mtweidmann

Nobody forces you to buy stuff from Mandrake. Te distro is still available for free download, and there are still sites like this offering community support. Either way its your choice which distro to use, so have fun with Slack. :)

The chances are that your hub has a DHCP server on it, so it can dish out IP addresses to machines on the network (it should say in manual). If so it makes things a lot simpler. Connect your Linux machine to the hub and power both up. Mandrake Control Centre -> Network & Internet Tab -> Network Settings Icon This brings you to the controls for the network. If you then click on the wizard button a new window should open up. Once you are past the welcome let it autodetect your network hardware and it should find your network card. If it finds the modem as well then un-select it for the moment. The next screen should ask you for the an IP address and Sub Net Mask, select the obtain automatically option. On the next screen you can ignore the http & ftp proxy settings (at least for the moment). It should ask you if you want to re-start the network, select yes. Hopefully at this point it will connect and after a few minutes you should see an IP address appear back in MDK Control Centre. A good test of whether the basic network settings are working is pinging another machine on the network. The hub will normally allocate itself 192.168.0.1 or 10.0.0.1 as an IP address but it should tell you in the manual. In a terminal window try: ping 192.168.0.1 (or whatever the address is). You should see numbers appearing on the screen, if so its working. As you've already had a Windows network working I'm guessing you know how to get the Win95 machine up and running. Once the Windows machine is running try pinging each machine from the other. I would recommend getting the basic network up and running reliably before you start playing with Samba. I hope this helps and doesn't just go over stuff you already know. Either way let me know how you get on. Note: Make sure you de-activate the firewall before setting up the network. I have found it works a lot better if you set up the firewall after the network connection. The settings for the firewall can be foudn in MDK Control Centre under the security tab.

I know its not exactly what you asked for, but I would recommend trying out Quanta. Its a html editor package that comes with KDE, and is not fully graphical drag and drop. But it does have lots of useful features like auto-completeion, syntax highlighting, project management and preview options. That a side what I found useful when I tried learning web design was looking at the code of web sites that I liked. It depends slightly on which browser your using but in Mozilla you just have to right-click and the option appears.

There is a tutorial on software installtion which covers RPMs at the old Mandrake User site: http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/index.html There are several tools which can use for installing and managing RPMs KDE and Gnome both have their own (Kpackage and Grpm from memory). These will show what is installed on your system and allow you to add/remove packages. Assuming you have one of them installed you should be able to right click on an RPM and select the open with option. The problem with RPMs is dependancies, eg to install package X you need to have already installed packages A B and C. Tools like kpackage will simply give you an error message leaving you to try and find suitable packages, this can become increasingly complicated and frustrating. So Mandrake came up with URPMI. The way it works is that it has a list of sources where it knows it can find RPMs (eg ftp site, a local directory, etc..) and it has a searchable database of all these packages on these sites. If you launch URPMI and tell it to install KDE instead of saying you don't have X installed, it will try to find X and it install it for you. The easiet way of using URPMI (at least in my opinion) is through the Mandrake Control Centre. Under the software tab you will find tools to install/remove packages, plus a tool to manage the sources that urpmi uses. Note: The more sources URPMI has, the better the chances of it being able to find all the dependancies you need. The following link takes you to a site that will help you add the most commonly used sources. http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/ Also it is important to keep URPMI's database up to date. That means telling it to re-check the source locations every now and then.

Your right in saying that you will need Samba running to share your files. There is a Mandrake Wizard to set up up a Samba server, which is quite easy to use. Run the Mandrake package installer and do a search for "wizard" and the MDK wizard package should appear. Next time you open the Control Centre you should see an extra tab for the wizards. The Samba wizard should install the required files and set it up for you. To access her files you'll need the Samba client installed, and also a LAN browser. In theory Konqueror ha a built in LAN browser but I've never got it to work. Instead I use Komba2 which works really well and is pretty straight forward to set up. How you set up the network depends on how your connecting the computers together. Are you connecting them together directly with cross-over cable or do you have some kind of hub/switch?

Gnome doesn't use arts, but I think it has a program which does the same job. I'd suggest testing that this is actaully the problem first. Try logging into IceWM instead of Gnome and try running RealPlayer from a terminal. If it works then it would seem you've found your problem. I don't use Gnome but I'm guessing that the sound controls can be found in the Gnome config program.

You could use a distro like Knoppix thats boots from a CD and then copy the hda1 partition. A better solution might be to use Partimage to make images of all your partitions which can simply be pasted back on to a formated drive. I think there is a bootable CD version of that available. http://www.partimage.org/ Finally if your machine as the required hardware you could consider RAID. I takes longer to set up and is more expensive but would eb quicker to restore from.

I'm guessing you use KDE? If so its not a problem with the sound card, but with the way your system is set up. KDE has a sound deamon called arts which is meant to allow multiple apps to use the card at once. The problem is that non-arts apps sometimes have prblems using the sound card while arts is running. There is a link on another thread (search for realplayer) that takes you to a version of Realplayer that supposedly is not affected.

The problem is caused by the arts deamon hogging the sound card, and not letting non-arts apps getting a look in. So if you logged in using IceWM for example the problem goes away (at least on my machine). A sort of work round is to tell KDE not to loads arts every time you log in. But if the new version of RealPlayer works I'd use that.

Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 can also resize NTFS. Worked fine when I used it.

What type of monitor have you got TFT or CRT? (Sorry don't recognise the name) If its a TFT or LCD you might want to just try it with an old fashioned CRT to see if that helps. Also have you tried really basic/low settings? If your Club member you could try downloading the ATI specific kernel and other packages. No idea what the difference between these are the normal ones are but it might be worth trying.

I agree with you, I hope they do get caught.

No worries, I've been trying to get it to work since last weekend when I re-installed. What I don't understand is why the same settings works fine on my laptop but not on my desktop, grrrr. If I come up with a better fix I'll let you know. :)

I've had similar problems on my desktop, but strangely not on my laptop. The reason is that arts is hogging the sound device and not letting non-arts apps use it. If you log in with IceWM (or whatever) all me apps start working. I'm trying to figure out what is causing it to mess up, but as a temporary solution you can set KDE not to load arts at login. KDE control centre -> sound -> arts (2nd entry) at the top of the first tag there is a tick box for setting to laod at log in.

I've got a Lite-On DVD+RW which works fine Mandrake. It was picked up and correctly configured by 9.2 and seems to work fine. I've only used it to burn CDs so far, no idea if the DVD bit works.

Ummm, strange. I tried swapping copies of Realplayer to the one suggested Mystified but same problem. I'm guessing it must be a more general sound problem then, because I'm also not getting sound in Tuxkart and in Lbreakout its about 2 seconds delayed. <sigh> Will have to try and fix it over the weekend.

I just installed Realplayer using the Mandrake Club rpm, but it refuses to work with KDE. If I launch it from Konqueror it opens up properly then freezes, if I launch it manually it just opens a black window. However it works perfectly under IceWM, grrrrr. I had it set up perfectly under 9.1 so I know it can be done. Advice?

I had a similar problem, the only thing that worked was the line-in for my TV card. After much fiddling I fixed by accident. I deleted the tab in kmixer for my sound card and then added another for the same card. Then muted and un-muted everything one after another until it worked. Not very scientific I know but it worked.

First thing I wpuld check is that you don't have faulty installation media. If you downloaded ISOs its just a matter of running the checksums and making sure they match. It would at least eliminate one possible cause. Its strange that it couldn't detect your monitor properly. My monitor's manufacture has never been listed but the installer has always managed to work out the settings. I don't know if the option is still in the installer, but have you tried entering the settings manually? Don't give up I have an ATI 7000 (yes I know its ancient) and it perfectly happy under Linux so it should be happy with your 98000 (fingers crossed).

Or else downloaded from a normal mirror and done a network install.

I've had 9.2 running since Sunday, and overall I'd give it the thumbs up. Two things which annoy me are that DVD playback is jurky and it takes about 20 seconds for Konqueror to open my /mnt directory. I'll have to find time to tinker with it. Otherwsie much better than 9.1 thanks Mandrake. :)

Yep encrypted DVDs playback on my 9.2 machine, although it seems a bit jurky (need to tinker with it). All I did was to add PLF as a urpmi source and install all the Xine & CSS packages. http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/

I like supermount, its always just worked on my computer which is nice.

No thats just the way that Mandrake operates. The distro gets released roughly every 6 months and goex X.0, X.1, X.2 Y.0, ........ I remember a similar thread when 9.1 came out, some one complained that announcing 9.2 made 9.1 worthless. Well not really it only means that MandrakeSoft intend keep improving their distro. I'd guess/hope we'll see KDE 3.2 in MDK 10 as its already being Alpha tested.

If you are going to install from scrathc anyway you might as well go with 9.2 now. I have just got it installed and it seems to be running very nicely and little bit quicker than 9.1 did. Back-up wise you could always leave your home directory intact when you re-install. That would save all your user settings and if your /home is big enough your data as well. Either that or you could try to use your CD-RW from the command line, the Linux Documentation project has a howto on the subject. http://en.tldp.org/