arctic

I think I'm kind of preferring the star one at present unless there's a way of incorporating the two L's with the S in the lower of the two "S" logos.

 

Can Solutions be changed to Systems instead? :)

Anything can be changed. I don't know if I understood your wishes completely, but I will give it a go. :D

 

I really like the colours arctic! And the designs - they are quite sophisticated and pro.

Thanks. :)

Here are some ideas in order to start with something. Light green is a fresh colour that is often connected to innovativeness and it is already included on the website, while grey is used in order to propagate authority, cleanliness, sturdiness and/or elegance. Some logo designs are - as you see - more conservative (the star), while other are more "sportive" (s) and yet others more pop-like. Anything that you like/dislike/dream of? I need some pointers before we go any further.

I will do some sketches later today. Maybe we find some basic design that we can improve later.

Maybe I can help you. Just tell me, what you need the logo for (e.g. the target audience) and what it should propagate/ which ideals it should transmit (e.g. simplicity, freshness, innovativeness, sturdiness, freedom,...)

1. Open the MCC and remove the software repos that you have configured there.

2. Go to the easyurpmi site and add Cooker mirrors.

3. Update and upgrade the system.

 

Beware: Cooker is experimental and only used for testing/development purposes. It should not be used on producting machines and by relatively inexperienced Linux users. Problems are expected to abound when using cooker, things are expected to break from time to time.

My experience with lenny has been very different from arctic's.

I really hope that not everyone will run into the problems that I experienced. As I said in my review: I was quite shocked as I found Debian to be quite goodand rock-stable in the past (I have used it repeatedly since Woody was released). I simply don't know what happened in the last nine months to this fine distro. :unsure:

I used the Beta2 CD1 to install on my test system. The first screen displayed a range of installation options, one of which was the graphical installer.

Funny, the daily snaphot image does not show these options... for whatever reason.

It allowed me to put the boot loader on the root partition (I wanted to keep Mandriva's boot loader in the MBR).

Question is not wehter it allows to install the bootloader but whether it allows to install the bootloader on the harddisk that you want/select, in my case the secondary 160 GB harddisk. ;)

I have been running it for several weeks now, with updates applied regularly, and find it to be stable and reliable.

Apart from the issues I pointed out in my review, everything else was quite stable. But the issues I had were sadly really frustrating.

Debian, IMHO, is not a distro for someone new to linux, (the learning curve is pretty steep) but for anyone with a reasonable understanding of "how things work" on a linux system, it is a viable option.

Of course it is not something for someone who is completely new to linux. But I wondered why some things are/were hidden from the end-user. Debian is not the only one here. Fedoras installer only allows you to use the ext2 or ext3 filesystems during system-setup - unless you know the trick to enable e.g. jfs at the bootprompt. IMHO there is no need to hide options like these from the more experienced users. :)

It's been some time since I posted the last review and I got a few PMs from users who awaited new reviews. So here we go. I wrote a preview on Debian lenny. You can read it at my blog.

 

Have fun. :)

DEbian goes brown as well? :unsure:

Nope. It is a customized theme I made for fun.

If it is really a kernel problem, please file a bugreport to Mandriva.

 

http://qa.mandriva.com

Actually it is very unlikely that you experience a kernel problem. It seems to be faulty configuration file of your desktop-environment as the only things that are missing are the icons and such minor stuff. Please create a new user account and check if the problem exists there, too. If it does, then there is something wrong with the system-wide configuration of your Desktop (KDE? Gnome? XFCE? Which one do you use?). If the problem cannot be recreated in the new user accounts, then the problem is user-specific. In that case, removing e.g. the /.kde or /.gnome config files should fix it.

I did some more research on your problem and apparently, there does exist a bug that is somehow related to your Nvidia-card. /sbin/css-init led me to several Mandriva related posts where systems hung up at booting/installing, just like yours. Apparently, the problem is already reported in bugzilla and a fix is hopefully available when Mandriva 2009.0 comes out (Someone wrote that there is a fix in Cooker for it, but you won't be able to make use of it without a working base system - or some expert-knowledge on Mandriva).

 

I would - in your case - just wait a bit and try Mdv 2009 or - if you want to play around - try for now if another distro is able to boot on your hardware.

 

Sorry.

Sadly, I don't have much time on my hands right now to examine all your hardware. After some research I found out that your motherboard is apparently not the problem (quite often, brand-new hardware is not perfectly supported out of the box). I wonder if perhaps your card reader might cause the lockup. (Maybe you and someone other users can simply google for some of your hardware + keyword linux or mandriva or fedora or ubuntu. The easiest way to find out if there are known hardware-issues).

 

(...off to work! )

* Image: In the pull-down menu, i have only mandriva related ones. Should I simply type in /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic Will the boot loader understand that I am referring to the Ubuntu's /boot dir and not the Mandriva's /boot dir?

Yes.

* Root: I don't understand what UUID=0ca7a84f-3184-4e26-a076-855a22b8e24a means. Should I simply select /dev/sda9 from the pull down menu? Besides, MCC won't let me type in anything anyway.

Yes, select /dev/sda9. UUID is an alternative way of naming devices/partitions. I will not go into the details here, as it would take too long. If you want to know more about UUIDs, e.g. start reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_Unique_Identifier

 

* Append: Do I put here ro quiet , or should these go elsewhere?

Yes, they go here.

 

* Videmode: I suspect this can be left blank

Yes, it can be left blank if the default video configuration works for you.

 

*Initrd: Again, what do I put here, /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic from the Ubuntu's list?

Correct.

 

* Network profile: I suspect this can be left blank

Yupp.

Just for adding transparency here: udev is the service that manages the peripherals attached to your computer (keyboard, usb-printer, external harddisks, ...). It will go into an endless loop, trying to add a peripheral that possibly is not supported by the linux-kernel. This is what you experience as the system "hanging".

 

Do as scarecrow suggested. If it still freezes, please give us the Mandriva version and media you are trying to install (DVD/LiveCD), as well as some hardware specs.

 

And welcome aboard. :)

Well, in my case I found out that the sticks do mount fine in Mandriva, using Gnome, but that the devices are not mounted automatically anymore (=no pop-up icon if device is mounted). I have to mount them using the gnome-mount-applet (why is there a © by canonical btw? I thought the applet existed already for a long time, irrespective of canonical...)

 

The funny thing is that the devices do not get automounted in Debian now either. And Debian has - on my box - SERIOUS problems with mounting and unmounting devices. Since they switched from hdx to sdx in lenny, everything is a real mess. But that's a different topic.

Are you saying I could simply cut and paste Ubuntu's entries into "ADD" fields?

Yes, this is one possible approach.

 

Now, where do I change the faceless "linux (/sda6)" to a more friendly name like "mandriva linux", which I had before?

In the MCC. When you click on "edit entry", you will see in the new window that pops up an entry right at the top called "label" or so (sorry, my box is in german...) where you will see the name "linux". Change the name to whatever you want it to be.

 

Alternatively, edit the names in menu.lst directly with an editor as root.

Take a look here: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=47709 :)

The easiest way would be to reinstall the Mandriva grub-bootloader using the installation media in rescue mode or - if you are already running Mandriva, using the MCC to set up the bootloader or launching from a terminal "grub-install /dev/xxx" xxx being the device where you want to install the bootloader, e.g. sda or hdc.

 

Adding Ubuntu to it is not complicated. You could e.g. mount the Ubuntu /root partition, and then copy over the Ubuntu-relevant entry from Ubuntus /boot/grub/menu.lst file over to Mandrivas /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

 

If you simply want to keep Ubuntus Grub but change the boot priority, edit the menu.lst file and edit the line "default 0" to whatever entry you want to have as default. Keep in mind that the first entry has number 0, the second entry has number 1 and so forth.

Welcome aboard.

 

Although nano is not included as a "default editor", it can be installed with two clicks, once you have set up the software mirrors in the MCC (Mandriva Control Center). Or, if you prefer the cli, use "urpmi nano".

 

I can understand where you come from. Fedora was also a bit too aggressive for me. I started with Red Hat 7.2 and used all Red Hat/Fedora versions till Fedora 8, but Fedora became too much of a risk for me and my everyday work (kernel-upgrades that left a system unable to boot were one of the nastier problems). CentOS is great and I do consider switching back to it, as it is a real workhorse.

 

Mandriva is a really great distro, but - much like Fedora - a bleeding edge distro that does not offer the long-time support of CentOS or Debian stable and cannot offer the stability of both. You can't have everything, so it comes down to finding the best compromise for oneself. ;)

 

About rpmbuild: Do you have all mirrors configured correctly and updated the system?

Maybe it is related, maybe not... but after updating my Mandriva-box this day, I am also unable to mount any USB-sticks. It tells me in my case that the partitions are not valid and possibly corrupt. The sticks do mount fine in debian and Windows XP though... Maybe a bug? I am still elaborating this.

An x-server that refuses to restart? ;)

Not much to add to ffis post.

 

UUID has is advantages and disadvantages, that's for sure. From a system-stability point of view, UIIDs are better than devicenode hda or sda entries. But - as you realised - they are not as easy to manage and really user-unfriendly.

 

I am getting a bit off-topic here, but another thing that turns me off even more than UUIDs is the new xorg which leaves the xorg.conf pretty empty as it tries to automatically detect the graphical devices at each boot. Yes, it has some advantages too, but ... how shall I fix an xorg.conf file if there is nothing written in it?

 

Lately I get the impression that Linux-development has taken the wrong path...

Welcome aboard. :)

 

I do have a laptop with the same graphics card and honestly - it sucks. The only distros that worked quite well with it were Mandriva 2007.0, 2007.1, 2008.0 and Knoppix. All other distros (SUSE, Fedora, DSL, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS) that I tested were rather problematic. I haven't found a working small linux distro for this laptop yet (Maybe Puppy-linux?). If you find one that works out of the box with the CLE266, let me know.

 

PS: I was more than once tempted to throw that laptop out of the window because of its sucking hardware....

Have you tried using a different mirror already? Usually this is a server-side problem.

Seven pages is huge for an article! Apparently you made a really good impression so that they considered it worth to spend seven pages to you in their mag. Hat's off. :)