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.

Open up aumix (or install it if it's not listed, urpmi aumix) and check your levels. I believe there are settings for everything. Digital 1 should be listed, try monkeying with that first. If not, run draksound as root, switch to the alsa drivers, and see if you have luck there.

I use aumix, either from a virtual terminal or just a console window.

Dolson and I figured out that the OSS drivers are superior to the ALSA drivers for this card. Run draksound as root from a terminal, and switch to the emu10k1 driver. The audigy driver sucks. It's lower quality and won't output to the headphone jack simultaneously with the other output for speakers.

That thing works fine for me. You just run it as root, there's an install.sh and you run that. I'm running the newest nvidia drivers as well. Perhaps you should rebuild the source rpms and install from those.

Unstable has more to do with hardware than Nvidia. Some motherboards and agp chipsets just don't play nice with those cards, even in Windows. At any rate, if you have or get an older card, the 3123's should be ok and give Xvid support. If you have a newer card, chances are the 4xxx drivers are decent. They work perfectly for me but aren't guaranteed for everyone.

Just a tip: if you do all your installing of nvidia drivers via the rpms, removing the old ones is part of the task if you install the new ones with the command rpm -Uvh blabla.rpm. It's in the nvidia script to remove, move or rename any conflicting or old libs it finds. I suspect this is part of your problem.

Here is the simplified command list for vi (the text editor) in case you want to learn it. shift-i to insert text esc to exit insert mode ? then some text to search for that text :w to write the file :q to quit There are millions of commands but those are the basics, you can accomplish just about any task with those. Also keep in mind that learning vi is essential, every unix/linux system will have it installed. BTW pico probably won't be an available command if mandrake9 is installed. Pine/pico is non-gpl and mandrake didn't include it this time. I think you can find the pine packages (which includes pico) on rpmfind.net.

On my motherboard the bios has a section in the 'integrated peripherals' section where you can disable the onboard sound and nic.

From what I've read, data loss is the result of pinholing that naturally occurs in the reflective layer of cdroms over a number of years. Typical, commercial cdroms have a life span of about 10 years. Dunno about burned cd's though, could vary depending on the quality of the media.

I second that. Any old TNT2 or TNT2Ultra will get you up and running nicely. Plus everytime Nvidia releases a driver update your 3d will get faster. My brother STILL has my Ultra after all this time and still games with it. Hard to beat that :)