kurtjo

USB card readers have been around for a number of years now. Both scsi and USB are meant to be generic and not require a lot of, if any setup - especially for a card reader. So, why should a person have to be "lucky" or have a non-stupid card reader (whatever that might be).? I have my cheap Comp USA (no-name) 6in1 unit working in 9.2, and although it requires manually mounting and unmounting - it seems to work flawlessly. Then I installed 10.1. Guess what - doesn't work! At least not by default. So, I tried the same stuff I used in 9.2. It worked. Only one catch - now the desktop don't boot up all the way - it just comes up with no icons or menu tray. Even 10.0 worked better than this. I looked in Mandrake's errata; there is nothing mentioned about this. Sorry to say this, but that is pretty poor, as I doubt very seriously Mandrake is ignorant of the situation. I won't bother to ask anyone for help about this, since I have already looked through tons of posts just like this one, with no real answers for those who are having this problem. But good luck to you all anyway.

You may want to give GTKtalog a try. It comes with 9.1, not sure about 9.2 as I don't use it. This app has some great features for cataloging CDs, even compresses the catalog.

I've done a fair amount of partitioning and mixing distros with windows in the past few years, but never tried Debian. What I can give you is: I would not advise this. Different distros put some config files in different places and also configure things differently. You should be able to get by with something like one new partition for /boot for your new distro (shouldn't need more than 50MB) and one for / (use the rest left over from 2.8G after creating the /boot). You can share your existing linux swap partition so don't make another one of those. Personally I use ext3 for the /boot partition and reiser for the /, but ext3 works well for both too - maybe with less hassle. Same stuff applies to the 11G partition. How difficult this really is will depend on the distro you are installing (how friendly the installer is about partitioning). Getting rid of the NTFS partition should be easy with most distros. Make sure you have a working boot floppy that can boot into your Mandrake system before starting all this. That way if something goes wrong, at least you will still be able to access your working linux system! You can do this in the Boot /Drakfloppy menu under the Mandrake Control Center. Most distros should update your bootloader (lilo?) properly, but there could always be a problem here. One of the best places to look is in the How-To's that may already be installed on your system. Of course typing your question in a search engine will get you more info than you can imagine, also. Good luck, Kurt

I have installed 9.2 RC2 and final release both on a system that uses a GCE-8480B with no damage whatsoever and was able to set it up as a scsi device for xcdroast.

I have tried using urpmi to update the OpenOffice 1.0 that comes with my 9.1 distro to 1.1 but keep getting failed due to missing packages. So I tried adding the Mandrake 9.2 CDs to the rpmdrake package manager sources and attempted to use that system to first uninstall 1.0, then install 1.1 using the 9.2 CDs. It seemed to be working, then gave an error about conflicts with apache. Has anyone using 9.1 successfully installed OO 1.1? If so, any sugestions - is it woth it? Should I just give up and wait for Mandrake 10?

Ixthusdan, I'm a bit confused since Mandrakes install notes do not specify if this problem only affects READERS or RW as well. I only know that I currently use LG CDRW drives in 2 systems under Mandrake 9.1 with flawless results. However, I must agree with you that I would not tempt fate by attempting to use an any LG drive with Mandrake 9.2 now that I've read that information!

This is interesting! I installed 9.2 on my test machine a while back, which uses an LG 48x cd writter and had no problems whatever with the drive that I know of. However there were other problems that annoyed me so much I put 9.1 back on after a while. I think I will wait until the bugs are worked out before touching 9.2 again. Good luck. :?

I don't know if this will help, but I ended up having to install the following set of files to get this thing working: bittorrent-3.3-2mdk.noarch.rpm bittorrent-gui-3.3-2mdk.noarch.rpm libwxPythonGTK2.3_2-2.3.3.1-1mdk.i586.rpm libwxPythonGTK2.3_2-devel-2.3.3.1-1mdk.i586.rpm wxPythonGTK-2.3.3.1-1mdk.i586.rpm Good luck.

Steve, if you're still following this thread, I sympathize with you. I too have had similar experiences with Windows OS's. One of my fovorites with win 98 was you start installing with a CD and after it is almost completed, windows informs you that you have no CD drive! I love linux, especially Mandrake. I have my 9.1 system restored from my backup copy already. The reason I am so critical of 9.2 is that Microsoft is just now admitting they are starting to worry about linux - and the whole world is watching! It would be a majorly good thing if Mandrake made a special effort to make the 9.2 release rock solid and able to install without a hitch on as many systems as possible. I want to see M$ squirm; those bastards owe me for the countless hours I have waited for my computers to reboot!!

Just got ahold of the new 9.2 release using bittorrent yesterday afternoon. After test installing 9.2 on a fresh install at work and having it fail to boot past the point where it was loading alsa, I tested installing it at home last night. I attempted to install it to a 60 Gig using ext3 for the /boot and reiserfs for the / partition. I used individual package selection to install lots of extra packages (unlike the simple install I tried earlier at work). This time it failed during install just after setting the user and hung. Rebooted and ran through install again and finally got it working but for some reason it would not bring up the network, nor did it install my windows drive in lilo like it should have. Tried a third install by reformating / using the same partitions on this drive over again and did a simple install this time, except I used 9.1 This time a charm, everything worked (as I expected). So, I upgraded this 9.1 install with the 9.2 CDs. This time it worked! Empowered by my success, I decided to upgrade my smoothly running 9.1 system on (not a test system - but my regular one I use all the time). Things went great until almost finished - then I got a warning screen that said mkintrc failed. I figured I was probably screwed, but went ahead and finished the install. When I rebooted all I got after a certain point was errors with init and it won't finish booting. I'm not complaining, exactly; I know we are all guinea penguins here, but I did expect a little more of Mandrakes new version than this! P.S. I just finished installing 9.1 on the same work computer that 9.2 failed on and am using it to post this thread.

Yep, I agree with the FAT32 approach for storing mpg's and such, even though I've learned not to trust FAT partitions, it's only data that can be backed up elsewhere easily enough. I'm still too chicken to write to the NTFS partitions where my Win OS is. If I screw up win I would be REALLY PO'd cause I hate working with it anyway. Thanks for the suggestions.

Thanks for the input, mtweidmann. I am trying to put together a plan for sharing files between linux and XP. Sure would be a lot easier if M$ would recognize other partition types and make NTFS public!

I read somewhere that SUSE 9.0 will support WRITING to NTFS safely. Does anyone know if this is true and if Mandrake 9.2 will be able to also?

Hey, thanks for the quick response guys! So if I have this right, I don't need to worry about it as long as things are working okay, but if there are problems installing, definitely turn off plug n play and try again. Mostly I use MSI/AMD or ASUS/AMD stuff. But Ixthusdan has me wondering who makes the MB that submits to M$ (I would avoid that one). And if I finally purge windoze altogether just leave PNP OFF. Thanks again.

I have been installing linux and dual booting into linux/windows on several machines over the last few years successfully with Plug and Play turned ON in BIOS. Yet I have seen several posts by veteran users who no doubt know more than I do about this and who claim it should be OFF. What's the deal here? Why should it be turned off? Doesn't that screw up windows if you are trying to run both on the same system? Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I am confused here.