aRTee

1) Linux root partition ( / ) can be anywhere, but it seems that there are issues on drives with very large ntfs partitions at the start of the drive. Large as in over 20-something GB or more. Could you reduce the size of the ntfs drive, then install Mdk, use that to repartition the drive - the remaining space after you resize the ntfs partition? Mdk can make fat32 partitions too, no worries there - those you can later turn into ntfs if you really want to (better for win, but Lin doesn't write to ntfs without quite a bit of extra effort).

I sympathise with you although for me Mdk 10.1 OE is the best (minus the KDE troubles) Linux I ever used. 10.0 and before don't deal well with usb storage - you have to mount by hand to have usb 2 speeds. Anyway: do you have a built in card reader? If sda1 doesn't exist, what happens if you run mcc or harddrake? You may have to have some patience there... Having old stuff still there is 'normal' - linux buffers at work and stuff. I have an external card reader, the only way to make things work (properly and all the time) is to disconnect the whole card reader, then swap cards, then connect it again. Yeah, Linux can use some more work on the usb front... but at the current state, it's usable, for external readers at least. On the OOo thing: have you tried it as a new/ different user? Newer versions of OOo regularly 'dislike' older configuration settings. You can also move the .openoffice folder to .openoffice_old and try again. On 10.1 on all systems I know, OOo is at least as fast as on 10.0 (and read my review, I've tried plenty of systems). On a side note, Linux is not (just, solely or specifically) for more sophisticated users, but why this has anything to do with Mdk shareholders I wouldn't know... ;)

Is the usb-storage (removable-storage? forgot the exact name) module loaded? Can you start mcc or harddrake? I have a digital cam that has similar behaviour, it should be usb storage compliant, but is hardly so. It takes a few minutes, then Mdk / the kernel will see it - after I start either harddrake or mcc. I actually bought a usb2 harddrive with usb on the go functionality, which makes the drive the master, so I can copy any connected usb storage to the harddrive (from my cam for instance - no need to buy more memory cards, one 6GB old laptop drive will do fine for months if I were to travel that long - I need 1GB per 3 weeks on holidays)... Then I found this usb otg which is standards compliant actually doesn't work with my cam, so I bought a usb2 8 in 1 cardreader which works fine on Linux and with the drive. My guess: either your card reader is similar, not 100% standards compliant - it's not a new one anyway, it's usb 1.1, or you have to try things like boot options: noapic nolapic In any case, with 8 in 1 usb2 (high speed, so the memory chips become the bottleneck, not full speed which is only 12MB/s) card readers at 14US$ (16CHF, 11Euros) or less, it may be worth the investment over the trouble messing with an old reader. Then again, I don't know how you are for cash, so you may want to put in more effort and spend less...

Normally I just use LILO, but in your case, next time you are in Linux, set things up to use Grub. It seems Lilo has trouble dealing with your system. Grub may well be able to work properly, so give it a try. You may have to install it, and then set it up. Post back here if you are not sure how/what to do, and if this helped.

Just before you connect the usb storage device, please run, as root: tail -f /var/log/messages on one occasion the kernel actually hinted that I might try a different setting for the kernel boot option for apic, the famous: noapic nolapic - if you have them, take them out, or if you don't have them, put them in.

Use what works for you. Linux is not for everyone everywhere. On the other hand, you don't want to change distro but you're willing to move to Win? Much bigger change there... I also don't get why Linux is not stable..? ATI? I must say, I haven't seen Linux crash in a long long time. On the community thing: in choosing a distro, there are three points: 1) what people who are around you use (if you've got experience this may count less - it is the reason your wife uses whatever you use...) 2) the community around it (helpful and experienced or not - if you have to come here for help on some other linux than Mdk, this doesn't bode well) 3) what the distro itself actually offers - the big ones don't outdo eachother by much; I have been using SUSE and only SUSE on my laptop for the last 6 weeks or so. Will move back to Mdk soon, and on to Ubuntu as well (yes, a review is in the making)... no big difference between SUSE and Mdk. It's nice if you have full control, but if you don't, you don't. If you do, you can tweak or not. I don't tweak. I set things up properly once, and make sure everything works fine, then stay off it. I don't need to su to root often, all my machines 'just work'. Then again, I don't have ati graphics (except on the laptop, which is too slow anyway, the FLOSS drivers work fine)... Another thing you could do: find someone who is willing to swap their NVidia card for your ATI. I don't know about win NT variations (never had one), but my guess is if someone on the system can delete another persons file, things are not rosey... I wouldn't want to multiuser on such a system... In any case, if you do decide to move to XP, just make sure you use the maximum of stuff that's available on Linux too (and make sure your wife does too), so that once ATI makes good Linux drivers (should be 'just a few months from now'...) you can smoothly move back... BTW heard that ATI drivers suck on Win too...

When I said the original easyurpmi site had hardware issues, this was directly from an email to me from trem, the guy who maintains easyurpmi.zarb.org Seems they had some hardware failures (which happens - make backups guys and gals!) - something I doubt this other guy can make happen on a remote system... I think he just jumped to the opportunity.

Happy New Year to you all, and I second arctic's gesture. See (read) you on the other side of the Y2k5 changeover.

I have used the Mandrake draktermserv, try this to see how you like the whole setup before forking out the money for the Dell/RH setup, to make sure you really want this. Stew Benedict did most of the work behind draktermserv, and he actually responds to email about it. I set up this server at work to help my colleagues boot Lin instead of some other OS. Basically, they were running as 'fat clients', just booting over the network (NBI) and mounting the host filesystem. 50 secs to start OOo (50MB) over a 10Mb/s line (upgraded to 100Mb/s in the meantime), but other than that all was fine. You may be able to find some more info on what I did via my website, I never got around to writing a review but I mentioned and described quite a bit on the site log (front page, scroll down), this past year around summertime. Hope this helps.

I have had all my 10.0 bugs fixed in the meantime. noacpi nolacpi ==> noapic nolapic (and in case you were aiming at this one: acpi=off) It's not like they don't care about their customers, it's that they likely consider you a lost customer. Should they send you working discs for 9.0? Would you? About the bank thing: it was a bank error, and the bank should fix it. Next thing you're going to put the blame of the LG dead drive on Mdk too. Please get real. On a side note: please open your own ranting topic in the respective subforum, not in someone elses call for help. Oh yeah, Happy Holidays! :P

Ok, I see. But my point was: only one burnt cd suffices to determine if there's something wrong with the burning setup - if the burnt cd has the same md5sum as the iso and this corresponds to the officially published md5sum, then you know Adamw, Gowator: this is the reason I do a clean install starting with RC1 for each Mandrake release, and I can only say I have had no major issues since 8.something. So it's a matter of not enough people testing this and giving feedback about things. I think this may be a reason why Debian has had a very minimal installer for a long time: those who got through it, never needed it again: they just apt-get update their whole system... BTW Mandrake is not the only one with this "limited resources for testing on the complete spectrum of hardware out there" - SUSE and Ubuntu for instance have similar problems, and likely any other linux distro. No distibution maker has enough resources to test on all possible configurations/hardware - which is why it's so important to get momentum for the big distributions...

yr2alex, that is really really sad to have to live through. One question though: why burn cds again and again? If the cds work on another machine, that's not the issue (or did I misread)? Did you not have a machine (with some kind of linux) to do the md5sum on with the burnt discs? Can you check with Mdk 10.0 or FC or so? I understand if you're fed up and too frustrated to try Mdk again... If you can, I'd advice you to try 10.2 around the second beta or first (hopefully not only) RC, should be around February/March 2005. Then you can just report these issues and hopefully get things working.

Just do: cat /etc/release which in my case tells me: Mandrakelinux release 10.1 (Official) for i586 and on my other partitions I have used as root partition (which I don't use anymore until the next time for betatesting) : cat /mnt/altroot_hda5/etc/release Mandrakelinux release 10.1 (Community) for i586 cat /mnt/altroot_hdb1/etc/release Mandrakelinux release 10.1 (Community) for i586 (So my system is tripleboot Mdk... except that the other systems cannot be booted from the bootmenu.. :P )

Ok, then what if you plunk the contents of the install discs into any partition that you won't use for Mandrake 10.1? So instead of having that on a windows partition, just do the same but in a different Linux partition? And lastly, indeed, this is really really strange..

Gowator, updating from CE to OE is fine. It's between previous final/OE versions where you can have problems to upgrade to next CE/OE versions, since there they may change things in a big way, like 10.0 => 10.1 switching from xfree to xorg and from devfs to udev. Drake, good to see you're doing ok. Welcome to this board.

Get the updates, this problem is known and fixed in the kde updates. Setup your system here: http://easyurpmi.zarb.org add the 'updates' to your system and install them.

Actually, it worked only halfway before, read my 9.2 review for more info. Basically, the 9.2 supermount thingy was not working well - leading to 1MB/s transfer speeds where they should have been 20MB/s. That too is not acceptable. Current behaviour is better, as long as the desktop icons work and let one umount the device - this also sync's it.

Do you have the modem connected to the nic/ethernet device? Make sure in the BIOS you have 'wake on LAN' off. Check for other suspect settings while you're at it. And let us know how things are going.

What things are you looking for? I explain stuff about the thumbbuttons on my site, I have 2 mx700 here at home.

[edit] forget what I said here, misread all of the above... Anyway, all of cd4 is also on contrib.

There were hardware issues on zarb.org, now things are repaired and back to normal.

I just got an email from a guy there, he mentioned that their hardware broke down. Not sure if it's storm related, could be just 'normal' hardware failure. Note that easyurpmi.zarb.org and plf are up again.

If hardware works (or seems to work) with windows, this means little - there are many stories of machines that had defective RAM which due to the way windows uses it (front to back) would only lead to problems when the machine was fully loaded, and just seem a Windows instability issue (lots of things running? On Win? Well, then crashes are imminent, so why are you complaining). Linux uses the RAM in the other direction (back to front), so on this kind of problematic machine, linux might not even boot. However, there's little difference between Mdk and RH, so the issue is not with your hardware. Now, a complete crash of Linux - i.e. not just X (the graphics) but no keyboard response, beeping, flickering lights on the keyboard and no mousepointer or keyboard response, is due to 1 thing only: a kernel bug. (Note: the way the keyboard lights flash actually tell you what kind of panic the kernel is suffering from...) That includes any bugs in any open or closed source drivers/modules you may have loaded. A program should not be able to crash linux. Ever. Check /var/log/messages and see what messages came around at the time of the issues. It might be that nothing shows up, the kernel may have panicked to the point of not being able to write to disk anymore. I have sighted messages like: this is a kernel bug, followed by a list of kernel modules that were loaded. If 'nvidia' was loaded, no one is going to look at anything else in your bugreport, since they don't have access to all things that play a part in this case. My guess: you've ran into a bug in one of the drivers or in the kernel, that is present in the Mandrake kernel and not in the RH kernel. Try to switch to another Mandrake kernel (use urpmi, go for the mm - multimedia kernel), see if that helps. If you're already using that kernel, move back to the stock kernel. If need be, move to the 2.4 kernel that also comes with mdk. Gotta love FLOSS, lots of choice.. :P Note that any modules that you had to compile/add yourself (nvidia for instance) will have to be installed again for the new/added kernel.

In older versions of Mdk it used supermount - leading to a whole bunch of other problems. (read my 9.2 review - very slow throughput, usb 1.1 speed on usb2 devices and ports) AFAIK, if you mount by hand and umount by hand, the drive will get sync-ed. The automounter will mount automatically (what's in a name), but you can still umount by hand I think, and thus also get the sync-ing done. Syncing all the time will slow down a machine too much, this is not an option. I agree they should fix this, but I don't know how. Instructions to use the desktop button to unmount before unplugging? And make sure that really works all the time? Whatabout those WM/DE's that don't have icons appear on the desktop? Face it, removable storage that people can unplug at whatever moment is never going to be bulletproof... On second thought: your solution to sync after any copy command is possibly the best - so they should implement this into the Linux kernel, as a standard way to treat usb removable storage...?

Check if it normally uses pwc (you'll have to search the web for the answer). If so, read on my site and get the driver from there (config page).