tux99

Pulseaudio is not the future, all over forums (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc) people say they uninstalled (or disabled) it to get rid of sound problems and suggest it as a solution to others. Eventually distros will realise this too and not install it by default anymore. One of the top voted and commented items on the Mandriva 2010 Ideas site is to make pulseaudio optional: http://ideas.mandriva.com/en/idees/show.php?id=142 I would suggest you to get rid of Pulseaudio, your sound problems will likely be solved too. xmms is really ancient now, try Audacious which is very similar and much better!

Unless you use the centosplus kernel :)

Those phoronix tests are really badly chosen, they are simply not meaningful real-life situations and the test hardware they have chosen isn't exactly mainstream either (Atom netbook with a 32GB OCZ SSD is a rather expensive netbook hardware combination). I have noticed that frequently with phoronix that they use daft benchmark tests. Also type of cpu (L1/L2/L3 cache, how many cores) and type of disk devices used, can affect the relative performance of various filesystems to each other quite drastically. XFS for example needs decent power cpus, better if multicore (Core2Duo, Athlon X2), to perform well, it's more optimized for server use. The type of use one makes of a filesystem is very important too, no filesystem is the fastest in all usage situations, some are better for many large files on a TB filesystem (media server), some are better with loads of small files, some are better for large concurrent read access (http server), ultimately you have to do your own benchmarks in your own situation to be able to chose the fastest filesystem for your use. With regards to ext4, I haven't tested it yet myself, so can't judge it's real life speed, but I wouldn't trust a filesystem that hasn't been mature (i.e no development going on on it anymore) for at least a couple of years with no recent reports of corruption. As long as kernel developers still fiddle with the code (other than minimal changes to adapt it to general kernel changes) I wouldn't trust my data with it. JFS has been around for many years and is absolutely stable and mature, you will not experience file system related data loss with it, EVER.

Try using both JFS and ext3 on a several 100Gbyte or TByte filesystem, try doing a fsck after a unclean shutdown, or better a full fsck (as ext3 likes to do that ever so often), or copying thousands of small files around, or deleting multi-GByte files, then you will notice a massive difference... If you just run normal desktop apps that don't access many files, you will hardly notice any practical difference between most filesystems (the differences are too small to notice).

I tested my 2008.1 rpm on 2009.1 now and unfortunately it doesn't work there. That's because a library (libxcb-xlib.so.0.0.0) part of libxcb which the handbrake binary links to, has been depreciated and removed from 2009.1. I will make a package for 2009.1 sometime soon, too.

my preference is JFS, stable as a rock, fast as a cheetah! Seriously, there is no reason to use ext3 or ext4 instead of JFS (unless you want to mount your Linux partition from Windows, then it has to be ext3).

Yes, chroot is the way to do it. Boot with Mandriva. mount the other drive temporarily (mkdir /mnt2; mount /dev/sdXX /mnt2) and then chroot onto it: chroot /mnt2 Once you are in chroot you can launch edit lilo.conf (actually you can do that before chrooting too) and then launch lilo to update the MBR. The only problem could be if the device names in lilo.conf don't match the current device names, you need to make sure the device names match otherwise you risk overwriting the wrong MBR.

I agree Mandriva (or any other Linux) cannot have corrupted your BIOS. Every motherboard has a procedure to do a CMOS reset, usually it's 2 pins on the motherboard that need to be shorted for a few seconds while the computer is switched off. Check the manual of your motherboard and follow the procedure to reset the CMOS memory.

Next time before reinstalling the OS, do a full check of the hard disk with: badblocks -svw /dev/sdX (replace X whith the device number of your harddisk, likely 1 if you only have one hdd) you can launch this from the boot CD by booting in rescue mode. You need to be aware though that this will completely wipe your entire hdd, so do this only if you don't have any data on it that you haven't backed up. Also this test will take many hours (even 24-48 hours) depending on the size of your hdd and it's speed. If this shows up any errors then either your hdd has defective sectors, or your hdd controller (likely part of your motherboard) is defective. Regarding your hardware: the cpu is definitely powerful enough, but the RAM is on the lower end, at least 512MB would be much more usable, but this is not the reason for your problems and I would not advise you to do any RAM upgrades before you have localized the problem (if the motherboard is the problem then you will have to replace it anyway and a new motherboard will need different RAM in most cases).

Maybe it's Adam Williamson's influence... ;)

Well, I certainly agree with you in principle, but in practice this doesn't stop me from using Handbrake, as IMHO it's currently the best, easy-to-use, transcoding application available for Linux. The results it produces are consistently high quality with no audio-video sync issues or any player compatibility issues. I have tried other GUI transcoders and they all had their issues, producing inferior results. BTW, I'm surprised you had compilation problems, I haven't had any compilation issues on Mandriva with any of the many svn versions I have built so far. Is this on Arch Linux (or some other distro) or on Mandriva?

That's not my decision, it's how the Handbrake developers intended it (the libs are actually included in the Handbrake source, the libs installed on my PC don't get used when compiling it), they claim that's the only way they can ensure that there are no incompatibilities between their code and the libraries (they basically want to avoid that different versions of libraries cause results to be unpredictable). Also keep in mind Handbrake is primarily a Windows/OS-X app, where many of the required libraries are not commonly installed by default. Personally I don't consider it an issue given the amount of RAM an average PC has these days (and you wouldn't want to run Handbrake on an old PC anyway as transcoding would take forever!), of course this is ok for the odd app like Handbrake, it would become a problem if all apps do it.

I have now packaged up a new svn build of Handbrake (svn2508) which includes DTS pass-through support and the long awaited support for multiple soft subtitle tracks (previously Handbrake only supported one burned into the picture subtitle track). Please give it a try and let me know if it works on Mandriva 2009.1 too, it's built on 2008.1 and should work fine on 2009.0 (my previous builds did). (I don't have a suitable 2009.1 install handy right now). As usual, please keep in mind this is a build of a development version, so it has not been tested as thoroughly as a release version (but according to my tests it's very stable and works great!)

I was not referring to anti-trust law at all, it's european consumer laws that invalidate any clauses in 'software licenses' that restrict usage. Basically for european (EU) law, software (at least when sold to consumers) has to be treated like any other item, it can't be subject to a restrictive license (any such clauses in licenses are void). I don't have any links here now, but I have read this numerous times with court cases that confirmed this.

From your description I would guess you have a hardware problem. Maybe your motherboard is dieing, I just had that happen to me a few weeks ago. First I only had occasional random lock-ups, then they got more frequent and recently the motherboard died completely (I know it was the mobo as I tried a different compatible cpu and different RAM but it still wouldn't post anymore). Else it could be a power supply issue, if the power supply is defective it doesn't supply steady voltage and/or amperage and that can cause random lock-ups too.

It might be triggered by 'msec' the Mandriva security package, which runs daily checks from cron. I have seen it on 2008.1 too, so it's nothing new (but you might have chosen a different security level in 2009 or the defaults have changed).

Yes, I noticed that too, the page seems to have been created and translated into English in a hurry, there are several spelling mistakes and items still in French on it. It didn't bother me too much, as long as they implement my suggestions! :D

Added my suggestions. I don't like that they sort the suggestions by vote count by default, that way most people only read the ones which are most popular already and other suggestions don't have a chance to become popular as they are not even noticed. Should be sorted by date by default (most recent first).

unfortunately it's not quite $40 yet, rather $99+shipping... If it was $40 I would have ordered one instantly.

You might quite likely get a speed increase, it depends on your usage patterns, the speed of the 2 drives, and how they are connected. You don't need to re-install Mandriva to do that, just create a filesystem on the second hdd, mount it temporarily on some other mount point (for example /home2), login directly as root and copy over all content from /home to /home2. Then unmount the old /home, change the /etc/fstab to point to the new home filesystem device and mount it.

Yes, it's a well known fact that foreign languages are a serious problem for most native English speakers... :P

could be a client (browser issue too) or maybe the server itself sends conflicting charset info in the header? You can check the server header with: curl -I http://www.whatever.domain/ Maybe it's an ISO-xxx versus UTF-8 issue?

Even though I'm not personally interested in any online backup/storage solution, I think the offer is interesting and competitive. It's success now depends first and foremost on Mandriva's capability to market it well, the best product is worth little if noone knows about it!! I really wish they get their marketing right with this as I would be happy to see Mandriva on a more stable longterm financial footing.

If they supply a genuine licensed copy of OS X with the PC, then it should be legal, as the Apple license clause that restricts installations onto Apple hardware only should be unenforceable under EU law. But if you look at their screenshots I see 'Hackintosh' mentioned... I'm not sure how legal that is... Anyway it's refreshing to see a PC vendor preinstall Mandriva Linux instead of the usual Ubuntu. And the Freedom Basic is essentially a Shuttle K45 barebones system which is a great inexpensive little PC, I have one and I can highly recommend it. It's much cheaper if you buy the barebones system (only 100 pounds) and put cpu/hdd/ram in it yourself, though.

If I understand your problem correctly you need to look at the /etc/resolv.conf file. It contains the IP adress(es) of the DNS server(s) used by this machine to resolve hostnames into IP addresses. Just change the IP address(es) in that file (you need to edit the file as 'root' user) to whatever you need them to be. The change will apply immediately, nothing needs to be restarted or rebooted.