xJlM

Way ahead of you, man. I registered way back when I first got Mandrake 8.2, and I've watched it a little bit since then. I'm user # 293877, but I've only really come to use Linux primarily in the last eighteen months. And there's still a lot I'm not really good at. I can burn cds and watch dvd and all kinds of video, though, and I don't even worry about the latest Microsoft worm.

This is a big deal, to me. With the improvements to Mandrake 9.2 and the help I have been able to find here on mandrakeusers.org I'm really happy with what I have in front of me. I quite literally have no use for Windoze anymore. Through reading the forums (and a lot of trial and error) I even have streaming Quicktime at a better quality than I have seen before. I haven't much tried burning cds yet, but I may give k3b a try. Gnome toaster seems to work pretty well, for all that I use it for. I do need to get my partitioning straightened out, since I'm constantly getting messages about not enough space in my /home directory (with two 60 gig hard drives?) whenever I download something big, but I'm sure I can work that out. I'm going to wait for a power pack version of 10.0, since some things there seem to need ironed out further, but I can't speak highly enough about what I have been able to do with only a fast internet connection and the good will of the online Linux community.

I've just read through this entire thread, and I wish I had found it a week ago. I'm running an Athlon XP 2600, but with an ATI Radeon 9000 card (with no fan). I had it overclocked, but turned it back down because I thought that might be causing the instability. In any event, part of my problem may have been having the resolution too high. I had it running 24-bit, but turned it down to 16-bit since DVDs play better there anyway. It's been fairly stable now for about a week, but i don't leave it on over night. Another system I'm trying to get running has the same problem, but it does have the Nvidia GeForce3 card. I get multiple errors trying to install anything over Mandrake 8.2. I can run Knoppix or Mandrake Move on it, so it's not memory or other hardware like that. Multiple errors reading discs, which wouldn't have anything to do with the Nvidia card. And the discs are good, since this system is running fine. I canned my version of XP, so I have no choice but to use Mandrake and learn to make it work. Really, that's what I need to do anyway. I'm not good at the command line, but I'm learning.

This is my first post here, so please excuse my inexperience. I had the same problems with the alsa driver until I took a look at my mixer settings. The feedback I was getting was coming from the microphone, which I don't even have hooked up. What I did was get the system up and running, and then(with the volume low) adjusted the mixer until I got the controls identified. When I figured out which one was causing the problem, I turned it all the way down and muted it. Now my DVD player works far better than any Windoze app I ever saw, and Flash is once again something to be enjoyed.

Wow, I downloaded the three .isos one evening, burned them to disc the next morning, and I've been using it ever since. No problems with USB, no problems with my display, I'm really impressed. I did have a problem with it locking up once, while I was moving some files from my Windows partition to it, but I blame that on windoze :)