arctic

well he claims that he did some "windows support for quite a long time". this can be something as silly as simply handing the newest version of a boxed msoffice-suite from one room to another. i also did some "it-support" at university, but my knowledge is imho still basic. so i would never state that i am an it-expert, only because i have set up a network a couple of times, added firewalls, administrated user groups and "repaired" ms-systems... :D

hmmm.. if that graphics card refuses to work, i suggest trying another distro/live-cd (mepis? suse? yoper?...) in the meantime. you can always switch back to mandy later on and i am sure that your hardware problems with mandrake might be solved when mdk 10.1 is available. but now, i dunno what else can be done... maybe one of your gurus knows some answer. heads up. the world is still alive. ;)

yeah, you are right... but he will get a new comp (costs 299 euro), sponsored by me next month. and there will be a burner included. i swear!... :lol: addendum: he still has to learn how to backup hi files... ouch... this will take some hours. ;)

well, after reading the nice Mepis-story (pdf-creation,...) posted by gowator, i just thought: were there any other nice stories, how a live cd saved your day? (ot that of other people?) i had several such encounters. here is the first one: my dad is known to be a typical computer-user. he writes his documents, does some text-scans and voilà, everything is okay as long as his pupils get peppered with cervantes etc. and he uses windows, which is a good thing for him, because he has to scan lots of text-documents (linux is sadly still lacking something that can compete in the ocr area). he got only some slight tastes of linux and considers using it on his next comp, but that is another story.... but my dad is helpless with respect to computer diagnostics and problem solutions. so, one day, my dad phoned me, he was desperate. "my comp doesn`t start anymore, everything is dead!!! my documents... are they gone? what is happening?" i talked to him, asked him if there was maybe a virus or a trojan. logically, the answer was: "whaddoiknow?". no, i knew what i had to do: i jumped into the car, drove some 50 kilometers and took a bunch of windows-cds plus applications and linux-live cd's with me plus a cd-burner... just in case. i know my dad... :D when i arrived, my dad was really desperate. he had the work of four years on this comp. i asked him if he had made some backups of his data, he replied: "nope, i don`t have a burner, because i don`t know if it works with my comp. and i don`t know how to use them..." okay, i thought and went to the box. i had almost forgotten that he still had an old p166 with 64 mb ram and a 4 gb and one 2 gb hdd. duh... :lol: i started the comp, the hd klicked all the time, while bios said, no os, no hdd available. i examined bios, ran a virus disk (good old f-prot) and there didn`t seem to be something serious affecting the bios. i tried to get the hdd back working via bios. no way... i just thought... is everything lost? hd killed? :unsure: okay, let`s try a linux live-cd... inserted knoppix and BOOM... not enough memory, only twm available. shit. i hate twm. now, i changed the cd, my dad watching at his strangely-looking box, while booting up damn small linux. okay, here we go. i examined the hardware and the primary hd was okay. first smile on my dads face. i examined the box further and found out that his 2 gb-slave hd got killed. not too dramatic as it was only for storage of crap (unformatted scans and some text-documents he found on internet, so they could be retrieved, etc.). finally i realized that the dead hd managed to start a chain reaction that somehow killed the mbr of hd1. i used the win rescue-disk to restore that one, after taking the damaged hd out, and made a backup of his senistive data with the cd-burner later on. and i never saw my dad that happy, seeing that windows98 bootscreen. :) the reward i got was a tap on my shoulder and the quote: "one day, i will use linux, my son... i will." :lol:

well, if linux won`t work properly on your box, that is a pity for sure. i don`t say/claim that linux-distros will work on everybox, because that would be a lie. if windows suits your tastes/purposes better, then use it, if you want. why not? as long as you are able to make your system halfway stable and secure... :) i know that sometimes, it is hard to really adopt to gnu/linux if you are still accustomed to the windows way. that is: you go to a site and install the driver/software and here we go... if (!) it works. i do remember several serious hardware issues with win, where harddrives didn`t work properly, neither graphics or networking. to me it seems as if a windows user thinks: well, that driver must work... somehow. if it doesn`t, i can still give the hardware back to the vendor. with gnu/linux we have another approach: it doesn`t work? so, let`s find a way to make it work. everyone has to make a personal decision which way he prefers more. for me, it is sometimes the first way (when i am really lazy :P), but most of the times, it try to get that thing working, knowing that my experience might help others out there, who have the same problem. and that i am able to do so (because of transparency and open source code) is the biggest advantage gnu/linux offers imho. (and security updates are not 90+MB big... ;))

i don`t blame them for adding a service pack that actually makes the system safer. i just thought of the poor users that will never understand why their apps won`t work or behave strangely and who will likely never find out how to fix it.... and the poor admins... oh my god... :D

i think orinoco based cards are nearly painless... :unsure:

i hope i got the message: you can`t surf the net, while ping etc. works. have you tried accessing the net without a firewall enabled? have you given access to the internet for the different users as root? (both can be done via mcc). try that first. if that doesn`t help, please give us some information on your networking-hardware (eth0/eth1 card, adsl-modem type) and post the contents of your ifconfig-eth0 file. :)

hey, one last posting: some wonderful news on winxp-servicepack 2... http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...ct=windowsxpsp2 anything to add in terms of user-friendlyness?

okay, here goes my irrelevant opinion. 1. using a beta ... no comment on this one. :lol: 2. upgrading windows was always a horror. i updated win95 to 98, result: total crash that needed complete reinstall. upgraded 98 to ME, system got destroyed again. and as a further plus, windows managed it three times to kill itself, deleting the windows folder. it was NOT a virus, NOR a trojan, simply a damn windows-bug. i never expereienced this kind of problems in linux. 3. downloading and installing should be consistent, but it can only be consistent for one distro. a source-based distro will likely never switch to rpms and vice versa. but if you look at rpm-based distros, where is the problem? right-click, install via rpmdrake, done. in windows, what do i have? three or four different installers that quite often crash on install for no apparent reason. and then, try to uninstall the stuff again. it leaves your system like swiss cheese and the registry gets peppered with junk, thus slowing down the machine. repair is nearly only possible with extra software (with maybe another weird installer). :wacko: 4. every multimedia application that i wanted to use (except for wmv-files) worked without a problem in totem. with windows, i had to grab dozens of codecs that, even when they were installed didn't work! and windows media player is a horror in itself. i won't comment on that one ... it is not worth my time. :P 5. evolution never crashed on my box, neither did contact. both are very stable imho. does anyone remember something like outlook? brrr... bad memories. and lotus notes? *running away* 6. i think you didn't get the point with konqeror. it is not nearly as bad as some people say, and there are many useful addons that you will never get for any other browser/filemanager except firefox. konqueror is primary a filemanager that can be used as a webbrowser if needed. and if you are not completely incompetent, you can configure konqueror to a very powerful and very fast web-browser. by the way, i am writing this in konqueror. ;) okay, gnome and spatial browsing... nothing that attracts me but isn't that all a matter of personal taste? :lol:

now... this is a sweet kde-desktop, right? features kxdocker, snowe-rade8 icons, baghira brushed metal-style and a beautiful wallpaper (i like those eyes.. :woops: )

well, with adsl, doing urpmi.update will take some two or three minutes, so i think, it will take some 10 minutes via dial-up modem. with respect to the kde-packages: i think that there were other packages that need upgrading, too. so, if you want to upgrade, be sure that you REALLY want it and keep in mind that installing mdk10.1 later on can (maybe) be cheaper and easier than updating with dial-up. sounds pessimistic, but that is the way i see it. :D

hi ipax and welcome aboard. :) first of all, please give some further info on the hardware of the laptop. this might help. then one simple question to begin with: which formatting has the hd and especially the linux-partition? have you created an extra partition? etc...

hmm... in my opinion, kde is better than gnome. :lol: okay, let's put aside de-wars. well, gdeklets has one advantage over superkaramba. first of all, the current superkaramba is a bit buggy (has to be compiled due to line-error again) and it uses more resources than gdesklets. but anyway, i say, don't overestimate the value of these eye-candy things. think twice before adding them to your desktop because EVERY single extra of eye candy will lower your system resources and thus slow your machine down. so, if your comp is not the fastest out there, i would skip these tools (imho they are unnessesary but that is only my opinion and you might probably find them useful ;)).

i simply say: don't buy a comp, sporting the latest high-end hardware and you will get a comp that has surely all drivers needed installed in the kernel. (for what is it good to have a super-high-tech comp anyway? reminds me of some guys trying to impress others with their "superfast-sportscar"...)

uuuh... how much ram does your comp have and how much ram has your printer? are you sure that you are choosing the correct printer-setup in your apps? if you choose "generic printer" than this can be the cause to your problems. look at the printing setup and ALL of the options there. i had a "generic" printer AND my "okipage 4wm" printer in the selection-panel. the generic produced crap, the other one worked fine. ;)

hi and welcome aboard. :) in order to help you, we need more info on your laptop. which hardware parts are ther? (chip, ram, graphics-card, hdd, usb-devices,...), what type of format has your hdd? (ext2/3, reiferfs?) did you check your cd's md5sum before burning?

well, using mdk 10.1 beta is imho not the best thing for a beginner in linux, but as long as it doesn't crash or give other serious problems... okay... :P i suggest you start first, doing some "simpler" customizing with the sites i mentioned above. that way you will get a "feel" for the differents desktop envirnonments and learn to understand how they work. you will find out, which desktop suits you best, which advantages and disadvantages every de has. later on, you will automatically gain enough experience in order to tweak some config-files. you can look nonetheless e.g. at the config files of blackbox or the like (stored in your home-folder), they are quite simple to understand. just read them and you will find out that colors are defined by their code and that for certain windows or buttons there are some bevel options and gradient-stuff plus lots more. in order to find out more about gdesklets or superkaramba (this are tools that give you e.g. a calendar + weather + system-info on your desktop), head to their sites (e.g. via google) and read their manuals. once you get an idea how these work, you can start tweaking as much as you like. but don't do it as root, just in case you do something "really stupid" to your system. ;) if you head into further trouble, just search the forum threads and, if necessary, post your problems in here, giving information on what you want to do in which desktop environment. you can also discuss most stuff in musb-chat (link is on top of page). :)

first of all: are you absolutely sure that your root-pw changed? usually, this is impossible. did you keep in mind that login is case sensitive? did you check that you don't have set caps-lock? second: if you have a live cd like knoppix or the like, you could explore your configs and thus recover your pw. but i still think this is a typo problem...

hi, and welcome. :) in order to help you, we need some more info on your computer and the install you made. did you format your partition in ext2,3 or reiserfs? what hardware does your comp have? please be as exact as possible. did you encounter any errors while installing? does it also freeze under windows (just in case you have bad ram on board)?

hmm.. i am not completely sure, but i think they refer to the linux-kernel, which must be installed for compiling first (i do wonder if it is really necessary to recompile the kernel). you can find the kernel sources on your cd's and you can grab them from the ftp-mirrors alternatively. but as i said, i am not 100% sure... :unsure:

uh... well, first of all, you have to decide, which desktop environment you want to tweak/customize. if you want to add some eyecandy to your kde desktop then go to http://www.kde-look.org, for gnome, have a look at http://www.gnome-look.org and http://art.gnome.org. for fluxbox, blackbox, xfce, windowmaker and other, smaller desktop environments, visit http://themes.freshmeat.net/ and http://www.themedepot.org/ . :) if you want to further tweak your desktop, it can be done with gdesklets or superkaramba and windowmakers like fluxbox, blackbox or fvwm2 can be modified by changing their config-files manually. in order to fin out more on these, i suggest you visit the desktop-relevant homepages first. they do have quite often some howto's attached for configuring the desktops. also search the net for e.g. "fvwm2 manual" and you will find some useful stuff. :)

in open office writer, there is a menu-button, showing a pdf-symbol. just click on it and your document becomes a pdf-file. with respect to ms publisher, i have to admit that i almost don't remember what it was. must have been shitty. :lol: well, it was something for creating document layout, right? in that case i suggest, you give scribus a try. it is similar to quark-express, pagemaker and indesign (although indesign is still the best program for professionalnewspaper/magazine-layout imho).

my current desktop, still featuring nuvola icons, alloy windeco, plastic theme, alloy colors (eye-friendly :) ) and self made, simple wallpaper. nuthin' spectacular, but very usable for everyday work imho.

hello, and welcome aboard :) well, i have not looked into the zipped files, but i guess that you have to compile it. if there is a configure-file in it, then do the following: extract the file into a new folder, go to the folder and open a console, then type (i suggest you do it as root) ./configure make make install after that, you should have the drivers installed. with regard to further steps, look here: http://web.onetel.net.uk/~showerail/simple_net_setup.html good luck