Dustpuppy

Your system will be better with 2006, and don't worry about the age: my 7-year-old computer runs just fine with it.

Re-sizing the partition just means chopping down the available space. If Windows plus data are taking up, say, 40GB then the Mandriva installer will give leave it with 40GB and take 60GB to make a Mandriva partition with (this is the option: use free space on the windows partition). You can manually adjust the amout of space that Windows has, but can't take it below the minimum that it needs to store OS+data.

There are a couple of things you need to do before installing so that the re-sizing happens OK. First, defrag and second turn off the paging file (you turn it on again once Mandy is installed). Both of these are in the documentation on the Mandriva site (it says it's for 10.1 but the installation walk-through is the same as for 2006).

Have fun!

Thanks a lot for that! I'll look into raid...

I have 1Gb of memory and 512Mb of swap and swap is never touched. Some people with 1Gb or more have done away with swap altogether.

That's interesting - so swap is only used when the physical memory is all being used?

Try not to see Linux as any more complicated than it actually is and you will enjoy it a heck of a lot more.

:D

But making it complicated is all the fun! I had a perfectly working 2006 installation, and decided that as I'd evidently mastered the basics (wow, that only took me three years!) then I should start tinkering... So I trashed my system by trying to install KDE3.5 without reading the instructions. I then installed FC5 and ended up with a LVM which I'd never seen before. So then I re-installed 2006 to find my swap space couldn't activate (or maybe could...). So you see, I'm learning more now!

Ian - thanks for your help on this. Yes, I'm using the LVM that the FC5 installation set up, which uses 20GB from the first disk and all of the second, and appeared as a separate tab on the partitioning setup of the mandy installer.

/etc/fstab reads

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details

/dev/VolGroup00/1 / ext3 defaults 1 1

/dev/VolGroup00/3 /home ext3 defaults 1 2

/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0022,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0

/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto umask=0022,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0

none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0022,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0

/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs umask=0022,nls=iso8859-15,ro 0 0

none /proc proc defaults 0 0

/dev/VolGroup00/2 swap swap defaults 0 0

and free gives

			 total	   used	   free	 shared	buffers	 cached
Mem:		514924	 404588	 110336		  0	  18488	 199692
-/+ buffers/cache:	 186408	 328516
Swap:	  1146872		  0	1146872

It's not re-compiling the kernel, it's just that the Nvidia drivers need the kernel-source to compile from (they do this automatically). Install the correct kernel-source for your kernel, and you'll be fine.

I've had this a couple of times when installing - I just tried and tried again, and after about 4 or 5 times it sudden worked. No idea at all what was wrong.

Ok... I tried gnome system monitor, and it came up with zero out of 1GB swap used. It also doesn't list swap in the devices: it lists /dev/hda1 (/mnt/windows), /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-1 (/) and /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-3 (/home).

Doing "free" lists 1GB swap with 0 used. I then tried to make /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-2 into swap, but when I turned it on it said "device or resource busy". fdisk -l gives

Disk /dev/hda: 61.4 GB, 61492838400 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7476 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

  Device Boot	  Start		 End	  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *		   1		4472	35921308+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3			4486		7476	24025207+  8e  Linux LVM

Disk /dev/hdb: 40.9 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

  Device Boot	  Start		 End	  Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1   *		   1		4982	40017883+  8e  Linux LVM

:unsure:

I've re-installed 2006 on desktop 1 and now have a problem with the swap space. On boot, I get the following a few lines apart in the startup sequence:

activating swap partitions [OK]

enabling swap space [failed, device or resource busy]

I previously installed FC5 to see what it was like, and that set up the spare space on my first harddrive (20GB) and the whole of the second drive (40MB) as a logical volume. I kept this and told Mandriva to auto-allocate and then format it, which it did into 5.9 GB root, 1 GB swap and the rest home.

Is the swap space enabled or not? Is there any way I can tell? It doesn't seem that slow, but I haven't run anything very big on it.

I tried FC5 on my laptop and it looked lovely but was such an enormous system hog that I didn't keep it, not to mention it not working with my wireless card. 2006 works fine with the wireless and can handle KDE without any problems - FC5 just couldn't cope, and even with Gnome was struggling.

Maybe if you get a new computer to run Vista then you can run FC5 on it as well

Solarian - thanks for the advice. I disabled everything I could get my hands on, and it seems to have helped a bit (not enough to run KDE yet, though).

I'll give Kanotix a miss for the moment, as my German isn't quite up to working my way through that site and their boards!

ETA: PS specs for lappy in sig.

Well, I've installed FC5 on the lappy. First impressions are: very nice, very slick-looking, good on package management, two users installed no problem, and a lovely root account. This does come at a price, though, as it's definitely a lot more resource heavy than 2006 was and certainly than Ubuntu was when I tried that, to the extent that I can't run KDE and even Gnome is having trouble when multiple apps are open. Acpi was disabled at installation for some reason, and I had to edit grub.conf to get it.

Now I'm going to try ndiswrapper... :o

I installed Ubuntu on my laptop a couple of days ago to give it a try-out. It installed very easily, and the default theme was easy to change. Then I hit sudo... which sucks, big time. As others have said, I'm really not happy with the first user account being the root account in all but name. I also found it difficult to set up multiple users, which is necessary as there's two of us using the laptop. When I set up another user I found that as that user I couldn't do things like install programmes or access the package manager - it simply wouldn't launch. And then there was the wireless card that wasn't even detected in hardware...

Suffice it to say that Ubuntu is coming off the lappy today! I'm downloading Suse 10 to give it a try, if that's not satisfactory I'll probably go back to Mandy. Unless anyone has any other ideas...?

And make sure the mic is placed well away from the speakers.

I don't think Mandriva will run on 80MB so you need to install extra memory, not limit it.

I installed 10.1 with 64MB once. It installed fine but it's usability wasn't the best even under IceWM: everything loaded... so... slowly that I gave up and added another 128MB.

Given that the firefox history etc has been wiped, is there any way to recover a complete list of all websites that my desktop 1 (see sig) has accessed in the last few days? I'm connected via eth0 to a netgear router that only logs security breaches as far as I can see.

ETA: I just need the sites that it's accessed under Mandriva, not XP as well.

Go for 2006 rather than 10.1 - seriously. I find my low-spec machines work much better with that, even to the extent that I can run Gnome rather than IceWm on them (see sig).

I never knew that existed... but it works!

Cheers!

I've got an Epson Stylus C44UX printer connected to desktop 1. I set it up during installation and it worked OK most of the time and there was no problem with sharing printing with other computers. However, whenever I try to go into printerdrake it causes a complete system crash at "searching for new printer" and the only thing to do is a hard restart. Then the printer started printing some things out twice (but not everything). I tried updating to the latest kernel and re-installing cups, but the only outcome is that printer sharing is now disabled (ie other computers can't see the printer).

Any thoughts about getting into printerdrake?

I got one of these Pioneer dvd writers for Christmas. It's very good, works fine under 2006, and can burn at 8x with no coasters (I've had a couple of bad burns at 16x, which is the advertised max speed).

I've seen the wiki before - no help there, I'm afraid! I came across something similar on a Suse forum, though: the person resolved it by changing WPA security. What's that?

My firewall's off on the laptop, wep is off at the router and it's an open access point. My security setting on the laptop is "high", as done at installation, and I can't find a way of changing that in 2006 .

I've left the gateway the same as it was before - 192.168.0.1, which is the IP addy of the router. I've added GATEWAY_DEV=mac addy of the router (LAN side), but that hasn't helped. Is this what the gateway is with wireless?

ipconfig - isn't this a windoze command?

netstat -r gives

Destination    Gateway        Genmask        Flags  MSS Window  irtt Iface

192.168.0.0        *                255.255.255.0      U            0  0          0    wlan0

127.0.0.0              *                255.0.0.0              U            0  0          0    lo

default          192.168.0.1      0.0.0.0                UG          0  0          0  wlan0

One thing I've just noticed is that the logs are chock full of ndiswrapper errors of the sort

ndiswrapper    (NdisWriteErrorLogEntry:222):code 78855856

I have no clue what this means, and can't find anything by googling. Does anyone know what it means, and is it a problem?

I've been given my brother's old laptop (see sig) which came with a Belkin Wireless Pre-N Notebook Network Card. This works fine under windows, and didn't have a problem in XP with connecting wirelessly to my router. I wasn't sure it would be easy to configure to use for a 2006 network install, so I installed Mandriva using an ethernet connection (which was fine), and then tried to install the network card.

After much googling, downloading and kernel-crashing I got to the following point. Ndiswrapper has been uninstalled and then the latest version installed from sourceforge. The NetAni drivers have been located on the XP partition and have been pointed to ndiswrapper. Ndiswrapper seems happy with this. The lights are on the wireless card, and the kernel isn't crashing. Modprobe.conf has been written as it should. I have an interface called "wlan0", and in the taskbar an icon tells me that the network is up on wlan0. Iwconfig gives me the mac address of my router (which I didn't input), signal strength and bitrate.

And it doesn't work. I can't ping anything either inside or outside the network, or the router (except 127.0.0.1). If I fire up Firefox it says it can't reach the host.

Please help!

The contents of both /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/wireless.d/Wireless and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 are:

DEVICE=wlan0

BOOTPROTO=static

IPADDR=192.168.0.6

NETMASK=255.255.255.0

NETWORK=192.168.0.0

BROADCAST=192.168.0.255

ONBOOT=yes

METRIC=10

MII_NOT_SUPPORTED=no

MS_DNS1=212.67.120.148

MS_DNS2=212.67.96.129

WIRELESS_MODE=Managed

WIRELESS_ESSID=wireless

WIRELESS_NWID=10

PEERDNS=yes

NETMASK=255.255.255.0

IPADDR=192.168.0.6

NETWORKING_IPV6=no

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Definitely try something like IceWm - this is a windows manager, so will replace KDE or Gnome on your system. However, you can keep the KDE/Gnome libraries for running individual programmes. Also try adding Rox as a file manager as it's much lighter than things like Konqueror (and rox-pinboard will let you put icons on the backdrop under IceWm).

Grab IceWm via urpmi and then logout of KDE/Gnome and then chose to login to IceWm. Configure your files as you want, and off you go!

Well, I wouldn't have thought that penguin had its partisans!

My husband refused point-blank when I offered to change the boot image on his computer, saying he liked the starry-eyed penguin! Hopefully he won't be too disappointed when I put 2006 on it

BTW, does anyone know the release date for the iso's to those of us who are too poor/tight to pay for membership?

*bump*

Anyone?

I've got one of those daft cd drives with no physical audio cable. Xine in 10.1 seemed to cope with this fine, but now in 2006 it will either say there is no plugin present to handle this device, or else play the first 2 seconds of the cd and then throw up the plugin error. Xmms (with appropriate digital plugin enabled) reads the cd track info, then when I press play says there's no cd in the drive :unsure:

Not really sure what's going on here - any ideas?

This is the same error that I had here. The solution's very roundabout, but seems to be working.