viking777

Thanks very much for that info Jim. I would never have looked for it there. Foolish of me I suppose but I would have expected to find it somewhere on the page to which it relates ie. 'Install and Remove Software'. Anyhow, it still doesn't help me because the option that I want - 'On Demand' - is the default and that is what I was complaining about in the first place. I click on a package to uninstall it and the first thing it does is to download extra information about the package that I no longer want. This is simply wrong.

I'll give it some time before reporting it on Bugzilla - I am sure sooner or later somebody will see sense without me hassling them.

I would like to update this tip for users of Cooker. I have just installed this plugin on Cooker and although the principle is the same some of the file paths are different.

The first thing I would say is don't bother with 'Iced Tea Java' since it doesn't seem to contain the plugin you need, so stick with Java 1.6, then in order to link to the plugin I needed the following command:

ln -s /usr/lib/java-1.6.0-sun-1.6.0.04/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

and that link was placed in

/usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.12/plugins

Obviously the numbers after the words 'java' and 'firefox' will vary according to whichever versions of those two programs you are using.

This worked for me, but if any mods with a deeper knowledge than mine feel that it is not appropriate to the community as a whole, feel free to modify/delete it - I won't be offended.

Perfectly stable on my laptop as well, although I would never run a testing distro on its own, always dual boot with a stable version is my advice, but give it a go definitely.

As Luis said it is probably worth waiting for RC2 now if it is only 3 days away.

You might want to bring this up with Mandriva directly, since we are unofficial Mandriva forum we can't really make these type of changes. But you could request it from their page at mandriva.com. Not sure where, but I'm sure there is a contact address for it. Don't think bug report would benefit this, as it's not a bug as such, but the way they've implemented it.

You are probably right Ian, although to be brutally honest I don't find the mandriva.com site to be much use to me when 90% of the answers to searches etc. come up in a language that I can't read even though I select English as my forum language. That is why I am here.

There is no big file (hdlist.cz) anymore. Mandriva is using a new XML based file format in 2008 Spring which is a way smaller than hdlist was. There should be an option in the GUI which sets up whether to download the info or not.

When I saw this new feature in one of the betas it only downloaded the extra info when I clicked on "file list" or "description" etc drop-down lists.

You have to ask for enhancements in Bugzilla just when you choose severity choose enhancement.

Thanks for putting me right on that point Dexter that must be why it is so much faster then.

If there is an option in the GUI to download or not then I can't find it.

I can't really justify putting it on Bugzilla when it works much better than it did before!

The proper way to handle this issue, in my opinion, would be for rpmdrake to trigger the download when the package is clicked on, IF the network is up, in background. The complete information would show when/if the extra information is available, else just minimal information would show.

 

Yves.

As far as I can see that is the way it is working, although I don't think that is the way it should work for the reasons I stated earlier.

Correction. I notice you put 'in background' in large font which it certainly doesn't do at the moment

I must say that the new version of rpmdrake is a big improvement on the 2008.0 version, I particularly like the alphabetical listing that it starts up with, and also the fact that you can use this to search with by just typing the initial letters of your query. However to my mind it still has a couple of problems that need sorting out.

I appreciate that by default it downloads synthesis files in order to save time and this is definitely a good idea. What is not a good idea though is that it retrieves the 'full' files whenever you click on a package that doesn't have information already. The problem with this is that you do not always click on a package because you want to know more about it. For instance, yesterday I wanted to remove a redundant package. Before I could do so I had to wait whilst it retrieved the extra information not included in the 'synthesis' package. This hardly makes any sense when all I want to do is delete it. Another occasion when it doesn't make sense is when using the search technique I described in the previous paragraph (which incidentally is far faster than using the search function). When you click on an item to focus the alphabetical search function, rpmdrake runs away and downloads the extra information for the package you clicked on, but probably have absolutely no interest in, which is just a little crazy.

Why cant we just have a 'get info' button somewhere on the gui that will retrieve information for packages you have highlighted when you want to read it. This makes much more sense to me and I don't think it would be that difficult to implement.

I have never fully understood firewalls, and I have more chance of grasping string theory than iptables, so I wanted to check if my thoughts on Shorewall are correct.

When I lived in windowsland, I always used Sygate or Zone Alarm, when I moved to Linux I mostly used Firestarter. All three have one thing in common, they include a system tray icon. I recently ditched Firestarter on Mandriva in favour of the default Shorewall, and have found it to be very good (for me anyway) since it requires little or no configuration to make it work, it works well (according to Shields Up ), it starts automatically and it protects several interfaces (eth0,wlan0, ppp0). But boy do I miss that tray icon. For one thing it at least tells you that the firewall is running. I know I can check if the service is running with 'ps aux' or by looking in MCC, but that is a bit of a pain. Supposing the service failed to start, would I get any warning if I don't look for myself?? Then there is the possibility that the service might stop whilst in use (this happened regularly with Firestarter, usually when I changed interfaces and forgot to restart it).

I know Shorewall is an iptables front end, and I assume/hope that I am correct in the assumption that once it has set the iptable rules on start up, then even if the service itself failed the iptable rules would still be in place and therefore the machine would still be firewalled - is this correct? Secondly is there an easier way to know that the service has started in the first place or perhaps more importantly if it hasn't started in the first place?

Thanks Ian.

Being a wimp I will probably just have to keep an eye on it manually (pencil and paper - remember those :lol: ), your solution sounds a bit to deep for me!

Done.

Thanks once again.

Greg,

Thank you very much for pointing that out, I guess I should spend a bit more time looking at bugzilla!

I have done as you suggested and added my own input to that bug. Unfortunately my 'foolproof solution' is not quite a foolproof as I thought. After shutting down the computer for an hour or so I returned to find that I am completely unable to get a connection with drakconnect and my bluetooth mobile. Although I am able to get one with wvdial, so I may have stumbled upon the problem, but I certainly haven't - as yet - found a solution (unless you count using wvdial!)

Right click drakconnect then select 'configure network' . Choose 'Bluetooth Dial Up Networking' then click next. In my case it correctly identifies my mobile phone as a modem and clicking on next leads to the configuration screen where my connection is not one of those listed. If I elect to set it manually it asks for three pieces of information, APN, username and password. I fill these in and it goes away and thinks about it for a while and then comes back and says that the connection has been configured.

This would be fine if it were true, and indeed to some extent it is, but it still won't work. It took me a long time to find out that it writes its configuration information to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/chat-ppp0, but when I did the reason it didn't work became fairly obvious. For one thing it was using the wrong phone number and for another (although this took me even longer to find out) it was using a connection script which does not work with my provider. When I corrected these two items the connection worked like a dream directly from drakconnect.

Why do I think this might be a bug? Well, I grant you most people would not necessarily know the correct configuration script to use so perhaps it needs to make an educated guess as to what that should be, but most people would surely know what phone number they need to dial, so why doesn't it just ask for this when it asks for APN etc rather than try to guess one when it already admits to not knowing the details of my connection (unlisted)? That is what kppp does. Furthermore, using the wrong phone number mostly only results in an inability to connect, but it could result in a user inadvertantly connecting to the wrong number (for which he or she does not have a contract) and racking up huge usage charges.

I feel that the interface should be rewritten so that it asks for a phone number as well as apn etc.

PS In case anyone is interested the connect script error was this:

 OK-AT-OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","three.co.uk"'

With that line the connection would never make, without it it works perfectly every time.

Well, I got home and tried 'super grub disk' and it couldn't boot it either, so I resigned myself to a reinstall. After I reinstalled (with my usual procedure of installing grub to the first sector of the partition rather than the first sector of the drive then copying the 'menu.lst' entry to the version that I have in use) I booted again and got a very similar error (grub error 2). So I reinstalled a second time and this time allowed it to place grub on the 1st sector of the disk and this time it booted properly.

I don't quite know what conclusions to draw from that except that it obviously doesn't like it if it isn't on the root of the hard drive although I am sure I am not the only person in the world that does that.

Anyway it now works again.

A related question to this - Unlike most other distros I have used Mandriva uses a slightly different layout in 'menu.lst' . First it provides a generic information line like this:

title mandriva
kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz-laptop BOOT_IMAGE=linux root=/dev/sda7 nosplash vga=788
initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd-laptop.img

then later it provides a kernel specific line like this:

title desktop 2.6.24.3-3mnb
kernel (hd0,11)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24.3-desktop-3mnb BOOT_IMAGE=desktop_2.6.24.3-3mnb root=/dev/sda12 splash=nosplash vga=788
initrd (hd0,11)/boot/initrd-2.6.24.3-desktop-3mnb.img

Both of these appear in the boot menu and both seem to work providing you are using the Cooker 'menu.lst'. When previously I copied my menu.lst entry into my working menu.lst I used the kernel specific entry. Should I have used the non-specific one or even both?

And why does it have two entries anyway?

Absolutely right SS60. Not only that but Beagle is a Gnome program anyway so it is hard to understand why it would trash KDE?

Anyway the advice given by jkerr should fix the problem.

Well, I didn't see your comment so it doesn't matter too much.

The more I look at this problem the more I think there must be some data corruption, though it doesn't say much for e2fsck that it can't find it.

I'll probably reinstall from scratch when I get home, it is not a big deal.

Anyway thanks for the reply.

PS I hope the weather is better in Fife than it is in Cornwall where I am at the moment!!

Greg, Dexter, Thanks for the info, I better add a few more repos when I get it going again. It's broken at the moment so the question is a bit academic.

Info here if you are interested:

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...st&p=393294

Yesterday I had a bit of a clear out of my hard disk in order to make more room. This involved moving/deleting a lot of old files, shrinking one partition, moving several others, and both moving and growing the partition that cooker lives on. This all went successfully with the exception of cooker which will now no longer boot.

I have run e2fsck on the partition several times with the -f switch, it is always reported as clean.

The partition is mounted and fully visible when I boot into Mandriva 2008.0. All the files in /boot are accessible and I can see no errors in them.

I have 3 disc images of the partition, all of which I have tried and none of which are bootable, whereas they all used to be.

When I run grub from a terminal in 2008.0 I get this ( the cooker partition is (hd0,12))

grub> root (hd0,12)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83

Which seems to indicate that there is nothing wrong with the file system.

But when I continue this is what turns up:

grub> setup (hd0)
Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... no

Error 15: File not found

Now I know that /boot/grub/stage1 exists because I can see it. I also know (courtesy of kdiff) that it is a binary equal to the same stage1 file that successfully launches 2008.0.

So why can't grub see it?

I am not at home at the moment and I don't have my copy of super grub disc with me. Neither do I have sufficient bandwidth on the internet to do any downloads, so I can't use that method to try and boot it.

At the moment I can see myself having to reinstall as I can't work out what is happening, especially in view of the fact that earlier disc images don't work either, but if anyone has an idea of what I can do about it, please let me know.

I think he meant what kind of repos can he use.

Currently the cooker repos should be used for updating, installing.

I am still unclear on this point. Which cooker repos should be used for updates? (not installation)

Only the ones with 'update' in the title?

The above + Cooker Main?

All of them?

All except backports?

Some other combination?

I have tried the first two of these options and it makes a huge difference to what is offered when you elect to 'Update System'.

One other question on this topic. I downloaded cooker rc1. If I continue to update it does it eventually turn into the next release candidate then finally the finished product or is it necessary to download the next version each time one is released?

As I have said elsewhere, I think drakconnect is a brilliant piece of software. Of particular interest to me as a frequent user of capped internet services with high charges for exceeding the cap, one of the most useful features it has is the Network Monitoring service with which I can keep an eye on how much data I am using. What I would like to know though is does drakconnect keep a log of past connections and amount of data transferred, or is all the information lost when you shut down?

If it does have a log, then where is it?

If it does not keep a log by default, is there a way to turn this functionality on?

This is not really an answer to #2, but does your download appear if you right click the desktop and click 'Refresh Desktop'? If it does it is a bit quicker than searching through menus for it.

It certainly gets bigger, and it seems this is by design not by accident, though heaven knows why. There is a thread about how to make it smaller again (basically involves editing the icon in am image editor) here:

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?s=&...st&p=221496

AFAIK krusader 1.80 does not work at all under qt4/kde4.

For that, you need the new 2.0 version, which isn't available everywhere.

Build instructions are here if you want to try compiling it.

That is not quite right scarecrow, Krusader 1.8 works perfectly on kde4 (at least it does on my computer) the only problem I have is that the 'root mode' does not appear anywhere in the menu and I can find no way to add it. The normal (ie non root mode) appears in the menu, and if you launch that then you can successfully launch the root mode from within it. The difference is that in kde 3.5.9 'root mode' has its own entry in the start menu and in 4.0 it doesn't.

I guess I owe an apology for not responding to the answers to my post earlier. Here is my excuse. Lately I have been mostly lurking on Ubuntu forums, and there if you start or reply to a post you are automatically subscribed to it and receive email notifications of replies. I naively assumed that Mandrivausers was the same and therefore that I had received no replies. I was obviously wrong.

So here I am posting this from a KDE4 desktop so at the very least nobody can accuse me of not being open minded.

At the moment I cannot say that the changes I see are at all for the better, but it is in an early stage of development and I might change my mind later, but not now. For example, my most used application on any linux system -krusader root mode- is missing from the start menu. If I switch to 3.5.9 it is there, but not in 4.0. That is not the problem though, the problem is that as far as I can tell there is no way to actually put it there. I can easily put useless stuff like moon phases or comic strips there, but anything useful that I might actually want to put there is impossible (as far as I can tell).

This just goes to reinforce my point about eyecandy and bling. OK some people are impressed with it but it doesn't make anything work better in fact at the moment it is worse. You could impress people by including naked pictures of Britney Spears as desktop wallpaper, but it wont help launch the application that you want to launch from where you want to launch it.

I thoroughly accept the point that people coding KDE4 or compiz or anything else for that matter may not have the ability or the will to code for anything else. I have never written a single line of code in my whole life and almost certainly never will, but if I did then I would want to work on what I consider to be useful and if that happens to be wobbly windows then so be it.These are very valuable individuals and have an absolute right to work on what they choose to work on but from my selfish point of view I don't see this as being much of a contribution to Linux as a whole, but I grant you it is a lot bigger contribution than mine.

Anyway if anybody can tell me how to add Krusader root mode to my KDE4 start menu or my desktop or my taskbar, I would love to know.

Krusader is light years ahead of any other file manager that exists. Whenever I install a new distro it is the first thing I add.

Thanks very much guys that solution to the graphics problem seems to have worked for me.

The MCC problem was solved by an upgrade that I got this morning.