alexpank

Thanks, TopDog. I'll check that out when I get home :) I never thought it would be that easy... Total newbie question, though -- what's anti-aliasing, and what are the pros and cons or using it? The guy on the site above seems to be against it, so i was just wondering why.

I'm currently editing a largish text file that uses the Japanese JIS X 0212 character set, which contains a lot of characters that are rarely or never used in Japanese information processing (if you're interested or curious, check out Ken Lunde's Understanding Japanese Information Processing). To cut to the chase, the only fonts I have that support this character set are some rather useful bitmap fonts, which are fine as long as the character isn't too complicated. When it comes to characters with over 20 strokes, I tend to end up with mush, and I can't find that in any of my dictionaries. ;) I tried getting the TrueType fonts that come with Mandrake (ttf-fonts-japanese), but even though the file says they support JIS X 0212 characters, they just come up with blank squares I don't even get the little boxes! This, by the way, is using Kochi Mincho, Kochi Gothic, the Watanabe fonts and the... other ones. I forget the name. I did profit from Windoze's lovely Arial Unicode MS font, which has every character you could possibly want, and MS Mincho and MS Gothic, which have all the JIS X 0212 characters, as well as the standard Japanese ones. I have tried to find something similar for Mandrake, but no luck yet. The other thing I was considering was to install those Windoze fonts onto WinNT on the other partition, and then install them into Mdk with MCC. Is there anything I should watch out for by doing this? TIA Alex

I think what the story is with the secondary language setting, is that it will enable you to use that language (so for Chinese, type in it, view it and so on), but it keeps your primary language for your desktop and what have you. :unsure: Can anyone confirm this? BTW, does anyone know if you can add on a secondary language without re-installing? I'm using Mdk 9.0, but I don't have the International CD, so I'm looking at downloading the packages to get Japanese support in... HTH Alex

Welcome to the board, Madokai. I'm not sure about your hardware problems, but as far as sndconfig goes, you should be able to go to the command line and type in 'sndconfig'. I'm not sure, you might have to su to root first :unsure: HTH Alex

Prisoner, Can you put up the text of the messages you get, please? Alex :D

I don't know if there's anyone around on this board who would need it, but I can do Japanese>English translations if needed. I can also do E>J, as long as you don't need perfect Japanese... :woops: I can be contacted by PM or at alexpankhurst (at) yahoo dot co dot jp Alex :)

No worries, it's all good :)

Ghil, [nitpicking] 'Increases of 1000% or more' is not the same as 'increases of 1000 times'. An increase of 1000% just means increase of 10-fold (i.e. 10x) [/nitpicking] Still, it's better than a poke in the eye, isn't it? ;) Alex EDIT: By 'it', I mean the increase, not the nitpicking... :woops:

AFAIK, if you installed Gnome and KDE when you installed Mandrake, you shouldn't need to do anything more. Have you got it set up to automatically log you in? If so, you can either switch off autologin (MCC > Boot > Boot Config) or just let it log you in and log out all the time. Then you should get your login screen, so bang in your user name and password, and then select Gnome, KDE, WM or whatever you want from the dropdown box below, and click OK/ Login -- I can't remember what it is, I just click it... HTH Alex [EDIT - Sorry, I wrote Users before, but I tried it myself and found it's actually under Boot > Boot Config.]

Hi Richard, Thanks for the kudos -- it's nice to be appreciated! :D I used to use KDE when I first got into Mandrake, and I found that you could install RPMs just by double clicking them, but I think I had trouble with dependencies and so on. I later changed to Gnome (nothing to do with RPM trouble, I was just curious ^_^ ) and found the solution above. It could just be my setup, but it seems to be a lot smoother than KDE used to be. Then again, my memory's not too flash, so it could just be a case of me 'loving the one I'm with'. I'll try to think of some other useful GUI tips and PM them to ya! Cheers, Alex

FWIW, I'm using a USR 56k modem at the moment, and it gave me no trouble whatsoever. I didn't even have to set it up, I just plugged it in and off it went! BTW, I'm using Mandrake 9.0, just in case something went funny in later versions. Alex

I had the same kind of problem when I was doing a lot of updating with urpmi, where the rate would just slowly fall and settle on about 1.5 kB/s like you say. I don't know if this will be of any use to you, but I've just started using GTM (GNU Transfer Manager) and it seems to work fine for me. The only thing is that I'm not sure whether you can use it as a stand-alone program or not. I've just been going to the site (including ftp) in my web-browser, and then downloading whatever using GTM. I do still get a small drop in download rate, but that seems to be happening with everything, even just web pages. I had assumed it was something wrong with my set-up, so it's a little heartening to know that someone else is having the same trouble! HTH Alex

Sorry if this is stating the bleeding obvious, but you can also just double click on RPMs to install them. This works under GNOME, and I'm pretty sure it does under KDE too. Alex

Hmm, this might have been the best thing to do, in hindsight, Qchem. That way it would only have been able to find the new one, instead of finding the old one and spitting the dummy. Anyway, like I said, I'm happily using aMSN (I only wanted to use MSN in any case), so it's academic. Thanks to everyone who helped me out on this -- I'm sure I'll need to use some of this again at some stage! Alex

Quick postscript to this: I was reading the README that came with pkg-config (what a strange thing to do), which said that it installed to /usr/local/bin/, which might possibly explain why glib couldn't find it. Duh! Alex @ when all else fails, read the instructions...

Thanks for your help and advice, Michel (but not for gloating about having braodband... grr...) I installed amsn, after trying to get all the others to work, and it's going great!! Thank heavens, too, cos Windows 2k on this machine has just gone weird... (or should that be weirdER)... Thanks again to everyone else on this thread too -- it taught me a bit about how Linux treats files and stuff :)

*sigh* Just as I suspected... Curse you, dial-up connection! Oh well, thanks for your help anyway, Chris. I think I'm just going to have to wait for Mdk 10 to come out before I can use MSN Messenger on Linux, unless anyone else can think of something in the meantime... Alex

Well, um, this is kind of embarrassing, but I got onto Mandrake Linux through my uncle, who installed it onto a computer for me from CDs off a computer mag (he gave me the computer with it already on it), and I just got to using it all the time now. The problem with upgrading is that I'm on a dial-up internet connection, and I'm in the sticks, so just downloading upgrades would probably take an obscene amount of time. I was considering buying the CDs for MDK10 when it comes out, and installing it, though. Actually, just re-reading through the above, I've made an assumption that there's stacks of stuff to download when upgrading Mdk. Is there really that much? If it's not too much, I could just do it overnight or something, I guess. How much would it be, roughly speaking? Alex

Like I said, I upgraded pkg-config to version 0.14 (I think I was on 0.12 before that), which should keep it happy, but doesn't. I tried to get 0.15 working, but it needs GLIBC 2.3 (surprise, surprise). Also, I did try the official RPM from sourceforge, but it also tells me very politely that I need to have version 2.3 of GLIBC. I'm guessing that this is the version in Mdk 9.1 and onwards?

Yeah, that was what I thought as well, so I upgraded pkg-config to v. 0.14, and it still came up with the same thing, even after rebooting. From what I found so far, I can't upgrade to the latest version (0.15) without upgrading GLIBC (2.2 --> 2.3), which I'm very wary of doing, from reading other posts on this site. :unsure:

Hi everyone, I'm currently trying to extricate myself from dependency hell while installing Gaim 0.75 on Mandrake 9.0, for which I (apparently) need glib. I'm trying to do it from source codes for reasons that I can't remember any more... Anyway, when I run ./configure, I get this: checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr//bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes <snip> checking for pkg-config... /usr//bin/pkg-config configure: error: *** pkg-config too old; version 0.14 or better required. Now, observant readers would have noticed that it's looking for pkg-config in /usr//bin/, not /usr/bin/. Is there any way I can set things to rights on this? TIA, Alex (still at newbie level, I'm afraid)

OK, I checked out the logs (thanks, derxen! I found everything I wanted there, and then some) and it seems that the original crash was caused by SIGTERM not SIQSERV or whatever I said before It seems that this is connected with CUPS, which I don't use anyway, so it doesn't really matter. But the other thing I found is what had happened when I rebooted. The boot.log had that a whole lot of 'inodes' had either bad modes, illegal block devices, illegal character devices, illegal FIFOs or illegal sockets. Also references to mismatching i_faddr and inode pairs, mismatching ref counts and block and inode bitmap differences. (It must be serious -- there were over 3,000 lines of this!) The other clue I found was in /var/log/messages, which said (about 140 times) There was also something about bad errors: Does anyone know what this means, and what might have happened to my poor computer? Finally, as far as misbehaving MCC goes, it seems that su is opening a session, and then immediately closing it again. /var/log/messages has this: Is this normal? If it's a problem, what can I do to repair it? (please, anything but re-installing...) Thanks again!

BTW, does Mandrake/Linux keep logs of this kind of stuff, or do you just have to write down the messages as they come up? Alex

Hi everyone, I'm running Mandrake 9.0, and a couple of days ago when I logged in, I got an error message, which I foolishly paid no attention to. As far as I can remember, it said something about a bug in SIQSERV (I think that's what it was...), and then asked to reboot. However, after rebooting, MDK kicked up a fuss about the hard drive, and started going through a routine that consisted mostly of finding blocks that were the wrong size and correcting them to 4096, whatever that means. Sorry I can't give more detail, but my poor eyes can't read that fast, and I haven't found a log file yet. Anyway, the crux of the problem is this: after fixing all these errors, MDK still logs in fine, and KDE loads ok, but the Control center no longer works. It asks me for the root password, starts loading, and then suddenly.... nothing happens, the whole thing just stops, with no error messages or anything. Any ideas about how to get it up and firing again, or do I just have to re-install the whole thing? TIA, Alex