arctic

Well, PCLinuxOS and UnityLinux have a different philosophy of what a distribution should be, act and look like. And the number of coders available there is still pretty small. IMHO it is a bit doubtful, that some independend coders that are interested in keeping Mandriva alive are interested to invest their time and energy for doing it the PCLinuxOS or UnityLinux way. I hope you get my point. Just like many debian coders don't want to code for ubuntu (e.g. because of personal distaste), the same can be true regarding Mandriva and the existing forks. You know... there are always some purists out there. ;) If everything shall be merged in one project, UnityLinux would get my vote, as it is a pretty flexible base to start from. PCLinuxOS is already way too "independend" IMHO.

Hmm.. as expected - things are getting worse. The good thing is that not only me has realized that it is necessary to either create a fork or to copy the fedora/Red Hat model (as I proposed already before and already years before). I would love to help tp keep the distro alive (btw. I just reinstalled Mdv 2010.1, dissatisfied with Debian, Ubuntu and openSuse) but the bad thing is in my case: I am no coder. :unsure: The only way for me to contribute would be in a) the artistic area, B) documentation or c) reporting bugs. But taking into account the limited sparetime I have, my contributions would be ... errm... :blush: Anyway, I think it's a good sign that community starts to act and gather everyone who can help in keeping the distro alive. Sometimes a disaster is necessary in order to improve things. Did they mention already where they would gather the volunteers for discussing the next steps?

Not really surprising, if you ask me. Mandriva has a history of making bad decisions, not communicating with their usersbase and lacking a global business-strategy. Nonetheless, the distro was always pretty good, if not exceptional. My fear is that Mandriva will implode. My hope is that there will be a community-driven project and an enterprise-company in the future, much like fedora and Red Hat work. IMHO it would be wise für Mandriva to start something similar. Mandriva as the cutting-edge community-driven desktopsystem, Mandriva-Enterprise as the solid workhorse for servers that uses the best of the Mandriva-Packages.

If the update process is interrupted, you will inevitably get a messed up-system with any OS. You can do the following: At the terminal prompt, log in as root, then run urpmi --auto-update which will update your rpm database and restart the updating-process. If it exits with a warning, then please post the message here, so we can find a workaround. (e.g. by forcing updates). PS: urpmi --help will show you the available commands for urpmi. If you don't know what urpmi is, take a look here: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Tools/urpmi

Dunno. Sorry. :unsure:

Open a terminal, log in as root and run urpmi --clean in order to clean up your rpm cache then run urpmi --replacepkgs <packagename> or, if replacepkgs refuses to work, try the urpmi --force command. If you need more tips, run urpmi --help or man urpmi Hope that helps

I guess that most programmers find it way more interesting to design new widgets instead of a help-center (and reviewers probably won't cheer at you for such a program 'cause it's .... boring ;)). But a good help-center is really much needed, especially the more complex a piece of software becomes. Anyway - I am running good old Gnome again on my Mandriva-box. B)

In case that there is a known bug but no workaround yet, it is better to mark the topic as "unsolved" as there is no known solution right now. If we mark it as "solved", everybody would expect to find a solution to this bug in here - and would probably be frustrated when they realise that there is no solution inside the thread. I changed the topic to "unsolved" in order to avoid confusion.

Right-clicking on the taskbar doesn't do anything. It only works by right clicking the desktop, then unlocking the widgets, then right clicking the taskbar. This is overly complicated, unintuitive and completely stupid. I have used Vista, too, and dumped it pretty soon as it is a nightmare - just like KDE4 IMHO. I figured that one out but ... errm... you see what's wrong? -> left click folder view. What has a folder view to do with a wallpaper? Nuthin'. No one would expect to find this feature there but in the main Control-Center in the Appeareance-section, next to icons etc. :P Just a plain, clean install. :unsure: Appearances for Plasma, available only via right-clicking the desktop, then the KDE-Appearances (Taskbar) and the MCC (Taskbar). Sorry, but this is overly cluttered, horrible, a usability nightmare, driving me nuts and completely insane. Whoever designed this has absolutely no clue of the basics of interface-design. BTW: Why does kget refuse to continue downloading a torrent? Aaaaargh! This desktop is wrecking my nerves!!!! :wall:

[rant] Maybe I'll sound like a clown, but I have currently installed Mandriva on my machines (I ran into several awful bugs in Ubuntu that resulted in frozen/crashed systems, thus installed Mandriva) and am currently testing KDE. Okay, KDE3.5 was not really beautiful - but it worked and was way more logical than this KDE4 thingy IMHO. Maybe I am to stupid, but how can I e.g. change the height of the taskbar? How can it be hidden? This were easy tasks in KDE3.5. In KDE4, I am lost - and I am not someone who doesn't know his way around in the linux-world. Whoever designed this DE is a complete moroon. Really. There are tons of graphical toys everywhere that slow the system down to where it is hardly bearable, useless stuff that will require faster and bigger machines all the time, but nothing that makes my computing experience more pleasant, nothing that makes my everyday-work easier to manage. Hello? Is this Linux-Vista? Even such simple things like changing the wallpaper are made pretty difficult by hiding them cleverly in completely cluttered menus and control-centers (why are there two Control Centers and even THREE if you count MCC in? :huh: What a nonsense!). I was once (back at the time of Mandrake 10.0) a huge fan of KDE and I knew that when KDE4 came out, that there would be some problems. I was patient, I gave the developers time to iron things out, I let the thing mature and even defended the developers in several discussions, said to others: "It's a new piece of software - just wait and let it mature!". But honestly, KDE hasn't got any better. This is IMHO a big piece of crap. How should anyone who is new to Linux and/or pretty computer-illiterate be able to WORK with KDE? Sorry, but even Rox and fluxbox are easier to use than the current K-Desktop. And I cannot understand how any distro can ship KDE4 as the default desktop (Mind you, no enterprise-distro ships KDE as the default DE. I guess this is for a reason). Either the developers are sadists or they don't care about Joe Average. My father e.g. is not the most talented computer-user but he managed to work with computers since 1986. He was able to work with DOS, with an old Schneider-PC running Basic, he used OS2/Warp, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, XP, he used KDE 3.2 to 3.5 ... and gave up on KDE 4. My mother used KDE 3.2, 3.4 and 3.5 and gave up on KDE 4 at once and now sticks to Gnome. I don't think they are the only ones who got the impresson that KDE4 is totally unusable for everyday work. It is a nice toy to tinker with - but that's about it. Sorry, this is a bust. I'll reinstall Gnome and fluxbox or Windowmaker, which are way more stable, usable and less memory-hungry than KDE4. [/rant]

Errm ... my two cents: There is IMHO no real need to upgrade from one release to the next, especially if the hardware might not be fully supported anymore. My laptop is also rather old and it failed to install Mandriva 2010 - thus it still runs with Mandriva 2009 spring. My mother and my dad still run Mandriva 2008.1 and 2008.0 respectively and are happy with it. Rock-stable, no problems, now that they have all patches applied. My desktop currently runs with Ubuntu - but that is because I am a bit lazy and have no interest right now to start all over again and test something different - and online-upgrading from release to release worked incredibly well, better than it ever did on my Mandy-boxes.:huh: If I'd reach the point, where an upgrade results in a buggy system, then I'd install an older release again - or perhaps CentOS or Debians Stable-branch. After all most apps we have today have all the basic funtionality we need and get mainly some cosmetic and usability improvements IMHO.

I would recommend to not run distros like Mandriva or Fedora etc. in the out of the box-configuration on older laptops. There do exist several "smaller" distros that are especially designed for less powerful computers which might be worth a look. (you can find them at distrowatch) If you are keen on running Mandriva on the laptop, switch to Windowmaker, Fluxbox, Icewm, LXDE, XFCE, Rox and other lightweight solutions that don't eat up 512 MB RAM.

No problem. :)

Did you check if your monitor is fully supported? I had a similar problem once in Debian where my monitor was not properly detected by the OS, but my gfx-card was. Quite odd but sometimes it happens.

Well, it is quite possible that your RAM has just reached its EOL (end of lifetime). Run e.g. a RAM diagnosis-tool like Memtest in order to check for defective RAM. The even more unpleaseant scenario would be your motherboard slowly reaching it's EOL.

I'd say: Either you have the wrong kernel installed (by accident and more likely) or the default kernel has a bug (which would be nasty).

I admit - I belong to the few people out there who don't encounter problems with pulse. Be nice to your OS and it will be nice to you. :P ;)

Use the "split" command. It will allow you to split a big file into pieces as big as you want them to be. Usage is basically like this (example with 1MB files): $ split –bytes=1m /path/to/large/file /path/to/output/file/prefix You can change the desired output file size by changing the –bytes=1m to your preference. You can use b, k, or m. b represent bytes, k represent kilobytes, m represent megabytes. For more information about split, run man split For restoring the file later, run $ cat prefix* > NEWFILENAME BTW: Using tar also is imho better than only zip for compressing

http://qa.mandriva.com ;)

Adobe Reader, Skype, Picasa etc. are all proprietary software and not GPL'd, thus they are not included in the main repos for legal reasons. I guess that you can understand that Mandriva is not keen on being subject of a trial. I don't know what the problem really is. Two clicks on easyurpmi will give you what you want to have - it's really extremely easy to add the repos and cannot be much easier. Try the same with Suse or Arch or Slackware. Way more "complicated". ;)

Welcome aboard. :) Your experience is very similar to my experience with other distros. I tried many but was almost always disappointed here or there. In my case, e.g. Arch refused to install grub, Gentoo refused to update its repos, Debian refused to install grub and detect the screen of my laptop, Suse was unable to detect the screen AND graphic-card of my laptop, Fedora was unable to detect the WLAN stick and had trouble with my external Harddrives, Ubuntu was unable to detect my screen on the laptop (but did in previous releases!). Mandriva just works with my hardware and it still has the - hands down - best installer of all linux distros I have used in my life (some 40 distros... ). It's weird, but whatever distro I try - I always come back to Mandriva sooner or later. :) Oh, btw: I am using Linux since at least seven years, so no newb, either. ;)

WTF???? :huh: And I'll create Barbie&Ken-Linux. :wacko:

Oh, ccsm ain't visible in KDE4? Wow... I thought you had it all configured through ccsm. :unsure: Because, in Gnome, ccsm always shows up in the systems-menu. You can make a shortcut to the application in order to make the access to it easier - or edit the menu accordingly. At least, that was possible in KDE 3.5, but I guess the option is not gone in KDE 4