afrosheen

For extra buttons on laptops, try a little piece of software called Acme. I used it to map all the multimedia keys on my Dell 8600.

It'll get a TOC and other things later. It's still very early but I wanted to see if it was accurate enough, easy to read through, etc. I hope to hear more (constructive) criticism from you all. Once it's finished, I may have a freely downloadable PDF of the book, wiki-ize it, or publish it. It really depends on how it turns out. So again, please download and skim through it, suggestions and comments are welcome.

Also look into finding the elusive gkrellm themes package. My favorite is 'glass'. It makes all of gkrellm except for the graphs completely transparent. Always looks great on any desktop regardless of theme. Since the frame it's in disappears, you can move it with alt+click and drag.

This may be due to the stupid way Mandrake has the xmms icon setup to work in KDE. If you're selecting it from the KDE menu then it's set to output through the arts daemon, which rarely works right with xmms. Either it'll freeze xmms right away or it'll look lik eit's playing but you'll get no sound. To see if this is the case, crack open a console and type 'xmms &' without the ' ' marks and hit enter. If xmms plays fine this way, you're set. All you do now is right click the xmms icon and go to properties. Look at what the executable is set to. It should have some junk about artswrapper. All that it should have is simply 'xmms'. Set it, save it, and you're done. If this doesn't fix it...keep trying. :)

Uh, are you sure it's a good idea to bury this post here? The book is intended for new or lightly experienced users. Well, anyway, feedback is very welcome, download, read, criticize.

Well, for any of you new or old users, I'm currently working on a book about Mandrake 10. If you want to check out what I've got so far, download the openoffice files from here: http://tech-fix.com/book/mdkbook-win.sxw and http://tech-fix.com/book/errata.sxw It's a work-in-progress, comments are welcome.

Pay close attention here, it gets deep but you should be able to handle it. Ndiswrapper comes preinstalled on Mandrake10 but the version is so old to be completely useless. First thing you need to do is uninstall it (urpme ndiswrapper), second thing is get rid of what it leaves behind. A fun little turd that will kill any new ndiswrapper you add is in /lib/modules/modules.dep. Yes, you will need to open that file with kwrite or vi (as root), find the line that shows the path to ndiswrapper, and delete it. Save the file and THEN you can start using the new ndiswrapper. This is mentioned in the INSTALL and README documents that come with ndiswrapper. The problem with the path in modules.dep is that it points to the old driver and therefore dmesg will always show you that version .4 got loaded. If you follow these instructions, next time you modprobe ndiswrapper, dmesg should give you alot of info. Good luck!

If you run dhclient as root, dhcp should feed you your gateway/ip/dns information automatically. Also what model is that Netgear specifically? I played with a Netgear ma410 cardbus card last week that had the prism2 chipset and needed the wlan-ng drivers.

I can confirm that this happens to me as well. It was working fine until I did an urpmi --auto-select to do a cooker update a few days ago. Since then I have to modprobe the driver at each boot. Doh!

Most bang for the buck: Geforce4 ti4200 or greater. Best card, period: GeforceFX 5950 ultra. Forget about the MX cards, they're junk.

Are these builtin (mini PCI) or pcmcia cards?

If that card has the broadcom chipset, ndiswrapper will work on it just fine.

Linux has been able to read ntfs for awhile, but writing is still experimental and off by default. Why, you ask? Microsoft has changed the NTFS spec at least 5 times now. Each time it's changed it has to be reverse engineered and the changes backported so the new ntfs read/write code doesn't break the code for older versions of NTFS. The problem is that NTFS is a moving target. It's hard to RevEng something that keeps mutating all the time. Fat32 and all the other filesystems (there are dozens) that linux can read/write to are all dead or stable. The fault lies not with linux developers but with big M themselves.

Throw it in /usr/lib. Then run ldconfig as root, it should be 'known' to the system then.

"But you, mean people suck, thats why you should read manpages before you ask people....try asking the mplayer people for help..." Wow Frew, you have some pair of cojones to tell me to RTFM. I'm well aware of the Mplayer guys but at least there is some method to their madness. The giFT dev is just plain mean and nasty. He'll kickban you from his IRC channel for any reason at all (i.e. if you report a bug in the channel). At any rate, I still use giFT and it still works great.