tux99

I have never tried PCLinuxOS before this release, so I can't tell, but IMHO the most important thing for a distro is to be rock solid, with a well tuned functional default configuration and a good package manager and choice of packages, with sensible dependencies. The eye candy is just that, eye candy, and TBH I'm not that keen on having to get used to a new look on my desktop every 6-12 months or so (a computer is not women fashion!), it's not good for productivity.

Linux has been supporting multiple cpus (dual cores mean basically 2 cpus in one chip) since the early days, I had a dual Pentium 233Mhz MMX PC in the '90s that was perfect with Linux, at that time the normal desktop Windows (95 or 98 didn't support more than one cpu at all). Basically don't worry, dual-cores work better with Linux than with Windows as more programs for Linux are properly multithreaded. You should rather make sure the integrated graphics works well with Linux, I would avoid AMD/ATI especially on a laptop, best is Intel (assuming you are not a hard core gamer), second choice would be Nvidia.

Thanks for confirming it! I might do a new svn rpm build soon, but I was still waiting for them to implement soft subtitles first, which is high on their to-do list, but then it has been for the past 2 years, so it might still take a while... B) That's the only important feature I'm currently missing in Handbrake, soft subtitles.

See the following link for a screenshot of the default PCLinuxOS 2009.1 desktop: http://www.linuxtech.net/news/ (click on pic to see full size) I really like the looks, it's even sleeker than Mandriva!

Quoting from the PCLinuxOS announcement: "This release features kernel 2.6.26.8.tex3, KDE 3.5.10, Open Office 3.0, Firefox 3.0.7, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, Ktorrent, Frostwire, Amarok, Flash, Java JRE, Compiz-Fusion 3D and much more. We decided to use kde3-5-10 as our default desktop as we could not achieve a similar functionality from kde4. Almost 2.5 gigs of software compressed on a single self bootable livecd that can be installed to your hard drive provided it is compatible with your system and you like the distribution. Over 8000+ additional packages available after hard drive install through the Synaptic Software Manager."

see if the mount options are different when you mount it vs. when Mandriva mounts it automatically. Type 'mount' in a console while it's mounted, do it once after Mandriva mounted it and once after you manually mounted it and compare the line that refers to the sd-card (maybe post the output of 'mount' for each attempt here).

Have you checked that the speakers or the headphone are plugged in the right socket, maybe someone has unplugged it and replugged it into the mic or line-out socket?

Actually I found that the 'MCC/Local disks/Manage disk partitions' tool does have an encryption option if you enable the "Toggle expert mode", but at least on my 2008.1 install it uses the older depreciated losetup/cryptoloop method, not the dm-crypt method as described in my how-to. Also I found out in the meantime that there are really two methods of doing encryption with dm-crypt. The one I described in my mini how-to which allows only one key, but uses the key directly to encrypt the partition and the LUKS method which creates a header at the beginning of the partition to be encrypted with the key and the encrytion method info in there. The LUKS method allows multiple keys and easier usage as you don't have to remember the encryption method used (as all that info is stored in the header), the big drawback of the LUKS method is that if the header of the encrypted parttion gets corrupted for some reason you loose the whole content of the encrypted partition while with the plain cryptsetup method described in my mini how-to you only loose the bits of data that got corrupted or damaged. I might still also write another how-to for the LUKS/dm-crypt method as it has it's uses too.

blog.mandriva.com wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.1_RC_1

Yes, it's showing up here for me (for mdv 2008.1), maybe it takes a bit longer to propagate to your side of the world.

The output you got looks good. The row of numbers is the frequencies your cpu supports (1.7Ghz, 1.3Ghz, 1.06Ghz and 800Mhz) and you have the acpi-cpufreq ondemand scaling active, which means your cpu should slow down to 800Mhz when idle (to use less power) and ramp up to 1.7Ghz when busy. What this tells me is that your battery life problem is not, due to non functioning cpu scaling, so the problem must be somewhere else. I'm wondering, have you actually tried out how long the battery lasts under Linux and under Windows, as in, fully charged it and then used the laptop continuously until the battery runs out of power while measuring the time with a watch? I'm wondering if it's just the indicator that's not correct or if in fact the laptop runs out of power quicker with Linux for some reason. This would be useful to know in oder to find the cause of the problem.

I have those kind of problems with 32bit Java too, I guess it's more a Java thing... B)

Try installing Mediainfo http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en (there is even a ready Mandriva rpm available to download on the web site) and run it against one of your video files from your camera to identify the exact specs of the file and the post the output here.

Interesting, I assume that's on your Ubuntu install? Can you maybe figure out what packages are involved in the prompting of the password under X, as I wonder if that is maybe available in Mandriva too by installing the right packages. I decided for Twofish instead of AES because Twofish is slightly faster according to all benchmarks I found (and it's a completely free algorithm, unencumbered by patents, while still being at least as good as AES). BTW, better make sure that your GUI tool uses 'essiv' by default, as without ESSIV your system will be vulnerable to very serious watermark and known plaintext attacks according to: http://www.shimari.com/dm-crypt-on-raid/ (it's mentioned on other sites, too). That's actually one reason why I prefer CLI tools for encryption, GUI tools add another layer of abstraction that might introduce unwanted weaknesses. Yeah, I know the multiple passwords is a feature of LUKS/dm-crypt, for which "cryptsetup" can act as a front-end. I assume you refer to this, when you say it can be used in Windws, too: http://www.freeotfe.org/

I thought about that, but I intentionally wrote it generic for any Linux distro, not specific for Mandriva, that's why I didn't include any reference to packages. Also as it requires some knowledge of Linux /dev/sdX (or /dev/hdX) device naming, (it assumes the reader is able to figure out what device name is assigned to the device to be encrypted), I assumed that anyone being able to do that, would also know how to install the "cryptsetup" command on their distro of choice, if necessary. Fixed, cheers!

I have written a mini how-to about disk encryption, it's not meant to be in-depth or comprehensive but rather short and to the point, to allow anyone with a minimum of Linux devices knowledge to create encrypted memory sticks, USB disks, or partitions in minutes. http://www.linuxtech.net/tips+tricks/linu...ini_how-to.html I have tested the procedure on Mandriva 2008.1 but it should work on most recent Linux distros. It would be great if Mandriva could integrate this into the 'MCC/Local disks/Manage disk partitions' tool, but until then, the CLI is the only way to do this that I'm aware of. Any comments are welcome!

Do you have frequency scaling enabled? open a konsole window and type the following 3 commands (each followed by enter/return): cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_driver cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor and post the output here

yes, I know but I would have imagined that someone else reannounces and seeds it on mininova or similar trackers once the 'official' one had been removed...

Damn, a single day I had no time to catch up on mandrivausers.org and I miss something like this! I don't understand why there are no seeders on any torrent tracker anymore though, or am I not searching right?

gl, x11 and xv are just different driver methods to display video under X, just choose the one that works for you (some might use more cpu than others, some might not work at all depending on your graphics card). For rai.it you might want to install the following plugin too as rai.it uses M$ silverlight a lot: http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/ Lieto di esserti stato di aiuto!

The antenna5 stream is currently broken, that's why you are still unable to play it, it doesn't work in Windows either anymore. The IPV6 errors are irrelevant, it's just that as you have IPv6 enabled (by default) it tries IPv6 first but then tries IPv4 correctly. The RAI stream seems to work correctly for me too, but as the others I only get the message that it only works in Italy. Try right click in the RAI stream window and check your mplayer configuration, especially the video setting, change it to something else until it works.

I think the issue when trying to play the stream directly from the website is their use of leading zeros in: mms://088.059.059.208:1925 mplayer (and the related browser plugins) don't seem to be able to handle them, thats why 'mplayer mms://88.59.59.208:1925' works, but the plugin not (and 'mplayer mms://088.059.059.208:1925' not either). I'm not sure if it is allowed to write the URL like that, so it's either a mplayer issue (if leading zeros are allowed) or a bad web site link (if they are not). stanituo, try running mplayer mms://88.59.59.208:1925 from a console and see if that works, if not then you still don't have the PLF packages installed, to get those installed see: http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/

actually I have to correct myself again, now mplayer %URL% works, too. Don't know what I did wrong last night... Anyway, that stream works with mplayer but it doesn't work with the totem-libxine plugin in Firefox, at least not for me.

Actually, I have to correct myself, I just tried gnome-mplayer with mms://88.59.59.208:1925 and it works fine! That's weird though, as I would have thought gnome-mplayer is just a front-end for mplayer and I wasn't able to see the video with mplayer itself... (obviously I have all plf packages)

Thanks for the info, I'm becoming more and more concerned about the closed-source status of such a security sensitive application llike the flash plugin, I'm starting to not feel confortable to run it at all on my desktop PC anymore. I'm considering running a web browser for Internet browsing exclusively in a dedicated virtual machine...