tux99

I just did something similar: I bought a new additional PC and as I didn't want to have to install Mandriva from scratch, with then having to select all additional packages and configure everything to my liking, I just cloned the Mandriva 2008.1 HDD from my current main PC with 'dd' and inserted it into the new PC. Guess what, everything worked flawlessly, I only had to run drakxconf to reconfigure X as the GPU is intel instead of Nvidia. The new PC is completely different hardware compared to the old one and still, apart from X, Mandriva reconfigured everything automatically! :D Try doing that with Windows XP.... :P

Hmm, let's see what google pxe mandriva returns, ok here you go: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Installin...nux/PXE_Install tsk tsk, kids these days, no thinking for themselves....

the quote is true, see here: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/0122...der.html?page=6

My preferred browser is SeaMonkey, the real successor of the old Netscape/Mozilla browsers. While it uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, Seamonkey's GUI has many more features and options, especially in the Preferences menu, Firefox always looks to dumbed down to me, worse than even IE...

I don't know where you live, but if you live anywhere in the EU tweaking things in the service menu doesn't void the warranty, even opening the case doesn't unless the manufacturer can prove that what you did caused the defect. Have a look at the Xorg log file to see what resolution gets used, type the following on a console: more /var/log/Xorg.0.log The logfile is quite long but full of interesting info, if you are trying to debug a X issue.

Firstof all make sure you have set X to the native resolution of your TV, or to one of the standard HDTV resolutions: 1280x720 or 1920x1080. Then try to find out (search for your TV model and the word 'overscan' on google) if there is a way to set the overscan on the TV to zero (sometimes there is a service menue or it's in the advanced options), that would be the ideal solution, otherwise you could make a personalized xorg.conf modeline, but that won't give you a pixel perfect display either (as the TV still does the rescaling) and is quite hard to get right anyway. You could try to post this on the Linux section of the AVS forum too, there are quite a few people with lots of Linux HTPC experience: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=76

Unlike with Windows where you pay through the nose to get f*cked up the ar$e... :P (sorry, couldn't resist...:D )

thanks, I just got a Shuttle K45 (great very cheap little system, well worth its bargain price) with an E5300 (overclocked for now to 2.84 GHz) and was surprised that I only see 4 scaling frequencies: cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies 2847000 2190000 1752000 1314000 while on my venerable trusty old P4 I get: cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies 316658 633317 949976 1266635 1583293 1899952 2216611 2533270 So the new E5300 can only throttle from 100% to still approx. 40% and in only 4 steps while the P4 goes from 100% all the way down to 12% in 8 steps. I would have expected the E5300 to be more scalable than the P4 rather than less, but your output seems to confirm that what I'm seeing is correct for a C2D class cpu.

can someone please tell me what you have in /etc/modprobe.preload.d/cpufreq on a system with a Core2Duo cpu? and the output of: cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies many thanks

Thanks for the compliments, I think the 'warnings' section at the top of the article would scare off some unexperienced people from even reading any further (and would disrupt the page layout too much), but I have now put a highlighted note to read the warnings section, at the beginning of the diagnostics section, to which they primarily apply.

I have written a short article on how to test RAM for defects, I hope this can be useful for less experienced PC users experiencing random crashes or lock-ups of their PC, to help track down the cause. You can find it here: http://www.linuxtech.net/tips+tricks/hw_diagnostics-pt1.html Comments and suggestions are very welcome!

I realise I'm late in this thread, but I just wanted to add the following link that explains the situation with regards to fakeraid and Linux: http://linux-ata.org/faq-sata-raid.html

I have backported the 1.2.10 plf rpm of libdvdcss from Mandriva 2009.0 to 2008.1 (mdv 2008.1 only has 1.2.9), to benefit from the various bugfixes and improvements contained in 1.2.10. It's available from my website (still mostly under construction, please excuse the barebones look!): http://www.linuxtech.net/downloads/libdvdcss_1.2.10.html Hope it can be of use for someone! [moved from Software by spinynorman]

The other day I packaged up the then current svn version of Handbrake for Mandriva 2008.1, as it contains some useful bugfixes and changes. It's available from my website (which is still very basic and under construction): http://www.linuxtech.net/downloads/ Please reply in this thread if you have any problems with it, I would be also interested to get feedback wether it works with 2009.0 too or not (I believe it should).

What's incomprehensible to me is, why didn't they include the last stable version then. There is always a newer beta or dev version out, but that's not a reason not to include koffice at all...

Most humans are creatures of habit, very few want a revolution, especially if things before the revolution were working great (KDE3), that's the same reason why Vista failed, the GUI is too different compared to XP. Therefore unless the GUi of KDE4 gets a lot more similar to KDE 3.5 it will never be the success that KDE3 has been. Under the hood you can change as much as you want, but the a GUI can only slowly evolve, otherwise you upset most users.

What's so bad about loging in as root, if you are experienced and know what you are doing? I wouldn't run any Internet related applications (web browser, skype, ...) and/or closed source and/or apps from an untrusted source as root, but other than that, logging in as a user is just a needless hassle. so what if the app you were running crashes the box because you ran it as root (hasn't happened to me since many years), we are not talking about mission critical enterprise systems here...

And anyone here complaining about the (lack of) speed of ext3, should use jfs (my current choice) or reiserfs3 (used it in the past, fast and reliable). Unlike 10 years ago, these days Linux is not necessarily ext2/3 , it's just one of the many filesystems you can chose from, any decent distro allows you to chose the filesystem during installation. On the other hand how much choice do you have in Windows, FAT32 and NTFS?! I wouldn't call that choice...

Linux is certainly NOT slower than Windows, yes, some drivers are less optimized, but the fundamental difference is, Linux multitasking works ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE BETTER than Windows multitasking! Just an example: A friend of mine whom I installed Mandriva as dual-boot on his home PC (an old Pentium 3, 1GHz, 512MB RAM) a while ago, uses normally XP, he only wanted Linux out of curiosity but never bothered to use it seriously. Recently his XP install got so infested by spyware/viruses/whatever that it has become unbootable, so he started using Mandriva, as he had no choice. Guess what, the first thing he noticed is that he could still watch a downloaded DVD quality movie without judder while in the background a 15GB file backup was running from an internal hdd to a USB hdd, and we were talking over skype at the same time too... He was expecting the movie to seriously judder and the skype call too, as he was used from XP!

thanks, I might try to compile it from source to check it out, but from what I understand from the website, it doesn't seem to be capable of what I want to do. I'm convinced a couple of CLI comands which I probably already have installed (I installed all mdv repo packages that could in any way remotely be related to what I want to do) with the right parameters will do what I want, it's just the figuring out which comands with what parameters that's daunting as I have no experience with altering movie files and the related man pages look like japanese motorcycle repair manuals written in japanese to me.... :unsure:

I can't find it in the 2008.1 (the Mandriva version I use on my desktop PC) repos, what is the package name? Is it maybe 2009 only? Looking more at the description on the webpage, I don't think it can do what I want, it's seems just a (very good) subtitle editor, not a program that adds a subtitle track into a vob file. I'm thinking it must be possible with the trancode package tools plus maybe some additional tool, but the transcode man page is depressing, 2817 lines full of audio/video techie language!! :o (compared to that a Bind or Apache manual is a walk in a park!)

thanks for the suggestion but I don't want to needlessly convert the existing audio and video streams, because apart from the fact that that takes quite some time, the conversion process would reduce the picture quality. The original DVD doesn't have english subtitles. I want to add english subtitles (that I downloaded from some web site) to it. I found there are a whole bunch if CLI programs that deal with subtitles and as far as I can see all I would need to do is find the right ones to convert the .sub subtitle format into the vob subtitle format and then add it to the existing vob that contains the audio and video tracks. I just haven't found much helpful documentation that explains to someone like me who hasn't done this before, step by step how to do it. That's what ideally I'm after!

I have a VIDEO_TS folder containing a backup of a DVD (done with k9copy, just the main feature, no menues or extras), I also have an english .sub subtitle file for this movie, can anyone suggest a procedure how to add this subtitle track to the existing ifo/vob file structure using Linux? Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.

I'm glad it now works, it sounds like the developers of the BIOS didn't intend/expect anyone to use the 'old' IDE connector for the boot HDD, as generally in new PCs the HDDs are on SATA, the IDE connector is there only for older CD/DVD or other removable storage drives. Asrock is the 'low-cost' brand of Asus, evidently to keep costs low they let the apprentices program the BIOS and don't do any QA testing afterwards...

Do you not have a 'normal' IDE cable (not cable-select) and then you could set the master jumper on the master hdd? Alternatively try moving the DVD drive to a different SATA port. Else, see if in the BIOS there is an option that says something like: SATA legacy emulation/SATA native If yes put this to SATA native. It looks like the BIOS boot priority is SATA first then IDE, check if there is any option to change this.