aRTee

Bitsetting is only required sometimes, my pioneer dvd105 slot-in drive needs nothing special, it just reads everything I've thrown at it during the ~5 years I've had it. Then again, maybe I'm just lucky with the stuff I buy, my marantz cd50 cd player from 1991 plays cdrw without any problem - try that with any other pre ~1998 cdplayer, or even some that are sold today, and you may find yourself out of luck...

Ehm, I have had no problems with nfs on Mdk 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, 10.0, 10.1, CE and OE versions where applicable. But I must admit, I used my old files to avoid silly retyping, and hardly ever used any gui for this. No need to either.

I checked and I was wrong about the kernel being 2.6.3-8mdk - it must have been 2.6.3-7mdk for OE, since there was this security advisory: http://www.mandrakesoft.com/security/advis...=MDKSA-2004:029 where you can see that the updated kernel for 10.0 has the name: 10.0/RPMS/kernel-2.6.3.8mdk-1-1mdk.i586.rpm About the errors, this happens whenever they mess up on the keys - I already noted this in my mdk10.1OE review where some packages have this issue too. I don't know where to get the right keys, I just took my chances... Of course the right way would be to incorporate the right keys.. there is a command (which I forgot) that you can use if you know the ftp location of the key(s).

I know I tried this type of webradio/stream at new years, what worked for me was to open the asx page, which has a link inside, and call that link like so, on konsole (xterm) : xine http://switch.streamgate.nl/cgi-bin/streamswitch?streamid=44 I've seen that this can work also with mplayer, there are some options to have no video playing window etc... edit: oh, yes, you do need those codecs devries just mentioned.

Geez, the guy just asked if things would work... :P Anyway, welcome to the board and enjoy Linux, seems you're set to go!

Can you connect the drive and boot from the installation cd, then choose rescue mode and 1) load the driver to be able to read/write the external usb disk: modprobe usb-storage 2) check with fdisk how your partitions are: fdisk /dev/sda see if there's anything fishy. I've installed mdk on an external usb drive, but couldn't manage to even partition the drive properly - it failed to format the partitions too.... (I have a screenshot of that on my website I think..) Maybe you have to do what I had to do: use the rescue mode as described to create the necessary partitions, then install without partitioning or formatting the drive. On the other hand, I had clear messages that that was the issue. At what point do you get error messages (lilo? during booting of Linux?). More info could help to figure out what exactly is wrong here...

Well, maybe it may be more interesting to see how a debian user likes urpmi/urpme/urpmf etc (in konqueror, do #urpmi in the address bar to get the manpage, read all about it and check the related commands)

2.6.3-7 is the community edition kernel, the OE of 10.0 is 2.6.3-8 I think...

Nice overview! Small point: Intel gets the crown instead of Nvidia: they make their drivers even open source, so they are included on any Linux system - 3d out of the box. Sure, Intel Extreme Graphics are slow, but in terms of being a Linux player, Intel is much bigger than Nvidia. Side note: Intel has at least one whole waferfab running on Linux, Nvidia just does some of their chipdesign on Linux... Oh yeah, and intel made centrino wireless possible - works out of the box. This really beats the easiest installer. For 2005, watch preinstalled systems pick up. And from a personal note: there will be great Linux home user support (well, I'll tell you more as soon as I finish the details on that), working towards make selling preinstalled systems easier, especially for white box vendors (who just want to push boxes and not bother with support).

Just check the version of the kernel, or of the system in /etc/redhat-release (yeah funny name...) - the community edition has a different kernel than the official - and powerpack is official (2.6.3-8mdk).

I have just finished my SUSE 9.2 Professional review, with (naturally for me) lots of comparisons with Mandrakelinux. Read it here: www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/reviewsuse92.html I have opened a topic for 'standard' feedback on the suse forum: http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showtopic=10630 However, in case you find something 'wrong' with what I wrote about Mandrakelinux compared to SUSE, please let me know either in this thread or in that SUSEforum thread. Naturally you can post regular comments here too - I just found it more logical to open a 'review feedback' thread on the SUSE forums.

I'd say, just read the forums here and post whenever necessary. Oh yeah, you may want to read the Mandrake doc about the Mandrake control center and such: http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/fdoc.php3 Never mind if it's for 10.0 - 10.1 is just the next more refined version, most tools do the same thing (with less bugs in most cases, more in some rarer cases)... Enjoy Linux!

Lac Leman you mean? Greets back from Zueri! :P Anyway, are you still on 10.1 CE? In that case you may want to give OE a try.. including the updates.

In case you have some wav files (rip an audio cd to get some), you can use cdrdao with the frontend gcdmaster - this is a completely different burning program, geared towards audio cds. Would it be possible that your hardware has failed? Also, can you try with the 2.4 kernel? Install it alongside your working kernel, then choose it from the bootmenu.

Another thing: hardware is not infallible - it seems a good idea to do a backup of your personal files. Hard disks break from time to time (around 3% of desktop drives break within 18 months...!). Welcome to the board! Enjoy Linux.

Can you tell us your system specs? What external hardware do you have connected? Also, check for problematic bios settings.

Ehm, did you check the bios settings for video settings: pallette snooping should be off. There may be more bios settings that are not ok, but this one comes to mind...

Side question: have you updated the KDE stuff - seems there are various issues with usb storage stuff on KDE, from locking konquerors to locking systems and then some, all fixed with the updates.

Welcome to the board! If you're mounting by hand, you bypass supermount and fstab (unless you only have one argument, you used 2 so fstab options etc get bypassed). Question: are you sure the floppy controller on the mainboard works? Your drive is fine, as is the cable and floppy, but the controller may be broken (incl bad contacts on the motherboard connector and such)... Can you boot from a bootfloppy to DOS? This would make sure it works... Let us know how you're doing, and enjoy Linux. Ps any hardware that should normally work with Linux, should work with it. I agree 100%. BTW I have made very good use of floppies this year, so they may be obsolete but still come in very handy...

About the cablemodem not starting right - I will propose a workaround but if this works, then why bother wasting more time to get things going automatically / properly. Basically, what you can do is automate the stuff you do by hand now to get the cablemodem working. So first you have to figure out what you are doing - if you do things from the command line, it's easy, it's just those commands that are needed. If you are using some GUI (control center or so), we will have to figure out what commands it's doing in the background. Next, you can put those commands at the end of the file /etc/rc.local - all stuff in there gets executed at the end of the boot process. (Sort of like a systemwide autostart thing - like the /home/[user]/.kde/Autostart folder for each user.) That should just get those commands executed at boot, so your modem will work at boot. About the AMD coolnquiet, it should be supported, but I don't know anything more either. Is it a problem if that doesn't work? (More noise, or whatever?) Edit: welcome to the board! Enjoy Linux!

Hmm, interesting (for me, annoying for you I would guess).... First, you don't have to change lilo.conf and run lilo, you can boot your system to the lilo selection menu, then hit [escape], then do linux noapic nolapic (where 'linux' is the name of the entry that you want to start, and the rest are options - which take precedence over any options mentioned in lilo.conf for that entry). For some reason the kernel thinks the usb controller is only full speed - you could try with the 2.6 multimedia kernel (should be in contrib, make sure urpmi is properly configured and install it) or with the (more or less obsolete) 2.4 kernel...? Note that with a new kernel, you have to undertake any action normally required for a kernel - i.e. redo the nvidia (and other closed source) driver stuff.

VMwaring to win2k - that sucks. BTW I got an apacer 8 in 1 that has linux support mentioned on the box. Which means if it doesn't you can just take it back to the shop and tell them it doesn't work... Got a very cheap (at the price I mentioned) hama - no linux support mentioned on the box, but works fine too. I even emailed them about mentioning Linux compatibility on the box and on their website - they won't support Linux, but I argued that in the shop, if one card reader has linux compatibility mentioned and the next doesn't, the customer might take the one with more compatible systems listes (which is likely true even if they don't have the slightest clue what Linux is, and the price is the same). Anyway, have you tried the noapic nolapic options?

Ok, let me rephrase: it's usable in most cases. Your mileage may vary - I have lots of usb storage stuff now, all works fine and I tested on plenty of systems. I installed mdk on an external hd and minus some partitioning issues it works great. I have colleagues who use linux and some do have usb storage issues, but most don't. Like I said, YMMV...

This link explains all I needed to get started: http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/.../TerminalServer I'm having trouble with the link though, so google's cache helps out here: http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:Ib9cT...&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 I did run into some strange things, but managed... at home things were easy, at work I had the problem that all was not 'official' so I didn't have a dhcp server or so - had to really get into grub to figure out how to do this thing with just telling grub from what ip to get the data and what ip to use for the machine itself. Also, I had to modify the initrd.img files for the various client machines to give them their own names and ip addresses and to know the ip address of the server... Interesting, but at home all was much much easier - just create the floppy with the respective boot image / network card driver and boot from it...

FWIW, I successfully installed 10.1 OE on an IBM P166MMX with 48MB of RAM and a 4MB graphics card. I actually got to the partitioning in graphical installation before things went haywire - it actually told me I didn't have enough RAM and that I should try the text mode installer instead. Which worked fine. Slow, but fine. The machine took around 5 minutes to boot. It would run icewm (kde I tried once, did run - barely) fine, OOo writer would take around 2.5 mins to start too. As an experiment, this was fine. Would I do it again? No, been there done that, moving on. Without a choice I would go for it though - use all the lightweight stuff, and such a machine can work fine for simple things. Forget about java we stuff, but burning a cd at 8x or so should be fine, using it as a music server too, running icewm - no problem (use rxvt instead of konsole - don't want to have half of kde running all the same). One big thing: with small RAM, put the swap at the beginning of the hd - that's where it's the fastest (hd's read from the outside in, like vinyl, and contrary to cds/dvds, so at the start it's fastest).