Havin_it

Ian, can you specify the 'slocate' command to find these files? I have most things ship-shape again but my tray icons are still disappearing, and I suspect one of these guys might be the culprit.

Another method (I prefer this because I have multiple network connections, some needing to update resolv.conf and some not) You can put this directive in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-foo (foo=name of your interface, eg 'eth0' for Ethernet connection) PEERDNS=no This stops resolv.conf being overwritten by that connection.

I was just about to start a Q about this very subject, but I think I'll hang back now and earwig on you guys for a while :) I've gotten to about the same stage as arTEE with my Motorola V3: installed the KDEBluetooth package and can view the services at sdp://myPhoneName/ but no clue where to go from there. You might want to have a look at this prog: http://kmobiletools.berlios.de/node/view/19 (You can get a Mandy package of this easily from rpmfind, it is in *some* contrib/cooker repos too) I got it to 'see' the phone over a cable, but couldn't really get any sync operations happening. So far I've had no joy with Bluetooth and this prog, but I'm only just starting ^_^ The problem I have right now is, supposedly the Bluetooth adapter should be at /dev/rfcomm0, but I don't have this node. It must be there somewhere, since the phone was 'seen' - any thoughts on how I could find the correct device-file?

Though I still burn to know what the first link was about, I was *enthralled* by Phantom's link to the Netcraft guy's page. Much as I'd like to believe that his unassailable legal position was the deciding factor, I'll go with his own implied assessment of the *real* reason Toshiba caved in: he screwed with their supply-chain. They threw him a bone (a replacement laptop) which, as it so happened, put the computer wholesaler behind the 8-ball. I can only imagine the wholesaler's demeanour and language when they called Toshiba about them having to shell out a new laptop - plus a rebate! - for a used, discontinued one. So apparently the top-level, bulk distributors have some muscle with the manufacturer. They don't like the idea of paying up every time this geek's friends get the news and decide to try it out themselves. And they have many other manufacturers to choose from. It can't matter much to the distributors what product they ship, as long as someone is buying it and not complaining, not throwing too much support overhead back on them. A case like this made them stop for a moment and realise that M$ monopoly can have bad knock-on effects for them. This has certainly given me some fresh insight about where the advocacy effort should be focused...

One caveat about swap space: If you have a laptop with Hibernate enabled, DO make a good-sized partition that's bigger than your RAM, because the RAM contents are suspended to swap-space. I originally had 512MB swap (=my RAM) and caused a horrible crash. Upped it to 800MB (over-cautious? perhaps...) and it worked fine. Given how much space you have on the external drive, I wonder if it's worth making partitions at all. You will already have a copy of your /home in your backup, so if/when you need to reinstall the OS, just copy /home back into place after install. That way you retain maximum flexibility of space.

Confirm that. I believe it used to be hidden away (possibly not even on the website, just the FTP repository) but now it is there as an option on the Adobe Reader download page: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html Reported to work WAY better than their previous efforts too...

As you have so much space to play with, I wouldn't do too much partitioning. You may find, in time, that one category outgrows the partition you set for it. IMHO the only area worth keeping in its own partition is /home, where your user docs and configs typically live. This way you can reinstall the system and keep that personal stuff intact. If your big external drive is not housing any system stuff (and there are a number of reasons why that would be silly), don't partition it, just divide it into directories, so you have the 'stretch' factor when one directory (video for instance) gets very big. /usr does contain program files (and a few configs) that are accessible to all users, but I'm not aware of a strong argument for keeping this separate either, since it is all system-wide stuff and will be reinstalled pretty much as-is with the OS. Of all the system directories, /etc is the dir I most often find myself customising, so there will often be stuff in there worth saving, but having the whole thing in a partition is a bad idea, as you may well run into incompatibilities if you install a new distro - certain things won't match. Just back-up /etc so you can cherry-pick from files that you may need to restore/edit. Remember also the usefulness of symlinks. Say your external drive has the folders you suggested for video, music etc. Their base position in the filesystem would be something like /mnt/usb1/video /mnt/usb1/games and so on. But you can create symlinks in your home dir to point to them, so even if you've put /home in a small local partition, through these it can enjoy the full size of the big drive. (You could even mount /home or /home/yourname as the root of the external drive, then the paths to your stored videos, games etc. can be as simple as ~/video, ~/games etc.)

Yeah, what Iph said! What is this about? What is the 'collaboration' of which you speak? The links really don't help to explain the post's title (even if you spoke French) - as a Toshiba owner I'd like to know what the story is...

Well... My combo-drive is housed in such a way that makes me think it might be hot-swappable, but I have nothing with which to swap anyway, so it's rather a moot point... I may just give it a try. Nil desperandum and all that... nice knowing you all...

Hello, This might be a bit of a lost cause, but I thought I'd ask. I just got a new phone, Motorola RAZR V3 (why yes, I am a ponce, thankyou) which can data-connect to to a Windows PC via cabling or Bluetooth (I've only tried the cable as I have no Bluetooth hardware). I just wondered whether there might be ways to access the phone under Linux? The bundled Windows software gives pretty complete access to the phone's functions, including GPRS data calls (the main interest for me) and arbitrary file in/out (hey, a new portable drive!) but Windows basically treats it as a winmodem, which is obviously a bit worrying from a Linux point of view. I don't know too much about the OS of the phone, but something called 'Flex' is mentioned, and it also has Java though I don't know whether this encompasses the whole OS or just a component. Any info, or pointers to general knowledge-bases that might help me in this area, much appreciated.

'ning, What it says. It's about the first thing that runs at boot, I think it only appeared during update to KDE 3.4, and all RPMDrake tells me is it's something to do with IBM Thinkpads (I'm on a Toshiba). Anyone know exactly what this thing is/does?

Oh yeah.. I hadn't thought to mention which theme was in use. I use a variant of the Orbit theme; not the one(s) on Mozilla update, got it from here: http://www.erdevee.nl/moz/fx/themes/ [grey one in my case] I don't know too much about how the themes are constructed, but it's interesting to note that they come in a .JAR (Java archive) format. I wonder if this is to do with FF's "Cross-platform COM" system. Again, no information on this, but possibly it has a hierarchy of GUI systems it can use per platform, and will switch to the most preferred if it becomes available? On the other hand, why would it prefer Swing (or awt or whatever) over GTK, Qt or whatever it might have been using before? I mean if it has to go through the JVM to run, that can't be more efficient than using a native toolkit, shirley? So, umm... any GUI toolkit experts indahouse?

'ning, I finally got around to installing Java on Mandy 10.1, and - though I can't be 100% certain - I'm convinced that the chrome of Firefox looks subtly different. I'm talking widgets such as scrollbars, progress-bars and toolbar buttons; the 'boring' stuff, which is why I can't say for certain they were different before, but I'm pretty sure the progress-bars used to be blue and are now grey. Can anyone comment on this? It doesn't really bother me, I'd just like to know if I'm likely to be correct in this feeling, and if so, why. EDIT: I use the same theme for Firefox on Windows and didn't notice a corresponding change when I installed Java (same version). [moved from Software by spinynorman]

Can you have full linux->linux filesystem control over Samba though? (i.e. setting/altering remote files' permissions, creating symlinks and whatnot?)

Yup, I have both of those. Non-threatening as far as I can tell, but bothersome indeed. For the second one, I've just taken to tapping my lappy's power button instead - this performs a normal shutdown.

Funnily enough I'm just looking at Azureus now ... I tried it a year or 2 ago on Windows and it sucked, but it looks a lot better now. I'm using ABC on Windows now, which sadly is only beta for Linux. LOL... isn't it normally the other way round? Well, about time I installed the JRE for Linux - here goes...

No, even if I staple its eyelids open (metaphorically speaking), it still gets kicked and I just have a very hot machine in the morning. But what's the key? Is Windows running other services over the net that the router might not like? Is UPnP to blame? Or is it something totally different in the TCP/IP stack (I've heard of this but don't really know what the term means...)

'ning, Today I'm wishing I had made my Linux partition a lot bigger than my XP one. The reason? I use a wireless home network and am a big BitTorrent fan. I've grown incredibly frustrated with my router/modem under Windows, because after a certain amount of throughput, it always 'kicks' my PC off the network, and I can only get it back by restarting it and my wireless card. That means, since this is a laptop, overnight seeding sessions end after a couple of hours and the computer goes to sleep. The same goes for any bulk downloading task - it happened during Windows Update once, which was *real* fun. As part of my bit-by-bit migration to Linux, I installed BitTornado and tried a torrent. After a slow start (until I remembered to actually configure some ports ) I left it and went to bed. Got up in the morning expecting the usual, only to find I had a full CD downloaded and was still seeding like a trooper! Since then I've done many other large DL tasks with Mandrake, and haven't been kicked once! What on earth can be the explanation for this rare bit of Linux goodness?

Also I see there are specialised packages for handling TV-Out on Nvidia and ATI cards - so there's _nothing_ like that for Intel cards?

I found this line in xorg.conf (in a 'ServerFlags' section) - could it be a factor? #DontZoom # disable <Crtl><Alt><KP_+>/<KP_-> (resolution switching) If I understand right, the hash means this whole line is ignored. But what does the key combination mean? What are KP_+ and KP_- ?

I'm hoping someone can explain what actually the X-server does (or should do) when you signal to switch to TV-out. Clearly the hardware understands the physical instruction (dedicated button or Fn+F5), but the OS is not able to properly implement it. I'm thinking if I can get XOrg configured right, I could solve this - but if that's unlikely, please let me know. This is getting really annoying because I have almost everything else on my laptop geared for Linux, but this alone holds me back!

If I can just chip in on this one...? I have no dvdcss package, but libdvdcss - is this the right thing?

Some of the material in that page is a tad dated. The command for loading drivers is now as follows (do this as root user): ndiswrapper -i /mnt/win_c/path/to/bcmwl5.inf ndiswrapper -l (to check that it's loaded) If you can't locate bcmwl5.inf on your system, sometimes it is known as bcmwl5a.inf, and should have the file bcmwl5[a].sys (the actual driver) in the same folder for ndiswrapper to find and copy it.

As promised, see here for a script to bully the config values that aren't properly loaded when X starts (KDE specific, sorry but you Gnomers will have to work that part out for yourselves!) https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=25134

Cool, I - sorry, we - have finally done it! #!/bin/bash echo Correcting all synaptics settings... grep '^ Option' /etc/X11/xorg.conf | egrep -v Device\|Protocol\|SHMConfig | sed 's/[ ]\+Option[\t]\+"\([A-Za-z]\+\)"[\t]\+"\([0-9\.]\+\)"/\1=\2/' | grep -vFxf <(synclient -l | sed -n 's/^[ ]\+\([A-Za-z]\+\)[ ]\+=[ ]\+\([0-9\.]\+\)[ ]*$/\1=\2/p') | while read cmd; do (eval synclient "${cmd}" || echo Couldn\'t add value "${cmd}") && echo Bullied value "${cmd}"; done echo Done. Yves, this is I think essentially what you provided to begin with, just boiled down a little (alphanumerics for the options, floats for the values, and spaces/tabs for blanks because I have the luxury of knowing which goes where :) ) and with a bit of error-trapping added. I wondered for a long time why it puked with syntax-errors when I ran it in console, it has something to do with Bash bersus sh it seems, so I made it explicitly a Bash script (funny, I always thought it was the same thing on Mandrake!) Anyway, this baby is going in my KDE Autostart folder - I guess it could go somewhere in the init system after X starting, but this is just easier for me since I only use KDE. Every time I posted in this thread I thanked Yves, and this is no exception dammit! I think this is the most important forum on this board for committed Linux learners, and sir you do it proud. Thank you!