaded from www.gnomefiles.org. Functionality 100% 6)Klipper. I like to run a clipboard utility in my systray. For some reason this does not happen by default in Xfce, in fact it doesn't even include a clipboard utlity. For a little while I was running klipper itself (with attendent cost in unnecessary kde libraries) but I eventually found that the Xfce clipboard plugin is called 'clipman' and you have to download it separately it is not included in a default install. I can't remember if I got it from the repos or from the internet but it is easy enough to find anyway. Functionality 100% 7)Clock The standard Xfce clock plugin is naff. Replace it with 'datetime' plugin which is much more configurable and includes a calendar as it should - not quite so easy to configure as KDE equivalents but not that difficult to work out. Functionaliy 100% 8)Amarok. OK it is a great program but do you really need all its bells and whistles? I don't. Mplayer plays just about everything you throw at it and is tiny in comparison, so is vlc (although at the moment it won't play the sound from dvd's on my latest version of mandriva 2009). Xmms is there if you just need audio playback. Xfmedia, the xfce media player works perfectly on Linux Mint but won't even load on Mandriva, no idea why, but there are so many alternatives it is not really much of an issue. Functionality 100% 9) K3b. Another superb kde program. Xfce has Xfburn although I must admit that to date I haven't tried it so cannot recommend it one way or the other. Functionality Unknown. So that is about that. Or is it? Unfortunately not. There is one more issue that remains unresolved on my quest to ditch KDE. If you don't use money management programs then you need read no further (and congratulations if you have managed to read this far - if you have the patience to do that then you certainly have the patience to succeed with Xfce!). If however you do use money management programs then I need to acquaint you with point # 10. 10) Kmymoney2. If you can remember as far back as the fourth paragraph of this epic, you will note that I said I had found a solution to most of my requirements on Xfce, but this is the exception, I cannot replace Kmymoney. I started using this quite a few years ago as a Microsoft Money replacement when I migrated to Linux and consequently I have a lot of data within it that I want to be able to use and refer to. If you have ever used .qif export/import techniques on money programs you will know that there is no such thing as a 100% success rate, it will always fail in some respect or another and this is one of the problems I face, even if I were to select a suitable replacement for Kmymoney I know for sure (because I have tried) that I would not be able to fully and completely transfer the data over. I could start again from scratch with a new money manager program by simply transferring the information in my latest statement into it and carrying on from there, but that would not give me any access to historical information which would all be in Kmymoney format - it is a bit like using proprietary software, you become locked in. I have tested several replacement options and for the benefit of others that may want to try them I will give my opinions here, although I must say that it is extremely unlikely that I will be using any of them. Kmymoney pulls in around 70MB of dependencies on a Gnome system (so I presume an Xfce only system would be about the same) - I guess it is something I will just have to live with. Here are the replacements that I have tried: Gnucash - I don't like gnucash and never have. The idea of having 'accounts' for everything instead of 'categories' is ludicrous besides which after I had imported all my data from Kmymoney it proceeded to tell me that I was £58,000 overdrawn!! I hope not. Grisbi - This one did the best job of importing the data from Kmymoney (although still not 100%) and I thought for a while that I had found my solution. That notion was quickly dispelled when after spending a couple of hours using it, it decided to freeze and had to be forcibly shut down. When I opened it again all the data that I had spent the last two hours sorting was gone. Too unstable to consider. Buddi - The complete opposite of grisbi this one, far and away the safest to use in that it auto-saves a new database at specific intervals, a bit like a decent word processor, so absolutely no way to lose data. Trouble is there is no data to lose, at it steadfastly refused to accept even a single line of data import from my .qif files, so you would have to start from scratch if you wanted to use it, but if you were in that situation it might be a good bet. Jgnash - a java app. Couldn't even get it to run (on 4 different distros). MMex - A Novell/Suse app this (although not originally). Bit of a one trick pony. It doesn't matter what you do with it, all you get is the warning 'Could not write to read only database' (4 different distros including Suse). In each case the database it was referring to was situated in my home folder with my own username and usergroup and 777 permissions. Useless. So that is it. Most but not all requirements satisfied to date. At the moment I am using Xfce as a default desktop but it is running on top of a Gnome install, with Kmymoney tacked on. A bit mixed up but nowhere near as mixed up as KDE4. Sooner or later I will get round to testing an Xfce only system (ie without the Gnome base, but still with Kmymoney) and when I do I will let you know how that goes. In the meantime this post is long enough as it is.
  22. Hey Brilliant Medo that works!! . What is more I have never seen it used in that form before so I have learnt something for the future. (Written it down in my notes because I probably won't remember next time I need it ). Incidentally you were right in your assumption that it doesn't matter too much what happens to my Cooker installation, it is just a plaything for me I have plently of other options that I take more care of. Thanks again. EDIT. Still don't know why it happened though??
  23. I suppose I should ask this in an Opera forum but I am not a member of that so I will ask here first. Does anyone know how to reduce the amount of lines scrolled for each 'notch' of the mouse scroll wheel in Opera? Lately it seems to be moving by 7 or 8 lines at a time, which is far too much. Firefox moves about 3 lines which is the maximum I would want, 2 would be even better. I have switched off smooth scrolling but that doesn't make any difference.
  24. It is my normal practice to install one instance of grub to the MBR and then all others to the first sector of each partition. I then chainload the other versions with a menu.lst entry of (for example): title Mandriva 2009.1 root (hd0,11) chainloader +1 Nothing wrong with that, and it has worked perfectly up until today. Now, when I attempt to boot from that entry all I get is a black screen with the word 'GRUB' in capitals and a flashing cursor. Strangely it is impossible to do anything in the screen, you cant type and you cant shut it down either (without pressing the power button) neither Ctl/Alt/Del or Alt/SysRq/B have any effect. If I had been messing around with grub yesterday I could have understood it, but I haven't even touched it, or menu.lst, so why it should suddenly go like that is a mystery to me. The mystery deepens when you consider that there is absolutely nothing wrong with grub. I know that because when I copy the menu.lst entry from the 2009.1 menu.lst to the active menu.lst it boots normally - I am typing in it now, it is only the chainloading that won't work. If anyone can suggest why that might have happened I would be interested to know. It is not a big deal if you can't because, as I said, I can work round it, but it does puzzle me. Incidentally I did do some updates to 2009.1 yesterday, but I am pretty sure none of them related to grub.
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