neutro

Done. Did it help?

It seems you have several questions rolled into one :P Each browser / file browser has its own file association policy. Generally the browser first checks if a file is handled by a plugin (e.g. you click on a link to a PDF document: if acroread plugin is installed, it will open the document). If no plugin can handle the file type, then there is specific options to handle file associations. For example, in Mozilla, it will generally ask you what to do with the file. You can configure it to always do the same thing with a file type (e.g. so that clicking on a link to a .m3u playlist always launches XMMS). This is done in Preferences -> Navigator -> Helper Applications (in Mozilla 1.6). In Konqueror, you must adjust the KDE file associations using the KDE Control Center -> Components -> File Associations (in KDE 3.1.0). I personnally use mplayerplug-in to handle multimedia embedded in web pages, the standard plugins (acroread, flash) in Konqueror and Mozilla, and I configured KDE so that mp3's are opened with XMMS and other multimedia (audio, video) files are opened with mplayer.

Yes RealPlayer 8 is the latest RealPlayer for Linux, appart from HelixPlayer. You can install even if your package has "bad signature" (it only means it signature has not been verified against your trusted sources, which is normal if you didn't configure this source). However, mplayer seems to handle .rm/.ram streams beautifully. I've long ago switched to mplayer for *all* my multimedia playback usage, and it just works, always.

Just for the record, my freezes are no longer random :P I am now able to trigger them at will. I just installed Mozilla Firefox (0.8), and if I go in the options and play around for a few seconds (typically scrolling down the font list), the will happen. Now I can run strace at will on Firefox with the -o -ff options so that all is logged. Now all I need is someone with the expertise and time to go through 33 MB of trace data :lol: (Seriously anyone know what I should be looking for, in order to at least identify where, generally, lies the problem -- network? video driver? etc. -- so that I can ask the right persons / write a bug report)

The link I mentioned above is back to life. You can get installers for XFT2-enabled Mozilla here. By default it installs in /usr/local. It works great!

Funny - I brought this up recently, and never saw your post doing a search before. Yep -- never press Y to that question if you're on ext3. Only trouble will arise :P I lost files too, but was able to rpm -f some packages back. Sounds fun? Oh yeah it is. I had to begin with vi and end with kdebase ;)

Mea culpa. I only looked at kalarm briefly and didn't notice you could run a program or a command instead of just the pop-up. Yet I wonder why it's not integrated with Knotify.

It is beyond me that Kalarm in KDE isn't registered with KNotify. Applications that register events with Knotify show up in KDE's Control Center -> Look'n'Feel -> System Notifications. Then, upon certain notifications from these program, you can select to hear a sound, have a pop-up, or run a program or script. Well Kalarm seem to only be able to show up its own pop-up and possibly sound, but nothing more. This is weird.

I always tought that it was video-related too. Yet I use nvpart (Option "NvAGP" "1"), and got the problem (with variable frequency) with every version of Mozilla since before 1.0, and with the nVidia drivers 2960, 3123, 4191, 4349, 4496, 4620 and now 5336. The via-related problem in 5328 prevented X from launching, and 5336 includes the fix. The thing is, maybe we don't even talk about the same problem. Since it's a random problem, it's very difficult to track down.

Well first of all, I don't want to deter you from compiling applications. This is something fundamental in the open source world. However, it can be painful at times :P Well I use Linux since a while now but rarely compile anything. I'm probably not the best person here to explain how to setup a system to compile applications. But here are some pointers: the tools needed to compile applications are all on your Mandrake CD's; at install time, they're installed if you check "development platform". That means you'd want to install these, but I couldn't name specific packages as I'm not a developer myself ;) I guess you could begin with using urpmi for installing gcc (the gnu C compiler). But I'm sure that you'll need a bunch of other packages too (such as make). And then again, when you compile an app that uses say a specific library, you may have to install the -devel package for this library. That means more RPM's to install. But at one point, the things you need are all installed and you can procede. Generally it's recommended to install RPM's for your distro as it ensure compatibility and all, but once in a while compiling an app can save your ass (e.g. compiling the latest kopete version so that you can connect back to MSN after a protocol change!). Well I wish you good luck, and maybe others here can be more helpful.

Hmmm interesting observation. Come to think of it, I got problems only with Mozilla, but then again, I don't use other browsers much, and with... Quake. Only when playing online.

Well it seems you don't have any compiler installed? :unsure:

Well as for AA fonts, you have to install an XFT-enabled mozilla build. I guess. I'm not sure if one is available on PLF or Texstar, but I found one on a site which seems to be down. It was http://www.scottbolander.com/mozilla-xft.html, but it doesn't seem to exist anymore. It had XFT-enabled builds (with the installer) of every major version up to 1.6. There's also a few things to adjust in order to have AA fonts in the menus (and not only the displayed pages). See here for details.

DiskDrake works well. I tought you wanted to know, how do we organize our partitions. For my part my current setup is quite useful I think. hda1 -> root hda5 -> /usr/local hda6 -> swap hda7 -> /home That way, I can reinstall the OS on / without touching /home, or /usr/local, in which I have programs such as quake, mozilla installed through the mozilla installer, or matlab. Amazingly, or not so but it's cool anyways, programs in /usr/local will launch without problem after a new install using this partion setup. I also have a second hard drive, where lies a useless Win2k (NTFS) partition on which I never boot anymore, an XOSL partition dating back to the days where this was my primary HD, and also a VFAT partition for general storage, and which was useful to transfer files from Windows to Linux.

For my part I use mplayer1.0-1.0-0.pre1.2plf (not the latest methinks) with mplayerplug-in 1.2 (compiled) with win32-codecs-1.3-1plf. As I said sometimes sites seem to not handle the stream nicely to the plugin (playing the streams directly in mplayer always works). You could post the URL if you want us to confirm the problem.

Interesting thread. My symptoms are somewhat different, but they're there, with variable frequency, since Mandrake 8.x. I too have a nVidia card (GF2 MX440) on an Asus mobo with Via chipset (Asus A7V266). When I lock-up, it would be typically while using Mozilla, while actually doing something (scrolling, or typing in a form -- believe it or not, right now I'm hoping that I'll be able to finish this post without a crash), alhough recently I got Quake3 lock-ups too. When a mozilla lock-up occurs, I can still move my mouse pointer around, but no widget or GUI element is responsive. In the past the only solution was to alt-sysrq-S/U/B since I can't access my computer remotely, and alt-backspace (restarting X) or ctrl-alt-Fn (changing virtual console) wouldn't work. I checked with "top" in batch mode however, and I can confirm that when those lock-ups happen, X is using somewhere around 98% of the CPU. Quake3 lock-ups feature a frozen video and a looping sound, and X uses around 70% of the CPU. At least now with the 5336 drivers, I'm not forced to reboot -- alt-sysrq-K works well (it didn't before). It happens a few times a week, now under Mandrake 9.1 with updates installed. Still this elusive bug, well, bugs me since a long time and I'm on it. I'm currently running Mozilla with strace -o -ff B)

Would using "cp -s" help you? You just copy the files you want to another location, but instead of making copies, this makes symlinks.

On some sites, it seems that the plugin is unable to retrieve the movie. On most sites it works right. I'm not sure whose fault it is; then again, if you can't retrieve the movie and you got its URL, you can simply use "mplayer the_url" in a terminal.

I don't think you can. It's not really a full-fledged download manager We'll if I'm wrong, I'm very interested to know more too!

Install mplayer with the win32 codecs (on Mandrake, use the PLF packages, they work great). Then install mplayerplug-in. I guess there's a PLF package for that as well.

vincentv, you probably have a good point. I use an Asus A7V266 mobo with two IDE controllers (8 possible IDE devices). My configuration is quite simple now (it's been much more crowded in the past!): First controller (Promise controller, not configurable through BIOS): ------------------------- hda - primary HD hdb - secondary HD hdc - unused hdd - unused Second controller (configurable through BIOS): -------------------------- hde - dvd player hdf - cd burner hdg - unused (set to 'None' instead of 'Auto' in BIOS) hdh - unused (set to 'None' instead of 'Auto' in BIOS) I set hdg and hdg (that is, secondary master and slave) to 'None' instead of 'Auto' in BIOS in an attempt to reduce boot time, without any effect. Yet I managed to find how to increase verobsity during boot-up (removing the "quiet" argument in the appropriate lilo.conf entry) and I can see that the choking point is here: This happens regardless of the BIOS settings for hdg or hdh (Auto or None). Note also that there is nothing about IRQ probing of hdc and hdd in /var/log/dmesg. Well if anybody know how to speed this up (bypassing IRQ probing on hdg and hdh?), tell me...

Thank you very much, this is exactly what I was looking for.

During Mandrake 9.1 boot-up, one typically sees a white and blue splashscreen with a "Welcome to Linux" line, and the result of init scripts running. However by default, we don't see the content of /var/log/dmesg being displayed during kernel bootstrap / initialization. Is there a way to make that appear during bootup? Or generally, how do we configure what we see during boot-up? In Mandrake 9.1, I only see a way to change the splash screen appearance / theme in Mandrake Control Center -> Boot -> DrakBoot.

I think the easiest way as stated before is simply to go to runlevel 3, running the installer, and going back to runlevel 5. No need to even change virtual console; open a terminal console (e.g. konsole), type "su" and enter the root password, then "telinit 3" (you should use telinit instead of init if I remember right, but yet, I don't remember why exactly :)). Once in runlevel 3, login as root, run the installer, and type "telinit 5" to go back to runlevel 5.

That's what I thought ;) Probably not: the delay is *before* init starts. My understanding is that after the kernel being loaded in memory, init (pid = 1) is the first thing to run, and is resbonsible to start all initscripts. Beside, most of these scripts I believe produce a visual output (which I can see, later). Interesting...