viking777

Good to know that I am not alone.

Anyway I have now fixed it (again). The software upgrades that I undertook somehow crippled KDE as well as giving me these arts warnings. The solution was to remove kde completely and then reinstall it. I now have both sound and no warnings. (and also got a look at IceWm in between times)

Along the way I also picked up KDE4 - interesting.

I am now off to do a disk image before I break it again!

I like this, this is fun! I have been testing Kubuntu since Gutsy Alpha 1 right up to Hardy beta 5 and it is never as interesting as this is.

Oh no, it has happened again.

This morning I thought I would do a few software upgrades using the 'Mandriva Recommended' section of MCC. I thought I was being quite conservative with my choices, new splash screen/themes, get rid of some language options that I didn't want, a new version of rpmdrake and some KDE stuff (but only 3.5.9 not KDE4). However as soon as I rebooted I was faced with the same situation I described before, I was bombarded with KDE crash handler messages about artsd failures. These beggars are really persistent. They pop up at the rate of about 1/sec steal the focus from whatever you are doing (so it is impossible to do anything else, even shutting down is next to impossible without the power button) and this time they did not cease when I elected to 'disable arts output'.

A real shame this because I spent a lot of time yesterday configuring it to my taste and it was running pretty well, but not any more! I don't have a disk image of the working install and I have no idea how to fix this otherwise so I guess I will have to reinstall again.

All part of the fun I suppose - at least it doesn't take long with Mandriva.

This is not a major problem because I already know the solution, the only trouble is I can't make the solution permanent.

Every time I start up Mandriva it overwrites my existing (working) xorg.conf file with a different one that doesn't work as well (the screen resolution is wrong). Luckily it saves the old one as a backup so all I have to do is delete the new one and restore the old one to get the correct resolution, but this does get a bit tedious.

Does anybody know a way to stop it doing this?

If you are interested, the only difference between the two files is that in the working one the graphics driver is 'fglrx' in the non working one it is 'radeonhd'.

Second question relates to software management in MCC.

By default the new software management section in MCC opens with the package selection criteria set to 'Programs with GUI'. Now, if you all live to be 100 you will never hear from a more pro-gui anti-cli man than me, but even I don't want this! For example yesterday I was searching for 'kernel-sources' (in order to make Virtualbox work). It took me a couple of minutes of puzzling as to why I couldn't find any until I realised this default behavior and changed the package selection to 'All'. The source files then popped up straight away.

Another annoyance with this is that every time you change the package selection you have to wait for it to reload, and it also deletes your search term, I am not to worried about that, but I would like to have MCC open with 'All' selected by default.

I am sure there is probably a config file somewhere that I can tweak to make this happen but I don't know where it is, so can anyone help with that?

To save you any further pondering on this question I would like to announce that install #3 was perfect. and now the installed image behaves just as well as the live cd does.

I can't explain the artsd bombardment that I had on the first install, but I might have some idea about the lack of functionality on install #2. In order to explain this I will have to take a little time out to explain how I run grub on my pc.

I long ago found out that reinstalling grub from scratch was an awful lot harder than simply having multiple instances of grub and switching from one to the other if you screw up one particular version (it only takes 2 very short lines of code to swap between them). Since then I have always installed grub on the first sector of the partition I am installing to not the first sector of the drive. I then copy the menu.lst entry from the new installation into the menu.lst that I am using at the time and boot from there.

This is the procedure I adopted for the first two installs and both times it resulted in disaster. When I looked at the output of

uname -r

this morning I found that install #2 was booting kernel-laptop 2.6.22 for which it had a kernel source file (I don't know where it came from?), but no config file, no initrd image, no system map file and no vmlinuz image. In other words it was a miracle it booted at all. I guess this must have been something to do with my use of grub, but that has never happened before and I cant explain it now.

Anyway I reinstalled a third time and this time, before exiting the live cd I switched to the grub instance from the one I was using before to the newly installed one rather than transferring the menu.lst entry. This worked perfectly and here I am posting on the cooker version and all is well so far.

I haven't had much time to look at it yet, I wanted to post this first before I did anything else, so I may find one or two other problems later, but at first glance it looks perfect.

I apologise if my first post was a bit alarmist, but I was alarmed!

Before you read this you should know that I am a great fan of Mandriva, 2008 is the best distro I have ever used and that is why I thought I would have a go at 2008.1 rc1. I chose the Mandriva One version. I downloaded, burnt and booted the live Cd and everything was perfect, even my bluetooth connected gprs modem was correctly detected. I was seriously impressed, so I pressed the install button.

Install #1 - no boot - grub error 2. Reinstall.

Install #2 - booted this time but as soon as I got to a desktop I was bombarded (and I really mean that) with kde crash handler windows (all reference artsd). They popped up so quick that it was like being on an unprotected windows system, the more I shut them down, the more they appeared. At about the time my system tray was flooded with these things I pressed the power button and switched off, they didn't give me time to shut down normally.

Boot attempt #3 - this time a warning box appeared asking if I wanted to disable arts output. Given my previous experience I answered yes and this prevented a repeat of the former error message bombardment. I was then able to contemplate what I had actually got.

Mouse (usb)- doesn't work

Keyboard (usb) - doesn't work

Internet connection - doesn't work (wired or wireless)

Sound - doesn't work

Graphics resolution - totally wrong.

And when I say 'doesn't work' or 'totally wrong' I mean after I had tried to configure it with MCC as well as before hand.

The last time I had anything this bad was using Suse linux.

The thing is that all the above items work perfectly in 2008.0 and all work perfectly from the live cd. So what gives here? I know it is only a release candidate but you seriously cannot even think about releasing anything this awful and hope to survive.

:blush: What a fool I am - of course that is the answer!!

Thanks scarecrow, just a few seconds work and now I have a second hard drive to use without deleting the first, just what I wanted.

I use Virtualbox for the very few occasions where I can't do something in Linux, but I underestimated the size of the .vdi file I would need and am now short of space. Most solutions to this problem start with the words 'create a new vdi file of the size you want' . This makes one fundamental assumption which is you have room to do that, well I don't. The only way I can create space for a new vdi file of the size I want is to delete the old one and that is not going to help me boot the vm.

I thought I had found a solution which was to create a small second virtual drive and attach that to the vm as a slave drive to give me the extra space I need. This worked perfectly apart from one small flaw. Windows does not recognise the second hard drive. I thought it would turn up as Drive D in 'My Computer' but it doesn't appear at all. If I hover my mouse over the hard drive icon in virtualbox it clearly shows that I have 2 drives attached, but windows only sees 1. The add hardware wizard doesn't help because as far as 'Device Manager' is concerned both drives exist.

What do I have to do to make the second drive appear in 'My Computer'?

Your experience of a distribution really depends a lot on your experience level, a bit on your hardware and maybe to some extent on your luck as well, but I have to say that to date Mandriva 2008 is the most competent distro I have ever used (and I have used a lot). Drakconnect is brilliant, I have never known anything half as competent at setting up internet connections, and occasionally Mandriva even manages to turn my laptop off when I ask it to, there is no other distribution that I know of that can ever do that (there is still much room for improvement here though, because a successful shutdown on 1 out of every 6 attempts is still a lot worse than I would hope for).

I still use Kubuntu and Linux Mint, and each have their own strengths (personally I think Mint is much better than Ubuntu). The most disappointing aspect of Mandriva is package management, a simple update of the package database is so painfully slow compared to a similar operation with Synaptic that it makes you want to weep! (and yes I do use 'synthesis' packages but that is not an answer, especially when you consider that you get virtually no information with them).

After the horrific experience I had with Mandriva 2007 (so bad that even thinking about it brings a shiver to my spine) it is a surprise that I tried 2008 at all, but I am exceedingly glad I did because at the moment there is simply nothing to match it. Why Ubuntu gets all the limelight is a mystery to me.

Please keep up the good work and if it improves as much in the next year as it has in the last then it will be unbeatable!

Ubuntu eat dust!!

Just a word of warning in case anyone else should happen upon this post and find it useful. After a couple of days of perfect operation I switched on this morning and got absolutely nothing, no connection at all. A bit of investigation into this led me to find out that for some reason the device node for the mobile phone modem - (which Mandriva creates automatically when the dongle is plugged in ) had changed from /dev/rfcomm0 to dev/rfcomm1, necessitating a brief reconfigure of wvdial.conf in order to get a connection. I have no idea why it has done that or if it might change back again in another couple of days but it is one thing to check if you suddenly lose a connection. You can check the node created by typing

rfcomm -a

in a terminal.

If you are unfortunate enough to be using a less capable distro you can create your own node with

rfcomm bind rfcomm0 00:1B:18:28:42:33 1

Substitute your own modem address for the one above and the '1' on the end assumes that your phone modem uses channel 1 to communicate on. I have to say though that using this method (ie on Ubuntu which for reasons best known to itself does not create the nodes automatically) I have not had much success.

Now it really is solved, I thought Mandriva wouldn't let me down. I had an incorrect init string, all I needed to do was to remove the line causing the error from etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/chat-ppp0 (and change the telephone number - again) and now it connects with drakconnect as well.

I haven't dared reboot it yet though

If I knew how to I would mark this thread as solved. The solution was much easier than I expected and as SoulSe suggested it was just to do with phone settings. This is how I solved it in case anyone is interested.

Go to sonyericsson.com/support, choose your region and then choose your mobile model. Click the link that says 'Mobile Internet(WAP)' ,then enter your country, operator, phone model again, and finally your telephone number. Then wait. It took 7 hours before I got a response (which is probably why it didn't work the first time I tried it - I gave up to soon). It doesn't say this and I don't know it for sure, but I think you need to leave your mobile on during that time. Eventually a new set of settings will be uploaded to your mobile. You don't get the chance to read these only to apply them or not, but since you asked for them I would say it is pretty safe to apply them which is what I did. I then searched through the phones settings to see what had changed. It quickly became clear that under the heading 'Data Accounts' I now had two entries where before there was only one. I selected the second entry (called 3UK instead of just 3) and tried the connection with kppp using the settings that I have been using all along and the connection worked straight away. :thumbs: , I am using it to post this.

Strangely though it wont (as yet) work with drakconnect only kppp. This again must mean that there is a setting somewhere that is wrong in drakconnect. I know for sure that every time I configure the connection in drakconnect it changes the phone number in etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/chat-ppp0 to the wrong one, but no matter how many times I alter it to the right one it changes it back again. TBH I am not sure where else drakconnect gets its settings from (it cant be wvdial because the settings there are correct). Anyway that is small beer, the main thing is that I now have a bluetooth modem and I can start using up some of the credit that I bought for it!!

Happy bunny :D

Thanks for the reply SoulSe. I don't think the settings are wrong because I use them on another device (same provider) and they work OK there, and I have already tried setting the phone as a 'trusted' device and that doesn't make any difference. I must admit I was trying to avoid the likes of wvdial as it is such a pain to set it up correctly, but I have used it in the past so I suppose I could again if I get desperate enough! Drakconnect is one of the best features in Mandriva, one of the reasons I use it as my default distro, and since it has worked with USB connected modems then I think it should with Bluetooth ones as well.

Yes I have Googled, of course, and one of the lines of enquiry that I am thinking about now came from that source. Apparently there are several services that need to be running to make a bluetooth connection work, two of which are 'dund' and 'pand' (dialup networking and personal area networking for bluetooth). Both of these services exist on my system but neither of them will start, either automatically on boot, or manually from a terminal and I think this is why I can't get a connection. Unfortunately, so far I haven't worked out how to make them start. You wouldn't have any ideas on that would you?

I recently bought a new mobile phone (SonyEricsson k610i) which is bluetooth enabled and I would like to use it as a modem for my laptop, but I can't seem to get it working. I can transfer files using bluetooth and I can even use the mobile as a remote control for certain apps like media players - neither of these I have the remotest interest in doing, but getting the modem functionality is something I would dearly love to do and I can't.

Drakconnect correctly identifies the device and I have set up the correct apn, username and password. When I press connect, I get a popup on the phone saying the computer is trying to use the phone as a modem and will I allow it. I press 'yes' there is a pause of a few seconds whilst it attempts a connection and then the bluetooth drops out and that is the end of it, I can't get any further.

Does anyone have any ideas?

PS I forgot to say that I have purchased a top up to allow me to use mobile broadband and I have 1Gb of data allowance waiting for me to use, and also I have an acceptable signal where I am (I can surf the internet via the phone).

I think you mean the kickoff menu style.

Anyway this feature is not related to menu style. You can use it with the original menu style if you want. The only confusing thing is how it works. Because if you just click on the Reboot button the machine starts to reboot immediately. But if you click and hold the mouse button down the menu appears and you can select any boot entry.

You are right Dexter I do mean 'kickoff' style, and thanks very much for the info regarding the way the kde menu works, again you are right, it does behave in the manner you suggested and I never realised it.

Great stuff, now I have a choice!

I have already said thank you for certain features that Mandriva has that other distros don't (notably the ability to shut my laptop down, at least some of the time). I now have another cause for celebration!

I am not a great fan of kicker style menus, so immediately I installed Mandriva I changed back to the KDE menu style. I later decided that I would experiment with the newer style and found a feature that I have been wishing for for ages - the ability to reboot from Mandriva straight into another distro without having to sit around waiting for the grub menu to appear and then selecting the relevant entry. Why other distros don't have this amazing time saving device I don't know, but I just had to say thank you for including it in Mandriva.

I guess I'll have to get used to the kicker style menu now because that feature is too good to live without :D :D

From what I have seen and read, I have this personal fear that KDE4 is going to turn out to be yet another piece of worthless eye candy just like compiz et al.

As I sit at my desk here I am surrounded by 5 hardware items that don't work, either properly, or at all, with Linux (any version) and I am using a laptop that will either shut down 1 time out of 6 (Mandriva) or will not shut down at all (any other distro) and yet I have this awful feeling that vast amounts of human resources are going to be ploughed into plasmoids (whatever the hell they are) and the rest, whilst such utter basics as I have just described, have gone, or will go, unaddressed for ever.

If Linux is to gain the credibility it deserves then it needs people to continue to improve on the basics, not to go off on wild and useless flights of fancy in some daft effort to emulate Windows (that is all that compiz was anyhow).

For the sake of Linux I really do hope that I am proved wrong in this and KDE4 does turn out to contain something useful, but widgets and kicker menus don't do it for me, and as a personal preference, Krusader is so vastly superior to any other file manager on offer there is very little point in trying to compete with it, just install it by default.

Hello John. The thing is Dexter may well be right on his computer but he isn't right when it comes to mine. Right clicking the underlined word does not give me any such menu options the only options I get when I right click an underlined word are - Undo, Select All, Properties, Spell check this field (which is already ticked), Languages (which is already selected to English/UK), No Script (which is set to allow for mandrivausers.org), and Adblock Image. None of these are much use for telling me the correct spelling.

Thanks anyway. It's not a big deal, when I went to school if you couldn't spell you got a ruler smacked across the palm of your hand so I learnt it fairly well!!

I know I ask some pretty obscure questions, and I apologise in advance, but here is another one.

Anybody who has read some of my previous posts will know that I frequently connect to the internet with gprs/3g modems. At the moment I have two of these (this is not by choice, simply that I bought the second before the contract on the first had run out) anyway, the one I propose to use is a payg modem, which for me is a much cheaper option than my present contract modem. But like everything in life it is not perfect. Whilst the normal payg charges are reasonable enough, the out of bundle charges are enough to bankrupt Bill Gates, never mind me. I phoned their helpline and asked what happens when your present top-up runs out (in other words I want to know how to avoid the out of bundle charges) their answer was that "We send you a text message to warn you that your credit is low". The problem with this is that being a Linux user, their software (which will receive text messages) does not run on any Linux distro and I have never managed to get it to run with wine either. The long and short of this is that I will not receive their text message, and this is why I want to find some Linux software that will receive text messages through a gprs/3g modem.

I have tried several programs that seem to fit the bill, but none of them work. They sit there in my system tray and loudly proclaim that I have 'no active connection' despite the fact that my modem is connected to the internet and I have downloaded the sms program using it. My only option at the moment is to use something like the 'drakconnect' 'monitor network' program to monitor my usage when I get near to my credit limit or else to constantly return to the ISP website and monitor usage from there, but it is not updated often enough to be much use.

So does anybody out there know of a program that I can run on Mandriva that will reliably receive text messages through a gprs/3g modem? Most of the ones that I have tried don't recognise the modem as a mobile phone and thus don't work.

TIA

Thanks for all the replies. It is only the incorrect words that are underlined, and I do have the correct language set, but I don't get any corrections or options in the context menu.

Strange eh?

Can anybody help me with this little problem?

Whenever I type into a web page or any other such text entry window, such as I am doing here, Firefox very kindly underlines every word that I spell wrongly. Unfortunately it absolutely refuses to tell me what my spelling error is. As I understand it when you click on the underlined word it is supposed to come up with a list of alternative spellings for that word - I never get this. I have the correct dictionary installed, but it never works.

I also have 2 other Linux distros with 2 other versions of Firefox and it doesn't work on those either. All three Firefox versions are version 2 or above.

Is it just me or are others afflicted with this problem and is there any way to cure it?

Do you know what that means?

Actually no need to bother replying to that because the -w switch doesn't seem to make any difference to the way it behaves.

No matter at least I have learnt how to connect with it, though why the Vodafone modem should be more problematic than the 3 mobile modem is a mystery to me, they are virtually the same thing although they are manufactured by different companies so there must be some difference in the 3 mobile one that suits Mandriva.

You could try using

rmmod -w usb-storage

that should not allow anyone new to use the module, and keep everything already using it happy.

That sounds like a really good idea Greg, but looking at the man page I came upon this little snippet:

Noone will be able to use the module but it's up to you to make sure the current users eventually finish with it.

Do you know what that means?

I'll give it a try anyway.

does python packages also have corresponding devel packages?

Some do and some don't ramfree. I am by no stretch of the imagination a programmer, so I can't tell you why that is.

I have kind of done that willie although I guess your solution is a bit more elegant. I wrote a small shell script and put it in ~/.kde/Autostart. This works beautifully for the '3 mobile' modem I can use drakconnect to connect to it with no additional commands necessary. Unfortunately the exact same procedure doesn't work at all for the Vodafone modem, I have no idea why.

Thanks Greg. I have tried Ian's suggestions but although I have installed a lot of Python packages I cannot get the software to load. However, I have found a way around it.

Just to explain the problem, I do a lot of travelling and whilst doing so I use gprs/3g modems to get on line. I have two of these, one works absolutely perfectly with Mandriva - I just use drakconnect to configure it and it connects every time. The other would not connect at all which is why I was trying to use the vodafone-linux software (which works on Ubuntu).

Just recently though I have found out that I can connect with the Vodafone modem (I am using it now) if I execute another command prior to starting kppp ( or wvdial). That command is

rmmod usb-storage

For some reason this command is not necessary in Ubuntu. Anyway if I do this and then modprobe the vendor and product id's for the device, the modem will connect. The difficulty with this is that issuing the 'rmmod usb-storage' command also removes any connections with other usb storage devices such as my external hard disk.

So my next question is this, can I modify the 'rmmod' command in some way (or use an alternative) so as to remove the storage module from the USB modem but not from every other USB device at the same time?