viking777

It is surprising what you find if you look hard enough. My general sense of dismay about KDE4 led me to have a look at alternatives. I have used Gnome and I don't really like it, so today I installed xfce. What a surprise! I wasn't expecting much, but I was very pleasantly surprised. It is just as configurable as KDE and unlike the last incarnation of KDE4 that I tried it actually works very well. It is supposed to be faster than other desktop managers and when it comes to starting up I guess that is true, although I don't see it in other respects, although I don't mean any criticism by that. If KDE4 does not improve then I will be quite happy to replace it with xfce once KDE3 is no longer supported, in fact I am using it now as a default desktop manager and although it took a little bit of time to configure (not long considering this is the first time I have used it) I really like it. My only problem with it at the moment is that I can't find a way to replace the window decorator with any other colour than blue. I know I could download another theme, but I don't actually need one, I only want to replace the default title bar colour. My favourite in KDE is KDE2 with desert red colour but nothing similar seems to exist for xfce (or at least I can't find it).

Anyway the message in this post is that if anyone else is feeling dismayed at the direction that KDE4 is going then don't despair, because xfce can fill the gap. If you are a Gnome fan then you can even make it look like that as well (in fact the default xfce 4.4 is more Gnome like than KDE like).

I still hope that KDE4 pulls out the stops and provides a desktop that I might actually want to use, but if it doesn't then at least I won't feel hard done by.

Congratulations to the xfce devs.

Shame about using Mandriva??

More like smug is what I am feeling.

I think of all those poor B's struggling away to get things to work in Ubuntu which in Mandriva just work anyway and I can't believe my luck at discovering this distro (actually it should be rediscovering because the very first Linux distro that I ever used was Mandrake about 8 years ago, although to my shame I deleted it and went back to Windows until about 3 years ago because I couldn't get Mandrake to work although that was mostly due to my complete inexperience with computers in general at that time rather than anything to do with Mandrake).

In the past 3 years I have tried just about everything you can think of but nothing matches the usability of Mandriva (at least not at the moment). That is not to say that it is perfect because it still can't shut my laptop down properly (never mind hibernate or standby) but then again it does so occasionally and no other distro does at all, so even at that it is superior.

If I have any problem with Mandriva it is simply that it never breaks (even in my heavy hands!) so I get bored with never having to troubleshoot problems :lol2: . I have a strategy for that though, I get hold of a Suse disc (or Fedora) and install one of those for a while. Suse gives me enough problems to last a lifetime and Fedora won't even install in the first place so eventually I am quite relieved to go back to Mandriva (not that I ever stop using it you understand, Suse or Fedora go onto another partition).

So all in all shame is definitely not what I feel about using Mandriva.

Thanks Ian, that is just what I suspected, and as you said there is no guarantee that this is actually the problem. I won't do anything just now as I have spent a long time configuring 'spring' the way I like it and it is working very well now. I will wait until later in the year when I start testing cooker again and try it with that and see if it makes a difference.

Thanks very much for those replies people.

I have done a bit of reading around the problem and I seem to have come up with the conclusion that it is not possible to change the space per inode back to 128 without rewriting the file system and thus destroying the data.

Is this correct? If so I guess I will just have to live with this problem.

Edit. Still thinking about this. If you preformat the disk with the the inode size you want and then reinstall, is there an option in the installtion routine to bypass the formatting that it does? I have always just let it format the partition and thus have never noticed if you can stop it doing so.

This is why I am asking.

I use Acronis True Image to make disc images of all my OS's so that when I break them I can easily replace them with a working copy. (shock horror - I know it isn't open source, but as soon as an open source program arrives that is one tenth as good as Acronis I'll use it - promise :P ). Anyway Acronis will image just about anything, but it seems to be having trouble with 2008.1. Every time I make an image with it I get a warning about 'File system errors' and advice to error check the disk. I have error checked it a hundred times and there are no errors on it. It allows you to proceed with the image but goes on to say that it can only be done on a 'sector by sector' basis. This results in a much larger image because (I presume) it is imaging the free space as well as the data (which it normally doesn't do). This has a by product that if you wish to restore it you can only do so on a partiton of identical size whereas normally you can reinstall onto any partition that is big enough as it dynamically resizes while it restores. It still produces a perfectly good image and restoring from it is trouble free as well, but because the file size is larger it takes longer to complete both processes.

My original version of 2008.1 was an early testing version that I continually updated to its final iteration. Yesterday I found the bandwidth to download a final release version of 2008.1 and both versions display the same characteristics when used with my disc imaging software. I had initially assumed that the specific behaviour was perhaps because my original version was a testing version or that I had some kind of disc error on the partition where it was installed, but when my new version of 2008.1 displayed the same behaviour, it started me wondering why. The new version of 2008.1 is on my old Ubuntu partition, this has been imaged dozens of times without this error message so it really cannot be disc corruption, it must be something to do with the Mandriva file system - but what?

I also have a copy of 2008.0 and it images normally with no error messages as does Linux Mint and Ubuntu before I deleted it.

So if anybody has any ideas as to why this might be I would be interested to know.

I am sure it wouldn't make much difference but it is Mandriva One that I have installed.

Mplayer works for me and it is in the plf repositories so no bother with installation.

Why not try that?

Hey dexter11, I would like to thank you for doing that bit of research on my behalf. Your 'urpmi_rpm-find-leaves' command was very interesting, not something I have ever heard of but very useful for me. I didn't proceed exactly as per your post but it certainly did help. First I ran the command. It came up with a huge list of 'leaves'. I started out by copying the file names into MCC 'install and remove software' one at a time (because I am cli phobic), but this quickly became very tedious as there were so many of them (and an awful lot of them were KDE4 related). I then remembered that MCC 'Install and Remove' has an option in the 'View' menu called 'leaves only sorted by install date'. I called this up and the list it presented enabled me to quickly sort through it by looking in the subtitle for the words 'KDE4 library' (or similar). I deselected all of these and got rid of a vast amount of KDE4 related programs in one go. I then ran your 'urpmi_rpm-find-leaves' command again and deleted any that the previous method had missed. Of course I don't know if I have finally eradicated it or not, but I must be pretty close by now and I never would have begun to get this close if you hadn't posted that reply. So thank you once again.

I don't think it matters what brings users into the Linux fold, once they are there, if they have even half a mind of their own, they will soon look around and find other distros some of which will be better than Ubuntu. Speaking as somebody who has just recently erased Ubuntu from my hard drive because (imho, of course!) it is not as good as Linux Mint and nowhere near as good as Mandriva, then I don't see any dangers in their success although I admit it surprises me. Of course if the 'glint of gold' ever caused them to move away from an open source model then that would be the time to worry, but I can't really see that happening.

Sorry to keep harping on about this but it is really puzzling me. Despite having copied a couple of dozen kde4 file names into urpmi skip.list, I am still getting kde4 files offered for update (not the ones that are in skip.list, but others). The puzzling thing to me is that none of these files actually exist on my system. I have searched for them with both kerry beagle and locate and they simply don't exist (or if they do then those two programs can't find them) so if they don't exist why do I keep being offered updates for them? Surely the basis behind updates is to offer newer versions of installed programs, not newer versions of programs that don't exist?

Wihih?

Thanks dexter11, I didn't realise it was a program I thought it was a shell command!

Anyway I have downloaded it and will experiment.

Dexter/ffi, thank you both for those replies.

I tried the commands that ffi proposed but I just got the response that the files were unknown, so I guess I have already deleted them.

Dexter, your 'urpmi.recover' command sounds very interesting but it is something I have never heard of can you give me any links as to where I might read more about it?

In the meantime I have come up with my own workround to this it simply consists of copying all the KDE4 update file names into /etc/urpmi/skip.list. They now no longer bug me.

Can anybody tell me how I can completely rid my 2008.1 installation of KDE4? I first tried deleting the meta package but that did nothing, I then went through the 'installed' packages and deleted everything with 'kde4' in the title but still, every time I try to update my system I am presented with a whole bunch of KDE4 updates and I just cant get rid of them. If I were at home I wouldn't bother, I would update them and forget about it, but I am away from home and have a limited bandwidth available and I can't afford to waste it on useless updates for a program I have no intention of using.

Any ideas?

I have a 64bit processor, and I use both 32bit and 64bit operating systems. I find it impossible to detect any speed difference between the two. Having said that I have never done any proper benchmarking to prove it one way or the other and I never deal with heavy graphics files like movie editing. I do edit photos but there is no discernible difference there.

Not wishing to hijack a thread, but after such a melodramatic post by viking777 perhaps you could expand on why you think KDE4 is so disasterous? I mean considering it's a work in progress, just what is so dire about it?

OK you asked for it.

1) I have used 3 versions of KDE4 so far, one came from a cover disc designed to show purely what KDE4 was, the second is from Mandriva on 2008.1 and the third is on a SUSE disc. All displayed exactly the same error right from the start which was the takbar/system tray appeared half way up the screen instead of at the bottom. Initially I though this was a 'feature' until I launched a few windows and found all those were split in two as well. Now I did find a way to cure this (I can't remember what it was) but it was not an auspicious start.

2) Taskbar. The taskbar appears to have been inspired by a piece of 4x2 timber with icons drawn on it 4" high. It is configurable of course, in exactly the same way a piece of 4x2 would be. If you saw off the bottom of a piece of 4x2 and make it a 3x2 you also lose the bottom inch of all your icons - exactly what happens with KDE4 unless you put up with it being full size.

3) Icons. Continuing the 'building site' analogy, the desktop icons are about the size of house bricks, and have a strange way of behaving as if they were house bricks as well, in other words they cluster together like they were built into a wall and no matter how many times you seperate them, the next time you start up they will all be on top on one another again. This would be bad enough, but if you hover your mouse over them they change from house bricks to breeze blocks, making it just about impossible to tell one icon from another (unless you pull them all apart again). These 'breeze blocks' have another 'useful' little feature, in that they in display another 4 icons in each corner of the block whilst your mouse is over them. When I last looked three of these icons did absolutely nothing and the fourth made the original icon disappear until you rebooted. Now I just know that somewhere out there lives somebody that has been begging for the ability to make an icon disappear for the rest of a session but have it magically reappear later, but that somebody isn't me.

4) That 'thing' in the top right hand corner. I have no idea what it is called, I only know that within 45 seconds it had started to irritate me to death. Never mind 'clippie' from Microsoft, at least you could turn him off. Now suppose you put up with the irritation of it keeping expanding every time you want to shut down a window with the 'x' button, what actual use is it? As far as I can tell it has two uses. The first is to 'add widgets'. Leave aside the fact that at the present moment in time there are none that are worth adding, you can achieve the same by right clicking the desktop, so that function is completely superfluous. Its other function is to 'zoom out'? This is really useful. Invoking this makes the whole desktop minimise to the top left of the screen leaving three quarters of your desktop as unusable white space. Again, there has to be someone who has been dying for this feature, probably the same person that wants to make icons disappear temporarily, again it isn't me. The whole thing is irritating and unnecessary.

5)Mounted Devices Icon in Taskbar. This super useful device tells you if you have plugged a new device into your computer! Wow, if that wasn't there I would never have known that I had just plugged a device into my computer would I? When I first saw this device I thought it might actually be useful in other words that it would offer you mount/unmount choices but it does absolutely nothing except tell you what you already know - useless.

6) I don't like slab menus. Now I know that is purely a personal preference and others prefer them. To my mind the only useful feature of the slab menu is the search function, include that in a basic menu and you have the ideal solution. The problem with the KDE4 slab menu is that I haven't as yet I haven't found a way to switch it back to a normal menu, although I must admit I haven't invested much time in finding out if it is possible or not because the whole user experience of KDE4 is so bad that although I have it installed I never use it.

I could go on but I think I have answered your question by now.

I have had this problem in the past as well. I agree with ianw that the best way to solve it is to unmount it properly under windows, I have never had much luck with the 'force' option of mount.

You could also try the pmount command. It is a lot easier than mount as it doesn't require any options or fstab entries, just typing:

pmount /dev/sdb1

Will have it appear in /media probably as 'disk' or 'disk1'.

As ianw says though don't forget to unmount it when finished before removing it with

pumount /dev/sdb1

NB if you can't find pmount then just install it, it is in the repos and is only a few kb.

I have KDE4 on Mandriva, I have also used it on SUSE, in its present form it is nothing but a disaster, you really don't want it unless you like ugly unfunctional desktop managers. If KDE4 is the future and it doesn't improve dramatically, I might be forced to use Gnome and that is like extracting your own teeth. It has to get better surely? Or have the KDE devs found a self destruct button and pressed it?

I have a very similar situation. I obviously work my computer in a similar way to yours, at least with respect to Grub, but I also had an issue with mandriva not booting when I carried out my normal procedure (copying menu.lst entries into whatever version of grub I am using). My solution was the same as yours and for similar reasons, in other words I let Mandriva 'own' grub as you put it and that works OK. In my case it was the ease of operation of my 2 hsdpa modems with Mandriva that makes me want to stay with it, that and the fact that once in a while it actually shuts my laptop down completely rather than leaving it hanging, and no other distro on the planet does that.

But Linux is like life, nothing is perfect, compromise rules!

Rambutan, you say that you have been using the commands you quoted for a while so I guess they must have worked for you in the past, but I have never actually seen them written like that before. The 'setup' command writes the boot information to the hard drive, but I always understood that you have to specify where the config files are first. So if I were setting up the system you suggested I would run:

grub> root (hd0,5)

followed by

grub> setup (hd0)

Maybe your method amounts to the same thing, but it might be worth a try just in case.

If you want to do it, you can, you simply have to change an option.

Ok I apologise, I wasn't aware that you could enable it, so long as you can I am cool with that even though I don't know how to do it and don't really feel the need to do so. Although I don't quite agree with the argument that a machine without a root login is any more secure than one that has one, and there are times when a root login is very useful. I rescued a system once using a root login when it was impossible to login any other way (user accounts inoperative) now maybe I could have done the same thing with a 'live cd' or something similar but it was a hell of a lot easier to use the root account which was the only one operating.

Also there is the fact that it is pretty basic psychology that the more you tell someone not to do something "for their own good" the more they are likely to want to do it.

I have been absolutely enamoured by Mandriva since I started using it and I still am, but isn't it always the case that whenever something really good comes along in life, sooner or later you find something bad to offset it?

It shows you how often I log in as root that since starting to use Mandriva I have never even noticed that you can't log in as root until I read this thread and then tried it. I must say that this type of attitude annoys the living crap out of me. Are we not told that Linux is about choice?? So supposing I want to exercise that choice and log in as root. Who the hell has the right to think they can stop me? This is my life and this is my computer and if I want to use it in a way that you think is foolish then that is my right too - butt out!!

I guess all I can say is that at least you dont stop people from having a root account as per Ubuntu. But really can't the people that make these decisions see that they have no right to do this?

After having got that heartfelt rant off my chest I would now like to advise you how to correct this situation. I will use the example of Ubuntu and Linux Mint in order to do this. Ubuntu just says "no root account" end of story (unless you know how to get round it) Linux Mint on the other hand says "would you like to install a root account?" If you choose 'yes' then they load another window telling you why they think this is a bad idea but part of that window has the option to "continue anyway" or something similar. This is choice, this is what Linux is about, ignore this principle and you are no better than Microsoft - and I can't think of a worse insult than that!

I have always understood that Shorewall is just a front end for iptables/ipchains and that if you don't have iptables then Shorewall won't work. I could have misunderstood this but I don't think so. Sorry I can't help with the original problem though.

If you want my advice don't install the OSE version of Virtualbox, it has no USB support and is to all intents and purposes useless.

Instead go here and install the full version. They have a binary specially compiled for Mandriva and it works very well.

https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfini...G-F@CDS-CDS_SMI

Q2) Worked for file transfers to/from my mobile straight away. Trying to get the mobile working as a modem took a lot more effort though although I did succeed in the end. NB. This was the first time I have ever used bluetooth for anything so I wasn't at all familiar with it which may account for some of the difficulty.

Doesn't the fact that you have posted this on a Mandriva forum send you some kind of subliminal message as to what distro you want??

Won't drakconnect do what you want? In my opinion it is vastly superior to knetworkmanager.

Drakconnect on its own it is one of the main reasons I have switched to Mandriva as my default distro it is so superior to anything else I have ever used.