polemicz

Please post your /etc/fstab file. As Mandriva is seeing the drive ok per your report it may simply be a permissions problem. Look at who owns and who has rights to the directories in the drive.

Have you checked the gimp rawphoto plug-in? I use it with my Nikon D80. I use the gimp-dcraw plug-in for my system (Debian).

I've never had a separate /home that is over 1GB, I keep all my data on a separate partition. This gives me all manner of flexibility that would be lost if all that other stuff were on /home. (And even my e-mail is linked to another partition)

The problem is that not all distributions use the same UID's for users. The way around it is to have a common user for all systems with the same UID. Debian and the Buntus start UID's at 1000, while Mandriva does not. The nmae is not the thing, the UID is.

When I install I start with a default user I may never use and use the useradd command to add the other users with the UIDs I want.

Another bit to be aware of: you need to add Samba users for each user, who is also a Linux user, via smbpasswd. That is how Samba authentication works.

I second what jagwah said about eboard. Also Crafty is a much better engine than gnuchess.

test disk comes with photorec which should be able to recover most all your files. I recently used it on my son's system after a partition was inadvertently reformatted. The problem was that while the files were recovered the file names were not. This may or may not be a problem for you.

I'd recommend doing a net install of the most recent Etch and then changing to unstable, so so much changed from Sarge and the older kernels (including the 2.6.8 in Sarge) as well as xfree to xorg. You can do a minimal install of Etch (just the basic system) then change your sources to unstable and do an apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade. Also right now there is little difference between Etch and unstable. Seems that when Etch froze things quieted on the unstable front. That will change when Etch goes stable. My experience from the past is that unstable and testing are most unstable after the release of a new stable. When Sarge came out I waited a couple of months before upgrading to testing.

In looking around via Google and looking at the "names" of the files, it seems Photrec does not recover the file names, so these characters are just that.

I just recovered data on a hard drive whose table got trashed and used photrec to recover the data. It, however, recovers the title of the files into hex, save the "extension" ( these are from my son's external drive which was a fat32 on his Windows system and contain his music collection, so the files are now named something like f548397.mp4). I've not been able to come across a utility to do this. I looked at convmv, but that doesn't seem to do it. There may be, I hope, some simple way to do this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Nice review.

I've been using Etch for about a year now and it has been very stable (a bit rocky early on, but since late Spring very solid). The new installer is great at picking up hardware. Right now I know I can keep upgrading and not have to do a fresh install. Probably after Etch goes "stable" and Lenny is testing I'll wait a few months and change my repositories from Etch to testing and continue the upgrade cycle.

I don't know if there are security updates for contrib and non-free. Also your first line has no space between debian/ and etch (/debian/etch should be /debian/ etch) which may be a problem. I use the ftp.debian.org repositories also and almost never have problems accessing them.

I've got the same router and it works fine. Set-up is via 192.168.1.1 There is the default password, etc to get into it. You then can do all your set-up from there. The router has worked nicely for me as I have a mixed wired and wireless network.

probably your print mode was set to normal; you could set it to draft and get similar results. i do this when i set up printers (using kde).

I went to play with Kububtu and have a spare logical partition. It appears that Kubuntu will only put / on a primary partition. Is that correct?

pretty odd. behaves ok with firefox. also i tried my.yahoo.com and had no problems with konq. thanks you yahoo.

I'm using a Linksys WMP55AG that works fine with ndiswrapper (on Mandriva 2006). Was a breeze to set up. I'm using WPA - Personal as they call it, not sure about WPA 2.

you'll probably also want to add contrib and non-free to your sources list. Also the debian-multimedia is a good one to have. Here's my sources list:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free

deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main

deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ etch main

You may want to apply all the updates before doing much else. 2006 was shipped with a broken xorg package and some had initial problems (I did on one of my systems, the others were fine) with the drivers for nvidia cards (not sure about other cards). Someone correct me if the packages on the mirrors were subsequently changed.

I have a 64bit P4 that I dual boot (Debian Etch 32 bit- main distro- and Fedora Core 5 -64 bit) and can not se any appreciable difference. There are many apps that are only 32 bit. My guess is that for ost uses you will not see much of a difference and some things may make 32 bit easier.

I'm seriously thinking about replacing my wired network with a wireless one and wonder what hardware you all would recommend. I'll need to be able to have four computers on it. One of my questions is whether "n" is worthwhile or spending extra money. The main deal is internet sharing (via cable) and accessing files on other systems, bcking up, and a printer. Encryption is important (my son's laptop picks up 4 wireless networks from my house!) as is also Linux support (obviously). I'll also need to get two wifi cards for the systems without. Thanks in advance.

You should have no problem with the ethernet cable (I run Debian testing AMD64 with no problems). As for whether the USB2 adapter you should do some googling. Also check with folks at forums.debian.net

When you do your partitioning (assuming one hd) I'd recommend having /home on its own partition, i.e. for linux a / partition and /home partition. It's a good idea to run a scaof your disk for hd errors and a defrag before resizing the Windows partition.

1. A clean install is best, especially from something as old as 10.0

2. If you have your home directory on its own partition just make sure you do not format /home and you will keep all your data and settings. If not save it somehow. If your HD is full you may have to put /home on a cd or dvd. If you don't have a separate /home partition and you have empty space in Win XP you can create a new linux partition by resizing the XP partition and using the freed space.

3. I don't think there will be any problems doing a full update (lots from the initial release). Don't forget that there are kernel updates that aren't done as part of the regular upgrades.

start firefox from a terminal and report what it says.