aRTee

Welcome to the board, and as you see you've come to the right place - the one that inspires you to find your answers before anyone else! :P Enjoy Linux!

The auto button calibrates for the timing / synchronisation of the analog video signal. The windows 2k logoff screen, and previously the kde logoff screen, that were dotted black and desktop pixels, where perfect for this calibration. I actually have an issue at work with a 75 Hz and flicker on an LCD.... 60Hz is a better fit for most LCD panels, afaik...

Not sure if all of them are, but the one I have works fine, after the above thingy to get the full functionality. Is there any particular model you're interested in? The usb linux website may help you further: http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/ and furthermore this: http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/ and this: http://www.vanheusden.com/setpwc/ which has this (incomplete) list: Another webpage which lists pwc webcams: http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/PWC/W...gWebcamsWithPWC?

I use the best tool for the job. Currently, at work (well, now I'm home, but I was working on the weekend for instance), I'm doing overtime to make layout for a chip - no way to do this on the command line. At home, I don't think I ever started a konqueror instance as root - the only gui's I use as root are the draktools/mcc. Photoediting is best done with a nice gui, so is photo viewing.... :) For the rest, I'm just way faster for file management and such on the cli. As for commands and manpages, I like to read them with konqueror. For browsing, there is a tool called xman, just start it (hey, from the cli if you're going to read the manpages), then click 'manual page' and go for sections - choose any subsection you like, lots to read! Mind you, this gui is a typical Unix gui - if you want to scroll in a page, click with the left or right mousebutton in the scrollbar on the left - rmb to go up, lmb to go down- , the higher you click, the less lines are jumped. Actually, the interface jumps exactly the number of lines that your mousecursor is next to - so if you're all the way at the top, and you hit the lmb, it will go one line down, if you're all the way at the bottom, it will jump a whole page. Very unintuitive if you've never used it before, but smart and nice once you get used to it. People who don't know this call it backwards and silly, but as far as I know, this has been around since early Xwindow systems, and if you first got the hang of this and then are confronted with MSWin scrolling, that's really limited, and the real reason MSWin needs a mousewheel (as do KDE and GNOME and such). Think about it, with regular windows (KDE, MSWin, GNOME, etc), you can scroll the number of lines that the mouse wheel is set to scroll, or you can scroll whole pages by clicking - but you have to click below the scroll-slider to go down, and above to go up: more and precise mouse action required ergo nasty.... and naturally you can drag the slider with the lmb, but for long texts this may require extremely precise mouse movements. So if you want to go up just a few lines on a long text, you have to use the single line scroll arrows at the top or bottom of the scrollbar, again precise and nasty mouse action... BTW the middle mouse button allows you to scroll directly, just as normal windows contents do when you grab the slider with the lmb. There are several terminals (xterms) that also have this kind of scroll behaviour. Compare to regular scroll-slider behaviour, in my konqueror nothing happens when I right click in the scroll part - why not? They could at least bind it to the inverse of the lmb..? Come to think of it, where does one file a feature request for KDE? Or configure this, if it's possible? Darn, did I just go off at a tangent or what..? :D neddie: Seems it works fine for me...? As for the umount, alt-sysrq-s should sync your disks, so after that you can unplug your usb-stick. Not sure if syncing is all that needs to be done, but against data loss, it's all.. Or you can wait 6 secs, there's a built in sync in the kernel, every 5 secs.

I voted guru, just for the heck of it. It was bash scripting that prompted me to do it, since I'm a self-professed non-guru (read my homepage, all there). I'd probably fit into senior better, but guru sounds nice ;) In all honesty, I hate coding, so I normally only do it if payed well and they accept that I do quite a miserable job, in terms of code quality (though I comment code well, which makes it actually easy to pass on, and I do make things work). This doesn't happen often (once every 2 or 3 years).... As for bash scripting, I set up my music server to create a speech file every song change, and surely there's not much to it, it does impress all visitors who hear my pc talking, saying the name of the arfist, album and song that's playing. So I guess they see me as guru... :D

Well, yes, but since there's no secret about which cards are no longer supported by the newer nvidia driver, there should not be a question, but automatic choice of what fits the hardware. But in terms of cvs vs stable they should/could have included an option.

As long as you're full of praise about mine in public forums! :P

Hi Ritchie welcome to the board! Thanks for the feedback and compliment. It's a good decision to not scrub your Linux (no matter which version, as long as it's one of the popular ones) but hang in there and get your issues fixed. For Mandriva (and lots of other Linux distro's) you've come to the right place, so just post about your issues in the respective subforum. Enjoy Linux!

I usually don't comment on other people's reviews, since I'm writing reviews too, but boy have these guys got no clue, preset minds and preselected winners or what? I guess what's so cool about Ubuntu is that you can order discs online and they get sent to you. Heard the community is nice, albeit not so clued-in at times... Last time I tried (a year ago) when everyone was saying: this is the new thing, forget SUSE, Mdk, FC etc, this beats them all, I found it had the quality and polish the competition had 6 to 12 months before - text installer, mediocre hardware support, etc. I'm just waiting for the next opportunity, I'm sure it's much better now - most linuxes have access to the same kernel and patches, so hardware support should be very similar, and the installer should have moved into graphics world. Although I didn't mind the text installer. Lastly, the hot thing about it is people finding an easy to use Linux based on Debian - which in its pure form is too hard for many starters (there used to be too many people shouting: rtfm/utfs - not sure if this is still the case). So the excitement is often about pride to have managed something cool. Not to mention apt-get, which those not in the know think is the only proper package installer... If you come from the 'other' side, it sure is amazing. If your mandy is working fine, as it should, Ubuntu won't offer you anything amazing. So from one side: Ubuntu is hyped, but on the other, it's all true, if you catch my drift.

I first used Linux at university, back in 95-96 when I was in my early 20s; the first serious computer use I had was a few years before that, on the HP-UX system. So I used Unix before windows, and never liked the window management. For everything else I could get along fine in Windows. But I never had my own computer until a few years after I finished Uni - bit strange for an electrical engineer, but anyway,.. I did install Linux on my girlfriend's computer back in 98 - first EasyLinux, later Corellinux and then Mandrake. Did use MSwin until somewhere in 2002 I guess - for a total of just under 2 years, but Mandrake helped me kick the habit. I moved to Linux for ideological reasons (Free Software, MS' monopoly being a bad thing), for technical reasons (I'm an engineer, and I like the way Unix is made) and for personal preference / character (I like to control my stuff, don't need Win to do it for me, I just really like Linux) - and what also counts is the tremendous work done by Free Software/open source developers, which I respect through and through.

The new folders that get created don't get recreated - see the release notes. There was also some info on the ~Desktop folder...

K3B cannot give buffer information since the backend for burning dvds is not cdrecord (or whatever the modern offspring of that is now called), but growisofs, which works differently. Since all modern drives include buffer underrun protection (and it's in the spec for data dvd burning), there's nothing to worry about. As for the burnspeed, it may be that the dvdrom and burner are on the same ide channel? Then they may not be able to pass data fast enough for 4x or 8x burning....?

Or you can make it one single urpmi command: urpmi xine-win32 win32-codecs You were not trying to use rpm by any chance?

you have to uninstall kat: urpme kat or do the deinstallation with mandriva control center. Deactivating doesn't do the trick.

Just grab the public iso from any ftp site. They should have plenty of bandwidth (universities and so on) and it doesn't cost Mandriva. No need for torrents.

Typical windows user mentality - they reinstalled to set up the printer... Nuff said I think..

Thanks scarecrow, I didn't know that.... I guess that info means that we now see why open source drivers are the way to go - no forced obsolescence. Then again, I already mentioned that in the hardware discussion of the second part of my review... ;) (Please note my remarks as to why Linux pitted against windows on AMD64 is doing well, as well as that Longhorn/Vista will come in below Linux on hardware support side....)

Intel graphics have no closed source drivers, the open source ones are fully functional under Linux. People tend to forget this, but Intel actually offers the fastest open source 3d graphics at the moment.... Thanks Intel! (BTW it was likely also Intel that made Mdv include xorg cvs.... 2 sides of the medaillion I guess..)

Some on this forum have been stung by xorg related issues due to Mandriva Linux 2006 including a cvs version of Xorg. From the errata: There are quite a few comments on how problematic this is. Personally, I'm using the Powerpack which automatically installs the closed Nvidia or Ati drivers, so I haven't seen any issues. I have come across some mentioning that the choice to use a cvs version is directly related to Intel - my guess is that they had to use this cvs version to be able to call Mandriva 2006 'Intel Centrino certified'. Anyway, I'm trying to see for how many people _here_ this has been a problem. Please don't answer with hearsay, just your own direct experience - it's okay if it's about the issues of a friend that you are helping to move to Linux, but not a friend's story about how he couldn't help someone else get started properly with Mandriva. Stories read on forums and such are also not relevant in answering these questions. And yes, I do realise that those who tried Mandriva 06 and couldn't manage and decided to hold off and never showed up here are not getting counted. That's ok, I'm not looking to count them - and yes, I'm sure there are such people.

Oh, I'm sorry for not being clear - skype is not on the public repos - but you must still use urpmi to install it. If you download the rpm from skype, you have to install it with: urpmi [skype rpm] and not rpm -i [skype rpm] but I guess you already did this correctly.... Since I got the PP and not the public edition, I'm didn't run into this issue. So I have no clue - anyone else?

Basically, there are no language versions in Linux - this is typical for proprietary systems (MSWin, MacOS - the latter I'm projecting, have no experience), with Linux all is included.

Note that for the Philips based webcams - the ones that use the pwc driver, you have to have contrib added (see easy-urpmi link at the top of each page here), and do: urpmi dkms-pwc to have the full vga resolution. And forget about the sxga resolution shots these can take according to the box it came in, the sensor is only vga, the rest is done in software on windows...

Play with the settings of digital output. I have a sblive5.1 on Mdv05le and it works great - but I remember I had to mess with that a bit. Read my config page for 05le and 06...

What if you create a new, clean user, and use that one? Same thing? If not, logged onto that new account or into GNOME, move your regular user ~/.kde to ~/.kde.old, then try again.

what if you move it to some other folder? I just opened kmail to find there was a message from mandrake in there (9.something period I guess,..), which I could delete, and now it shows nothing in my inbox...