tux99

what mdv version are you using, I tried it on 2008.1, maybe the codecs in 2008.1 are not supporting it , but the newer versions in 2009 are.

what does typed on a console report? That's what the Linux kernel sees.

I just tried it with Firefox 3.0.6 on mdv 2008.1 using the totem-xinelib plugin and it doesn't work either, my guess would be the codec used is not supported (maybe DRM'ed...). the direct link to the live stream embedded in the page is: http://www.antenna5.it/tvonline/tv.asx wget returns: wget http://www.antenna5.it/tvonline/tv.asx more tv.asx <ASX Version="3.0"> <ENTRY> <REF href = "mms://088.059.059.208:1925" /> </ENTRY> </ASX> I have tried vlc, mplayer, xine, but none plays the stream if I start them with mms://88.59.59.208:1925 as CLI parameter...

Agreed, quality is more important than meeting (self-imposed) deadlines, the world would be a better place if this principle was more popular. PATIENCE IS AN IMPORTANT VIRTUE!

So did you buy that bike yet or did you rather go for the sensible Honda CBR option? B)

I never got the point of 'music library managers'. I use Audacious as music player (previously used Xmms) and my music library is organized as a hirarchical directory structure on the filesystem managed with 'mc'. Works perfectly for me...

open a konsole window and type 'top' to see which processes are using up most cpu time and therefore are slowing down your PC, maybe post the output of 'top' here (let it run first for a few seconds). Also GET RID OF EVIL SYMANTEC ANTIVIRUS, SYMANTEC SOFTWARE IS WORSE THAN A VIRUS ITSELF!! ;) Seriously, I didn't even know Symantec had a Linux version of their antivirus, but you certainly don't need it on Linux.

with Win98 (and I believe with Linux, haven't tried it) you can actually create 4GB FAT16 partitions, which can be read/written by any OS, in XP they don't allow you to CREATE 4GB FAT partitions anymore, but if you have one created by for example Win98, you can still read and write to it. And of course I know that FAT is not a good filesystem ofr large partitions, but it's still the most compatible one, almost any device can read and write to it. If you only care about Linux compatibility then ext2 is the best choice for flash devices.

It really depends what kind of services you are running on it, in my case only /var/log/ get's frequent writes and that can be mounted as RAM disk (but I haven't bothered to do that yet). A desktop machine (with a default install) if used for web browsing will actually by default do a lot more disk writes due to firefox, adobe acrobat, flash, and other plugins caching many MBs of data at every session in the user's home directory. I found it more tricky to reduce disk writes on a notebook running off an SSD (HP mini-note) than on my server, because for desktop use the writes are all over the place while for server use they are concentrated on a few well defined directories. On the other hand, I have previously used a 1GB Kingston CF card (the cheapest ones with no speed rating) for swap and /var exclusively, and after 2 years of use it still had no signs of defective sectors (I have now retired that card and only use it accasionally as a USB stick with an adapter and it's still working fine). YinYeti, high reads are certainly not an issue. One more tip, buy as much RAM as possible, so you don't need a swap partition and have space for a RAM disk.

FAT16 volume size limit is 4GB and FAT32 is at least 2TB, did you maybe mean single file size (which is max 4GB on both)? See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

I would think the difference is negligible, but with ext2 make sure you mount it with 'noatime' and 'nodiratime' options to avoid unnecessary writes!

Try to create a new system user and then log on using that user, to see if the problem is related to the config of your current user or global to the system.

With modern USB sticks, CF or SD cards, you don't need to worry about specific wear leveling filesystems, as this is done already in the firmware/controller chip of the stick or card. You still should use ext2 (ext3 without log is ext2) or FAT(32) though, as less writes are always better on flash media.

A VIA C3 or C7 based server is your best bet (can be passively cooled), they aren't cheap, but you should be able to get one with less than 250$ euros, maybe this one: http://linitx.com/viewcategory.php?catid=1...amp;pp=116,1012 I have an older version of one of these: http://linitx.com/viewcategory.php?catid=1...;pp=116,118,119 with an 8GB SLC CF card (Transcend Industrial) it's totally silent and fast enough for server use. These are even smaller, but not as powerful: http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm

Thanks Ian, I did come across that Dykstra article before, but it's not written in a "language" that I completely understand... So how does "Path MTU discovery" come into play with this? I thought it would avoid fragmentation in case of different MTU? How can I check if I'm getting fragmentation?

Onboard graphics can be Nvidia too, but more often they are Intel, do you know what yours is? Also, what devices are connected to you PC (both internal cards and external USB or firewire or others)? Maybe try disconnecting all (including any internal add-on cards) but the essentials (keyboard/mouse/monitor) and see if it still happens. If not, then reattach one by one all devices until you find the culprit.

I recently upgraded my home network to a Gigabit ethernet switch ( http://www.linuxtech.net/reviews/review_funkwerk_s208.html ), and would like to make use of the Jumbo frames, but I don't know much about it, especially I don't know if there are any drawbacks or negative side effects. I have added 'MTU=9000' in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 on all PCs that have a Gigabit ethernet card and are attached to the Gigabit switch (using CAT6 cables), everything still seems to work, and ifconfig is showing: UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:9000 Metric:1 What I wonder is, since not all devices on this switch are Gigabit, how does this affect traffic between a MTU=9000 PC and a device with a standard MTU=1500 setting? Will I get split up packets? Will this slow down traffic to the non Gigabit ethernet devices? Also my switch documentation says it supports Jumbo packets up to 8000, but it seems to work fine with a MTU=9000 setting on the attached PCs, why? I read somewhere that MTU=4000 is supposed to be better than MTU=9000 (it didn't say why), anyone know why? Any pointers to some related FAQ would be welcome too.

Happens to me too, not forever, but maybe 15 seconds or so, do you maybe have a Nvidia GPU? I never bothered investigating it as I thought it's relaterd to loading the Nvidia kernel module which appears with a message right after that at boot.

ATA is just a generally used as a short name form of PATA, so it's the same thing. The use of sd devices instead of hd devices for PATA drives, has to do with the switch to the new libata kernel drivers for many PATA chipsets.

I didn't know Torcs, just found it: http://torcs.sourceforge.net/ looks interesting, thanks for the pointer! It's even available in mdv 2008.1(at least the previous 1.3.0 version): # urpmi torcs To satisfy dependencies, the following packages are going to be installed: Package Version Release Arch (medium "Contrib") torcs 1.3.0 4mdv2008.1 i586 torcs-data 1.3.0 1mdv2008.1 noarch torcs-data-cars-extra 1.3.0 1mdv2008.1 noarch torcs-robots-base 1.3.0 4mdv2008.1 i586 torcs-robots-berniw 1.3.0 4mdv2008.1 i586 torcs-robots-bt 1.3.0 4mdv2008.1 i586 torcs-robots-olethros 1.3.0 4mdv2008.1 i586 283MB of additional disk space will be used. 130MB of packages will be retrieved. Proceed with the installation of the 7 packages? (Y/n)

USB sticks are never SLC (as far as I know), there are SLC CF cards and SLC SSDs. Of course it's safe to use MLC for read-only installs, even for read write ones, as long as you don't keep precious data along with the OS on the same stick (you can do that too as long as you have backups of the data), worst case when the stick dies, you get a new one, they are so cheap these days anyway! See here for SLC vs. MLC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_cell

Even that should be an issue with the UUID based device naming in the fstab and in grub, it all worked autmagically in my case. But you are right , better be prepared.

I'm running mdv 2009.0 on a HP2133 Mini-Note with a 8GB Transcend SLC flash disk, see here: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...st&p=548074 The only changes I did was to make /tmp and /var/tmp on tmpfs (ram disk), use ext2 instead of ext3 and disable all disk caching in Firefox/Seamonkey, Flash player and Acrobat Reader. If you make sure the flash disk is SLC it should last many years of normal use. Forgot to add: DO NOT MAKE A SWAP PARTITION ON THE FLASH DISK!! (make sure the laptop has enough RAM, so that it doesn't need a swap partition)

no 2008.1, but 2009 should work the same. But if you are only upgrading the PC and therefore reusing the old hdd, you don't even need to clone the hdd with dd like I did, I did that only as I was building an additional PC.

So you had 125 machines all with the same Win XP key??? I guess Micro$oft wouldn't be happy, if they knew... Or did you have a site licence (something the OP probably doesn't have, given his description of his task)?