Sarissi

Your SB PCI 128 should work with no problems. I know, as I use one and love it. Mandrake install sets it up correctly.

My current mobo's bios doesn't even have the option to turn off plug and play, and I don't have any problems (yet).

Nice article! One thing I don't like is the term 'Desktop', since the focus is on business desktops, to the exclusion of home usage.

I find Mandrake Linux perfectly fine for home usage. I don't use a computer anywhere else, as I am at home nearly all the time. By home usage, I don't mean WineX for those wondoze games. I will be building a win98se box for those that I have. I rarely play any games, so it is really no matter.

Well, I am back up and running. I will upgrade to version 5, when I can do so. On one other interesting note, my /home is a maxtor 160 gig hdd and win98se in win4lin v4, sees the entire 160 gigs!! Sure can't say that, even for the fdisk that comes with my win98se, which only sees 29 gigs of the drive!! I am running it in 24 bit color, too. Here I thought I was stuck with 16 bit. :D

I have finally seen the end of dual booting.

I don't have a separate /boot partition. swap uses its own special file system, anyways. I use reiserfs for everything else. Back when I was dual booting with Win98SE, I used System Commander Personal Edition and it only recognized ext2. Same with the version of Partition Commander I have (older version). I always worried about rescueing linux if I had to reinstall Win98SE, so I did it that way (lilo in root superblock). Now I don't have to worry about such things.

Of course, once I got all stable hardware (particularly RAM), I never had a BSOD or needed to reinstall windows.

This is how I have my hard disks partitioned:

hda: (61 gig maxtor)

/ 4 gigs

swap 3 gigs

/tmp 10 gigs

/var 10 gigs

/usr remainder of disk

hdb: (160 gig maxtor)

/home entire disk

hdd: (61 gig maxtor)

/pics 49 percent

/archives 51 percent

(hdc is cd burner)

I do know the Logitech Cordless Mouseman Optical work just fine in Mandrake. I have one, and it is setup as a mouseman+. The wireless part is transparent to mandrake.

One bit of advice when buying a cordless setup: make sure it is not infrared (other light sources interfere), make sure you can replace the batteries. 2 AA is fine. All you need is 2 pair of NiMH per device and a charger that can handle them. You don't want to be stuck when wired in rechargables need recharging, when you are in the middle of something! The batteries in my cordless mouse always die when I am using the mouse. I just take them out, put charged NiMH in, and charge the exhausted pair. No sweat.

Hope this helps you. ;)

Tell me about it! Those jumper settings change, even with the same manufacturer! I have two Maxtor 61 GB ata100 hds, and a new Maxtor 160 GB ata133 hd. The slave setting is different on the 160 GB.

I'm back an NO windows partitions! unfortunately, Mandrake likes to put the Promise controller first (eide, but mandrake see it as scsi). The ASRock K7VT2 BIOS sees the promise card and puts it second (after mobo eide controller), where it is supposed to be. Now, this mobo is made by Asus group, which is notorious for things like this. They tweak the bios to make life difficult for anything but windoze and these addon controllers.

I did not have this problem with the Gigabyte mobo I had, this promise controller, and Mandrake. I hope I won't have this problem with my Chaintech mobo.

I tried installing with no promise card, boot, shut down, install promise card, along with the 2 extra hds and burner, and reboot. Unfortunately, the promise card was seen by mandrake as first in sequence. Then I tried installing with everything in place. Reboot: found Lilo with no problem, but hung on unpacking the kernel.

Live and learn. Anyways, this asrock mobo is going to be in my windoze gaming box, after I get the cpu and ram for the chaintech mobo.

Never heard of LVM, Ramfree. Besides I am going to see if this Promise ultra100 PCI EIDE controller works as it is supposed to with mandrake 9.1. That means Mandrake install better not swap the motherboard and promise controllers, where actual hda become hde, and visa versa. This happened to me with mandrake 8.2 (unrecognized chipset - southbridge). Sine the chipset is recognized by 9.1, I have hopes that thing will be fine. I will know as soon as I go to partition the hdds. :D

First I have to tear the system apart for a partial rebuild (moving hdds around). I will be back after I am in pure Mandrake Linux (NO native Windows boot). Now to reboot into win98se and use Partition Commander to redo a couple of things. (mostly deleting ext2 partitions)

See everyone later today (I hope).

Well, I bought a Maxtor 160 GB ata133 hdd, and it will be delivered tomorrow. This is going to be exclusively my /home partition. It won't take me long to rework my system for this, as I have 4 HDDs now, 2 of which will be reserved for a win98se native boot system for gaming. The remaining 2 HDDs are Maxtor 61 GB ata100, and will be exclusively linux, along with the 160 GB.

What file system is best for a single partition on the 160 GB?? I am thinking of going with reiserfs for everything except the swap partition. If I have to go with something else, please let me know before friday evening! Assuming the hdd arrives tomorrow, the evening will be my system rebuild time. (UPS says it is on time).

Thank you in advance!

Try using a generic monitor. I had a similar problem with an NEC MultiSync monitor. WHen I selected the specific make and model: endless problems. After I went with a generic monitor: no problems. Note: I was still using the NEC, but used a Generic selection in config.

That article, is full of sarcasm. Fragmentation is the result of the way things are allocated on a hard disk. Now, that could be largely due to the file system in use.

I have seen far too many Data Center oriented books on Linux. Part of the problem there, has been Redhat's attitude of 'Linux is for Servers, only'. Unfortunately, that attitude caught on. Another attitude problem I see with Linux, is the focus on Desktop, as in Only at Work, NOT at home. This is showing up in print, where most of it, has to do with MS workplace substitutes. Of the rest tha I have actually seen, it is written by Geeks, FOR Geeks, in GEEKESE.

Hmmm, MAN pages. I do have a rant with those, and the How Tos: Also written in GEEKESE and assume you are already an expert.

The 2 printed manuals (books) that come with Mandrake Powerpack: Written in plain language. OH, what a Novelty that is! (Great Idea, too!!!). Thanks to them, I actually understood what Tarballs are, and alot of other things. Yes, I actually took the time to READ both of them. This was back when I got my very first copy of Linux: Mandrake Linux 7.2 Powerpack Edition.

Keep in mind, that I am one of those, that the Geeks like to sneer at: A long time MSDOS/Windows user, and worst of all, a Home user! :D

I don't know about other distros, but, Mandrake has this GUI Archiver front end, which is SO Nice! No more typing in loooong lines on the console, just to extract things from tar.gz files.

Newbies do need plain language books to explain the basics, including how to call up MAN pages. Most importantly, Linux books need to be Distro neutral and explain things like RPM and apt-get, and so forth. They do need to include things like how to compile programs that the author requires you to compile, just to use. I can go on and on, but do include how to use Tar, gzip, and other essential utilities that are standard in Linux, but from the UNIX and BSD world.

Well, you see, I have never done anything like this, even compile anything, other than ZBASIC PC/32 and VB 3 Pro.

bvc: Thanks! :D

It is very nice to find a site that has a bunch of helpful people. I have no use for those holier than thou geeks, that love to trash newbies that are migrating away from windows. Editing things like fstab is totally foriegn to windows users, as is compiling a kernel. This is actually the first time I have done anything like this, so the satisfaction of getting something working, is very great indeed!!

I had a hard disk die on me several years ago. This one's drive motor ground to a halt during win98se format. Not fun when something like this happens.

Ixthusdan;

I got it working, thanks to your help! This was the final, critical thing needed in order to see my way clear to a linux native boot (only) box.

Thanks! Now, I presume that while I am editing fstab, I can change the 'win_c' etcetera, entries to something useful, like the actual drive names????

I am going to do this later today, as I am going back to bed. I will check back later before I do it.

Okay, here is lilo.conf:

boot=/dev/hdb1

map=/boot/map

default="linux-enterpris"

keytable=/boot/us.klt

nowarn

message=/boot/message

menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw

image=/boot/vmlinuz

label="linux"

root=/dev/hdb1

initrd=/boot/initrd.img

append="devfs=mount hdd=ide-scsi acpi=off quiet"

vga=788

read-only

image=/boot/vmlinuz

label="linux-nonfb"

root=/dev/hdb1

initrd=/boot/initrd.img

append="devfs=mount hdd=ide-scsi acpi=off"

read-only

image=/boot/vmlinuz-enterprise

label="linux-enterpris"

root=/dev/hdb1

initrd=/boot/initrd-enterprise.img

append="devfs=mount hdd=ide-scsi acpi=off"

read-only

image=/boot/vmlinuz

label="failsafe"

root=/dev/hdb1

initrd=/boot/initrd.img

append="devfs=nomount hdd=ide-scsi acpi=off failsafe"

read-only

other=/dev/hda1

label="windows"

table=/dev/hda

other=/dev/fd0

label="floppy"

unsafe

Here is fstab:

/dev/hdb1 / ext2 noatime 1 1

none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0

/dev/hdc1 /home ext2 noatime 1 2

none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/scd0,fs=auto,ro,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win_c vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

/dev/hdb5 /mnt/win_c2 vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

/dev/hda5 /mnt/win_d vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

/dev/hdb6 /mnt/win_d2 vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

/dev/hda6 /mnt/win_e vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

/dev/hdb7 /mnt/win_e2 vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

/dev/hda7 /mnt/win_f vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

/dev/hda8 /mnt/win_g vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0

none /proc proc defaults 0 0

/dev/hdb3 /usr ext2 noatime 1 2

/dev/hdb2 swap swap defaults 0 0

/dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/cd	/mnt/cdrecorder	auto	ro,noauto,user,exec	0 0

Now what? Once I figured out, that since I am not changing anything at this point, I could open in kedit (open with option on right click). Duh! :roll:

IF I knew how to even look at lilo.conf and fstab I would do so.

MY current drive setup, excluding floppy is:

hda = 60 gig WD, all Windows

hdb = 60 gig WD, 1/2 windows and 1/2 linux

hdc = 61 gig Maxtor, all linux

hdd = cd burner

In temporary exile are a maxtor 61 gig hd, and a cdrom drive. I used to have a Promise Ultra100 PCI EIDE controller, until I got his ASRock K7VT2 and found that mandrake install (8.2) swapped the mobo and promise controllers: hda became hde (etc) for install, then linux boot swapped them back, totally screwing the linux boot.

If I remember the enterprise kernel error message correctly, the chipset was not recognized. IF that explains the eide controller swapping, then I could get another controller.

Unfortunately, I have heard horror stories about mobos made by Asus and Asus Group, which makes this mobo, and their mobos not liking to have both mobo eide and pci eide controllers active (mobo's must be turned off). I like both. Giga-Byte mobos don't have this problem.

The reason I was asking, was the the nvidia readme, that I was reading. It said you had to have a supported kernel. So I was wondering if there were extra hoops to go through to get the stupid thing to work.

To preamble a bit, I want to get away from Windows native boot entirely. In order to do this, I need to get my Cyberdrive CW038D CD-R/RW working as a burner, which is listed in the mandrake hardware database as supported.

When I did the K3B setup, it listed the drive, but, some things are missing:

eMovix

tccat

tcdecode

tcextract

tcprobe

tcscan

transcode

vcdxbuild

vcdxgen

Do I need these installed to burn CD-ROMs? If so, I will install them and this brings me to what next? I tried to burn a test CD, but it would not do so with a fresh CDR in the drive.

Does the burner HAVE to be in the master position? That might be a bit tough with my setup.

Other hardware I would like to get and have work:

USB Hard disk

USB pendrive

USB Compact Flash card reader/writer

EIDE DVD/CD writer Combo drive (a good one)

The most important thing at the moment, is my cd burner. Thank you in advance!

Does anyone know if NVidia cards work with Win4lin (ie Kernel support)??

I need to ask this, as my future Native Mandrake linux box may or may not use one of these video cards. My other option is ATI (currently ATI XPert 2000 Pro AGP - Rage 128 based), and I want to go with an 8x AGP OpenGL card.

I just don't like going through alot of headaches trying to get something to function, which is why I have avoided NVidia cards to this point.

Thank you in advance!

Thanks a bunch, guys!

Now, I will have a hardware question related to Win4lin kernels that I will post in Hardware section.

What astonished me even more, is the install of Mandrake 9.1 Powerpack. It didn't even request a host name and just went ahead and setup the Roadrunner connection on its own!