beesea

the 2.6 kernel has alsa built in, and as chris-tux said the new alsa has support for au88x0 cards, so that might the be the easiest solution. of course, you'd have upgrade to 2.6 (which wasn't too bad in my own experience)

paul, I believe that's gentoo, no? *cough /*no comment*/ :lol: well, ok....I sure wasn't gonna trust the gentoo/grub combo......I'll stick with what works thank you .

i use gentoo's grub with no problems. i've never actually used mdk's, is there anything different between the two?

in my experience, unresolved symbols while trying to load a module means that you're missing an needed module. i'm not really sure what module you're missing, but i'd check to see if you have soundcore. if its not there you're gonna have to recompile the kernel with soundcore enabled.

also, i'd check to see if there are mandrake rpms for the alsa driver.

for the record, i've only dealt with alsa using the 2.6 kernel (where alsa is built in to the kernel) in gentoo. unresolved symbols is a common error, so its shouldn't matter

iif you want the bootsplash running in verbose mode all you should need is to change

splash=silent

to:

splash=verbose

in put it in ~/.Xresources:

Xcursor.theme:  Industrial
Xcursor.size:   16

and in my ~/.xinitrc:

xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources

i think if you use a dm it will look for a ~/.Xresources and load it automatically, but i use startx so i need the line above

all the kernel-source rpm does is install the source into /usr/src. its not an actual src.rpm file. check out the kernel howto at tldp.org

i have an aureal soundcard and here's how i got mine working. the problem i had is that the au8820 module i needed to load needs to be loaded by force with "insmod -f au8820". first i added this to /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

modprobe soundcore > /dev/null
insmod -f au8820 > /dev/null

and delete (or comment out) these lines in /etc/modules.conf, if they're there:

alias char-major-14 sound
alias sound-slot-0 sound
alias sound au8820
alias midi au8820

hope this works for you

EDIT: it shouldn't make a difference, but i used the cvs version

When you compile the source RPM's, are the resulting rpm's actually "designed" for you computer and hardware?? Is this what this process achieves?

Therefore the computer will be much more stable and faster?? Is this right??

yup, that's pretty much what this process does. i also run gentoo on my machine and its noticeably faster than mandrake, so i can tell you that, from my own experience, this does can a difference. the "optflags" values (which are mostly just CFLAGS) that you set in ~/.rpmrc tell gcc to compile the program such that it is optimized specifically for the machine you specify. the way i understand it is that this creates faster code and smaller binaries (probably because the compiler doesn't have to be as general).

Check the freetype fonts.  Right now the mdk libfreetyp6 is butt uggggly!  The one from plf is ok.  Other times with font problems, gettng the freetype forts from plf seems better.  <shrug>

the rpms from plf fixed everything, thanks. there weren't any 9.2 rpms, but the 9.1 ones seem to work ok. as i mentioned in my first post i suspected that this may have been a freetype issue all along, but i had forgotten about the whole disabled bytecode interpreter business. out of curiosity i went and i got the freetype 2.1.4 (the version that ships with 9.2) source rpm and poked around the spec file. in order to enable the bytecode interpreter (fyi, this is the difference between the plf and mdk rpms, and makes my fonts look much, much better), you only have to change the first line in the spec file

from:

%define build_plf 0

to:

%define build_plf 1

this allows me to use the newer freetype without any problems.

nope, unfortunately that didn't work. great tip though. anyone other ideas?

i've always built rpms without any problems as a normal user. try that and see if that helps. here are the config files i use:

~/.rpmrc

optflags: i686 -march=pentium3 -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe

buildarchtranslate: i386: i686
buildarchtranslate: i486: i686
buildarchtranslate: i586: i686
buildarchtranslate: i686: i686

~/.rpmmacros

%_topdir               /home/beesea/rpm
%_tmppath              /home/beesea/rpm/tmp

%_signature            gpg
%_gpg_name             Mandrake Linux
%_gpg_path             ~/.gnupg
%distribution          Mandrake Linux
%vendor                MandrakeSoft

i'd also check out http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/howtos/mdk-rpm/ for reference

it doesn't matter what window manager i'm in. but for the record, my fonts look bad in kde, gnome, openbox, windowmaker, and icewm. you said that you tweaked something in mcc. what did you do?

also, do you use antialiasing or no?

i forgot to mention that i tried installing both manually and with fontdrake. getting fonts installed isn't the problem though, its the way they look once they're installed. also, this isn't a problem with just ms fonts, all truetype fonts look awful. so the bitstream vera fonts just as bad.

so i finally got around to installing 9.2 only to find that non-antialiased truetype fonts look horrible. i find that normal-sized fonts look better when they're not antialiased (and seem easier on my eyes), so i disable antialiasing for fonts sizes between 8 and 14 in /etc/fonts/local.conf. fonts outside this range are antialiased and look just fine.

after playing around with it for a day or so, here's some of the things i've done so far:

• remade fonts.scale
  
• remade fonts.dir
  
• re-ran fc-cache
  
• restarted xfs
  
• logged out and back in
  
• rebooted (i know this shouldn't make a difference, but sometimes you just gotta try :))
  

anyone else been having these problems or do most of you antialias your fonts of all sizes? i've also been thinking that this might be an issue with the freetype shipped with 9.2. might that be it? anyone have any other ideas?

i'm trying to set up balsa to use ssl (which is required by my pop server). the problem is that i can't seem to find where the setting would be to turn on ssl over pop. google and the balsa mailing list archives turned up nothing useful (or recent). anyone out there know what i can do?

i think in mcc -> boot config there's an option for turning off the framebuffer image. i'd check it out myself, but i'm booted into gentoo right now (i still have 9.1 anyways). see if that works

if you edit the last line in /etc/sysconfig/bootsplash so it reads:

LOGO_CONSOLE=no

then that should get rid of it. this is for 9.1, but its probably similar in 9.2

it kinda sounds like you didn't get a version of firebird with xft compiled into it. if you had an xft-enabled firebird font names would be displayed by their normal name like courier. since you're firebird is displaying font names like adobe-courier-iso8859, i think that means that it wasn't compiled with xft, and i don't think firebird can anti alias fonts with xft enabled

texstar just put up an new package called gnome-2.4.0-1tex that installs all the gnome dependencies. it ended up installing a bunch of things i don't use (like evolution) but it fixed the problem

i just installed texstar's gnome 2.4 rpms and everything works fine except that nautilus crashes every time i start gnome. if i try to start nautilus from the menu, however, it works just fine. this is the error that i get in .xsession-errors:

libgnomevfs-ERROR **: file gnome-vfs-async-job-map.c: line 53 (_gnome_vfs_async_job_map_get_job): assertion failed: (async_job_map != NULL)

aborting...

normally i don't have nautilus draw the desktop, so i'm not sure why nautilus starts when gnome starts. but if i open the gconf editor and have nautilus draw the desktop, nautilus doesn't crash when gnome starts and i don't see that error in my .xsession-errors file.

i've also reinstalled all nautilus and gnome vfs rpms, but to no success

anyone know what's wrong?

$ emerge -s flash

Searching...   

[ Results for search key : flash ]

[ Applications found : 3 ]



*  media-libs/libflash

     Latest version available: 0.4.10-r1

     Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]

     Size of downloaded files: 172 kB

     Homepage:    http://www.swift-tools.com/Flash/

     Description: A library for flash animations



*  net-www/gplflash

     Latest version available: 0.4.10-r2

     Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]

     Size of downloaded files: 350 kB

     Homepage:    http://www.swift-tools.com/Flash

     Description: GPL Shockwave Flash Player/Plugin



*  net-www/netscape-flash

     Latest version available: 6.0.79

     Latest version installed: 6.0.79

     Size of downloaded files: 1,374 kB

     Homepage:    http://www.macromedia.com/

     Description: Macromedia Shockwave Flash Player

you might wanna check out epiphany also. its a relatively new mozilla based browser that a lot of people seem to like. (also, i think its replacing galeon as gnome's browser)

that worked perfectly, thanks!

in gentoo if i hit tab in a terminal the internal speaker beeps. if i hit tab a second time, bash shows all possible completions. in mandrake however, i only have to press tab once to see the possible completions. does anyone know how to change tab completion behavior in gentoo so it behaves like mandrake?